“Race And The Supreme Court”: Furthuring The Racial Divide In Our Two Americas
When the United States Supreme Court upheld Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in higher education Tuesday, the justices weren’t just endorsing similar bans in seven other states and inviting future ones. They were, fundamentally, continuing a painful conversation among themselves, and between themselves and the rest of us, on the topic of race in America.
It is a conversation that has been ongoing in its present iteration since the Court’s ideological core shifted to the right almost a decade ago, following the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in July 2005. She was replaced by a far more conservative jurist, Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s center of gravity then shifted from Justice O’Connor to the more conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, and the ascent of Chief Justice John Roberts, who replaced his friend and mentor Chief Justice William Rehnquist, made the Court’s transition complete.
And it’s a conversation that, judging from the past few related decisions, isn’t bridging the racial divide in this country but rather splintering it further apart. The Court’s ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend would not have happened 10 years ago. We know this because Justice O’Connor herself, in Grutter v. Bollinger, another case out of Michigan, crafted a 5-4 ruling that gave such remedial programs another shaky decade of life. But now they are as good as dead and, as Justice John Paul Stevens said in another context, the Court’s majority didn’t even have the courtesy to give them a proper burial.
Instead, they will be killed over time by what Justice Anthony Kennedy labeled as the procedural necessity of allowing state voters to impose their will upon minorities. We aren’t ruling on the merits of affirmative action, the justice wrote, instead we are merely allowing the voters of Michigan to render their own judgment about affirmative action. And even though that action commands university administrators not to consider race as a factor in admissions, and even though everyone understands that the Michigan measure was passed to preclude what supporters called “racial preferences,” this democratic choice somehow does not offend equal protection principles under the Constitution.
Also unthinkable before the Roberts Court kicked into gear would have been its Court’s decision last June in Shelby County v. Holder to strike down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. And it would be a mistake today not to connect that ruling to the one in Schuette. They are different sides of the same coin. Shelby County told white politicians in the South that they could now more freely change voting rules to make it harder for minorities to vote. Tuesday’s decision tells white voters that they can move via the ballot box to restrict remedies designed to help minority students and, by extension, communities of color. In each case, the Court sought to somehow extract race out of racial problems.
In Shelby County, the Court’s majority refused to acknowledge the will of the people as expressed through Congress, which repeatedly had renewed Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act with large bipartisan majorities. Yet in Schuette, the Court’s majority rushed to embrace the will of the people of Michigan as expressed in their rejection of affirmative action. Contradiction? Sure. But what these cases have in common is clear: this Court is hostile to the idea that the nation’s racial problems are going to be resolved by policies and programs that treat the races differently. This is what the Chief Justice means when he says, as he did in 2007, that “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.”
In a perfect world– a post-racial world, you might say—the Chief Justice would be absolutely correct. But the problem with his formula is that he seeks to declare it at a time when there is still in this country widespread discrimination, official and otherwise, based upon race. It is present in our criminal justice systems. It is present still in our election systems. It is present economically and politically even though, as conservatives like the Chief Justice like to point out, far more minorities participate in the political process then did half a century ago. And so the idea that now is the time to stop reflecting this reality in constitutional doctrine is to me a dubious one. “Enough is enough,” the essence of Justice Antonin Scalia’s argument, is neither a solution nor a just way in which to end the experiment in racial justice we’ve experienced in America for the past 50 years. Enough may be enough for white Americans. But it’s not nearly enough for citizens of color.
And this surely is what Justice Sotomayor had in mind when she wrote her dissent in Schuette. What is the role of the federal judiciary if not to protect the rights of minorities against the tyranny of majority rule?
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination. As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.
This is the language that future historians will cite when they cite this cynical decision and this troubling era in America’s racial history. What’s the best evidence that the Supreme Court has it all wrong? Just consider how the two Americas, the two solitudes, reacted to the news of Schuette. The Chief Justice, in his short and defensive concurrence, accused Justice Sotomayor of “doing more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.” But to Justice Sotomayor, and to those who share her view, there is no debate. It’s already over. And the side that usually wins in America clearly has won again.
By: Andrew Cohen, Fellow, The Brennan Center For Justice at New York University School of Law; April 23, 2014
“From The Roberts Fab Five”: With No Accountability Or Liability, Generic Drug Companies Get Even More Immunity
Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling immunizing drug companies from lawsuit for egregious injuries wasn’t terribly surprising for those who have been following along. Two years ago, in a case called PLIVA v. Mensing, the U.S. Supreme Court held that generic drug companies were largely immune from lawsuits alleging their failure to warn of harmful consequences. On Monday, in a 5-4 ruling along ideological lines, the court extended this holding to apply to other types of claims against generic drug manufacturers, and held that a federal statute precluded suit by a woman who incurred burns on 60 percent of her body and was rendered legally blind by an alleged drug defect.
This ruling was a predictable addition to the line of cases immunizing big business from liability, but it was not an inevitable follow-up to PLIVA. In conjunction with two other rulings Monday that stomped on workplace protections for minorities and women, this decision brings the top corporate lobby’s win rate before the U.S. Supreme Court term to 13-3. With one case remaining in which the Chamber of Commerce weighed in, it is clear that however that final case is decided, big business won very big at the expense of the little guy.
As has been a frequent practice by the Roberts Court, the five-justice majority found that federal law trumped state law protecting patients, over protestations from the four dissenting justices that both federal and state law could co-exist. Interpreting a federal law requirement that generic drug companies simply follow the warnings and design of the brand name drug, the court held that generic companies cannot be held liable for its flaws. This means that a generic company that distributes a dangerous product has no obligation to simply stop selling that drug, and can go on dispensing the potentially dangerous substance with immunity. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the court justified its holding through “an implicit and undefended assumption that federal law gives pharmaceutical companies a right to sell a federally approved drug free from common-law liability.”
The majority holding in this case overturned a $21 million verdict — upheld by the appeals court — for the plaintiff’s alleged injuries. Now, the company owes nothing. With 80 percent of U.S. prescriptions filled by generics, this ruling not only wipes away generic manufacturers’ responsibility to halt the sale of dangerous products; it also impacts safety for the great majority of consumers.
According to a Public Citizen report released Monday, much of the safety information about a drug emerges after FDA approval, once the drug enters the market. And it is often not the case that the FDA revisits approval. As Justice Stephen Breyer explains in his dissent, it is “far more common for a manufacturer to stop selling its product voluntarily after the FDA advises the manufacturer that the drug is unsafe and that its risk-benefit profile cannot be adequately addressed through labeling changes or other measures” than for the FDA to formally withdraw approval based on new information.
In the wake of the PLIVA decision, members of Congress had asked FDA to revise its regulations in ways that will now be doubly essential to consumer safety. In the absence of clarity from Congress or the FDA, today’s decision paves the way for a whole lot of malfeasance.
By: Nicole Flatow, Think Progress, June 24, 2013
“I Want My Binky”: Justice Samuel Alito’s Middle-School Antics
The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court’s opinions announced Monday was not what the justices wrote or said. It was what Samuel Alito did.
The associate justice, a George W. Bush appointee, read two opinions, both 5-4 decisions that split the court along its usual right-left divide. But Alito didn’t stop there. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, Alito visibly mocked his colleague.
Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.
His treatment of the 80-year-old Ginsburg, 17 years his elder and with 13 years more seniority, was a curious display of judicial temperament or, more accurately, judicial intemperance. Typically, justices state their differences in words — and Alito, as it happens, had just spoken several hundred of his own from the bench. But he frequently supplements words with middle-school gestures.
Days earlier, I watched as he demonstrated his disdain for Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the two other women on the court. Kagan, the newest justice, prefaced her reading of an opinion in a low-profile case by joking that it was “possibly not” the case the audience had come to hear. The audience responded with laughter, a few justices smiled — and Alito, seated at Kagan’s right elbow, glowered.
Another time, Sotomayor, reading a little-watched case about water rights, joked that “every student in the audience is going to look up the word ‘preemption’ today.” Alito rolled his eyes and shook his head.
Alito is best known for his antics at the 2010 State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Citizens United decision. While other justices remained expressionless, Alito adopted a sour look, shook his head “no” and appeared to mouth the words “not true.” At the various oral arguments I’ve watched over the past few years, Alito’s eye-rolling, head-shaking and other expressions of exasperation are a fairly common occurrence, most often when Sotomayor has the floor.
Alito’s latest irritability came, ironically, on a day when the main headline about the court was comity: Justice Anthony Kennedy read an unexpectedly modest decision on affirmative action that left some racial preferences intact and commanded a 7-1 majority. Many in the audience expected bigger decisions, on same-sex marriage and voting rights (former justices John Paul Stevens and Alito’s predecessor, Sandra Day O’Connor, were both in the house), but those contentious issues were held for another day.
Beyond the broad agreement on affirmative action, though, were three 5-4 decisions Monday, two read by Alito with a dry and clinical delivery. In the first, he announced that the court was rejecting a jury award for a woman who was disfigured and disabled by a drug that didn’t come with adequate warnings. Despite the “dreadful injuries,” Alito argued, siding with the drugmaker and throwing out an appellate-court ruling, “sympathy for respondent does not relieve us of the responsibility of following the law.”
The second case Alito read, one of two cases Monday limiting claims of workplace discrimination, rejected an African American woman’s complaints of a racially hostile work environment. Alito argued that the employer was not liable because, under Alito’s narrowed definition, the person doing the harassing did not qualify as the employee’s supervisor.
Other conservative justices share Alito’s views but aren’t quite so dour in expression. Antonin Scalia is caustic and even incendiary, but often funny. Chief Justice John Roberts can be droll. On the other side, Kagan has tried to make the court more accessible to a lay audience by giving chatty lectures from the bench rather than reading from her written opinions, which also have been playful. In an opinion she wrote this month on a transportation case, she made reference to the 1980s song “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone.
Even Ginsburg, no comedienne, can be colloquial and accessible. In her dissents Monday, she noted that an employee can avoid a harassing co-worker by telling him to “buzz off.” She also invoked the self-deprecating quotation defining a legal mind as one that “can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking about the thing which it is attached to.”
Ginsburg was tart, even acidic — but she confined her objections to words. That kind of judicial restraint would benefit her junior colleague.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 24, 2013
“Suspicionless Search And Seizure”: The Supreme Court Rules That DNA Is Like A Fingerprint Or Mugshot
In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police have the right to gather DNA evidence without a search warrant after an arrest and before the arrestee has been convicted of a crime. The majority ruled that a cheek swab is no different from taking a fingerprint or a photograph.
Already 26 states collect DNA samples from suspects, a fact that had gone mostly unnoticed until 26-year-old Alonzo King was arrested in Maryland for second-degree assault in 2009. Maryland authorities took a DNA swab from King while he was in custody, and after running it through the state’s and the FBI’s databases, they found that it matched DNA from an unsolved rape committed in 2003.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Monday reversed a 2012 Court of Appeals decision in which Maryland’s highest court ruled in King’s favor, stating that the DNA swab was used for investigative purposes after his arrest—this was in direct violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, as he had not been convicted of any crime and was still presumed innocent.
Groups including DNA Saves have been advocating for the DNA swabbing of arrestees as a means to close unsolved cases, citing statistics that most crimes are committed by repeat offenders.
Justice Anthony Kennedy was among the five Justices who voted to reverse Maryland’s decision. “DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure,” Kennedy wrote. “Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan joined Justice Antonin Scalia in his written opposition to the court’s decision. His dissent began, “The Fourth Amendment forbids searching a person for evidence of a crime when there is no basis for believing the person is guilty of the crime or is in possession of incriminating evidence. That prohibition is categorical and without exception; it lies at the very heart of the Fourth Amendment.”
Scalia’s defense of the Fourth Amendment continued in his scathing dissent: “Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches.”
The dissenting Justices warned of likening DNA sampling to fingerprinting and taking photographs. They aimed to differentiate between methods of identifying and investigating an individual after their arrest and before a trial.
New technologies are increasingly presenting privacy challenges that complicate the typical conservative/liberal alliances on the Court.
USA Today reports, “Last year, they held that police could not attach a GPS tracking device to a car in order to monitor a suspect’s movements. This year, they ruled that using a drug-sniffing dog with reasonable suspicion was OK — but not at the door of a private home. And they decided that executing a search warrant after a suspect had left his home was out of bounds.”
Of course the major difference between last year’s decisions and the one the Supreme Court reached today is that DNA swabs may be used by authorities to implicate an arrestee in crimes for which they have no warrant or reasonable suspicion. In this way, the majority found, a DNA swab is similar to the procedural tasks of taking a fingerprint or a mugshot.
The minority warned of the broader implications of the decision.
“Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” Scalia wrote in his dissent. “This will solve some extra crimes, to be sure. But so would taking your DNA whenever you fly on an airplane.”
By: Allison Brito, June 3, 2013
“Sotomayor, Kagan Ready For Battles”: You May Have The Votes Conservatives, But You’re Going To Have A Fight
For a quarter-century, Antonin Scalia has been the reigning bully of the Supreme Court, but finally a couple of justices are willing to face him down.
As it happens, the two manning up to take on Nino the Terrible are women: the court’s newest members, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The acerbic Scalia, the court’s longest-serving justice, got his latest comeuppance Wednesday morning, as he tried to make the absurd argument that Congress’s renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 by votes of 98 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 33 in the House did not mean that Congress actually supported the act. Scalia, assuming powers of clairvoyance, argued that the lawmakers were secretly afraid to vote against this “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”
Kagan wasn’t about to let him get away with that. In a breach of decorum, she interrupted his questioning of counsel to argue with him directly. “Well, that sounds like a good argument to me, Justice Scalia,” she said. “It was clear to 98 senators, including every senator from a covered state, who decided that there was a continuing need for this piece of legislation.”
Scalia replied to Kagan, “Or decided that perhaps they’d better not vote against it, that there’s nothing, that there’s no — none of their interests in voting against it.”
Justice Stephen Breyer defused the tension. “I don’t know what they’re thinking exactly,” he said, changing the subject.
The styles of the two Obama appointees are different. Sotomayor is blunt and caustic, repeatedly interrupting. In an opinion this week, she harshly criticized a Texas prosecutor for a racist line of questioning. She has been on the interview circuit publicizing her memoir.
Kagan is choosier about when to interject herself, but she’s sardonic and sharp-witted. (“Well, that’s a big, new power that you are giving us,” she said, mockingly, when a lawyer tried to argue that the justices should overrule Congress’s discrimination findings.)
Both are more forceful than the Clinton appointees, the amiable Breyer and the frail Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The two new justices are sending a message to the court’s conservative majority: You may have the votes, but you’re going to have a fight.
Wednesday’s voting rights case was typical. Surprisingly, the five conservative justices seemed willing to strike down a landmark civil rights law (the provision that gives extra scrutiny to states with past discrimination) that was renewed with near-unanimous votes in Congress. Conservative jurists usually claim deference to the elected branches, but in this case they look an awful lot like activist judges legislating from the bench.
Sotomayor allowed the lawyer for the Alabama county seeking to overturn the law to get just four sentences into his argument before interrupting him. “Assuming I accept your premise — and there’s some question about that — that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t,” she charged. “Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?”
Moments later, Kagan pointed out that “Alabama has no black statewide elected officials” and has one of the worst records of voting rights violations.
Scalia and Justice Samuel Alito tried to assist the Alabama county’s lawyer by offering some friendly hypotheticals, but Sotomayor wasn’t interested in hearing that. “The problem with those hypotheticals is obvious,” she said, because “it’s a real record as to what Alabama has done to earn its place on the list.”
Sotomayor continued questioning as if she were the only jurist in the room. “Discrimination is discrimination,” she informed him, “and what Congress said is it continues.”
At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy tried to quiet her. “I would like to hear the answer to the question,” he said. The lawyer got out a few more sentences — and then Kagan broke in.
Sotomayor continued to pipe up, even when Solicitor General Donald Verrilli was defending the Voting Rights Act — at one point breaking in as Alito was attempting to speak. Chief Justice John Roberts overruled her. “Justice Alito,” he directed.
Scalia was not about to surrender his title of worst-behaved justice. He mocked the civil rights law as he questioned the government lawyer. “Even the name of it is wonderful,” he said. “The Voting Rights Act: Who is going to vote against that?” (Verrilli cautioned him not to ignore actual votes of Congress in favor of “motive analysis.”)
But Scalia’s mouth was no longer the loudest in the room. When the Alabama county’s lawyer returned for his rebuttal, he managed to utter only five words — “Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice” — before Sotomayor broke in.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 27, 2013
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