“Ignoring Precedent And Denying Reality”: The Court Stacks The Deck Against Minorities
Affirmative action has opened doors for disadvantaged minorities and made this a fairer, more equal society. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts apparently wants no more of that.
This week’s big ruling — upholding a Michigan constitutional amendment that bans public universities from considering race in admissions — claims to leave affirmative action alive, if on life support. But the court’s opinion, ignoring precedent and denying reality, can be read only as an invitation for other states to follow suit.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s thundering dissent should be required reading. She sees what the court is doing and isn’t afraid to call out her colleagues on the disingenuous claim that the ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is limited in scope. It has implications that go beyond college admissions to other areas, such as voting rights, where majorities seek to trample minority rights.
By “rights,” I mean not affirmative action but the principle, upheld repeatedly by the court, that the political process should be a level playing field. In Michigan, with the high court’s blessing, anyone who wants to advocate for affirmative action is at a disadvantage. Instead of banning the policy outright — which would at least be honest — the court paints it with a bull’s-eye and strips it of defenses.
The case involves the University of Michigan — my alma mater, by the way — which has spent nearly two decades trying to defend taking race into account, as one of many factors, in deciding admissions.
The university is governed by an elected board of regents, some of whose members have campaigned on their views for or against affirmative action. Opponents of what they call “racial preferences” tried but failed to elect enough like-minded regents to end the practice, so they proposed an amendment to the state constitution that says Michigan’s public universities “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” Voters approved the measure in 2006 by a wide margin.
This may sound reasonable, even admirable, but here’s the problem: With the amendment, voters changed the political process in a way that unfairly burdens racial minorities.
There was, after all, an existing process for influencing the university’s admissions policies. You could lobby the regents. You could run ads to pressure the board. You could campaign for board candidates who shared your views. You could run to become a regent yourself.
You can still do any of these things if you want to influence the university’s admissions policies in any other way — if you want, say, more places reserved for “legacy” applicants who are the sons and daughters of alumni. But if you want to influence the board in favor of race-sensitive admissions, you have only one option: an onerous, expensive and almost surely futile attempt to amend the state constitution yet again.
As Sotomayor wrote , “The effect . . . is that a white graduate of a public Michigan university who wishes to pass his historical privilege on to his children may freely lobby the board of that university in favor of an expanded legacy admissions policy, whereas a black Michigander who was denied the opportunity to attend that very university cannot lobby the board in favor of a policy that might give his children a chance that he never had.”
If stacking the deck in this manner is acceptable in university admissions, why not in voting rights? Sotomayor’s dissent recounted the long history of attempts by majorities to change the political process in order to deny racial and ethnic minorities the chance to achieve their goals. The court has recognized a duty to protect the process rights of minorities — until now, apparently.
Once Sotomayor dispensed with the other side’s legal arguments, the court’s first Hispanic justice — she is of Puerto Rican descent — gets personal.
Race matters, she wrote, “for reasons that really are only skin deep, that cannot be discussed any other way, and that cannot be wished away.”
She went on, “Race matters to a young man’s view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grew up. Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, ‘No, where are you really from?’ . . . Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’ ”
To young people of color, the Roberts court replied: Maybe you don’t.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 24, 2014
“Dopey Media Whiffs Again”: No, Dems Aren’t “Playing Politics” By Exposing GOP Idiocy
Lazy Beltway pundits have discovered a new Obama scandal: The president is telling his base the truth about how Republicans are making their lives worse, and he must be stopped.
Last week, Obama was accused of ginning up his base’s anger over voting rights: The New York Times reduced his Friday speech on the issue to an effort “to rally his political base,” while the Washington Post depicted the Democrats’ focus on voting rights as mere partisan strategy, calling it the party’s “most important project in 2014.”
Then came the National Journal’s James Oliphant, declaring that “Democrats are giving Republicans a run for their money in practicing the politics of grievance.” Oliphant accused Democrats of cynically exploiting anger over voter ID laws and the failure of bills to hike the minimum wage, reform the immigration system and help women achieve pay equity, for political gain.
Slate’s John Dickerson has topped them all, however, with “Obama trolls the GOP,” his Thursday column accusing the president of lying about the wage gap between men and women in order to win votes. Dickerson is the one doing the trolling, as he sort of admits upfront, blaming the Internet for rewarding columns that call the president names and make an argument without nuance.
But the essence of Dickerson’s argument is of a piece with the lazy “grievance” meme spreading among his peers: Obama is doing something wrong by telling a component of his coalition, in this case women, that Republican policies are hurting them. In other words, telling the truth while also, yes, practicing politics.
We can certainly debate which number we should use when debating pay equity, but the notion that Obama is deliberately lying to create “stray voltage” by choosing the wrong number seems cynical or worse. Dickerson relies on a Major Garrett column that relies on an older Major Garrett column in which White House adviser David Plouffe explained his theory of “stray voltage” – how any controversy, even ones that seem to hurt Obama, can be put to good political use when “stray voltage” from said outrage sparks the ire of Obama’s base.
Supposedly, the controversy around the White House continuing to use the Census Bureau figure – that women make 77 cents to a man’s dollar – even though other studies find a smaller gap, cements the impression that Republicans oppose measures to close the gap, and may create “stray voltage” to galvanize women voters in 2014 and 2016. Oliphant likewise relies on the pay-gap flap, and the Democrats’ embrace of the doomed Paycheck Fairness Act, as an example of unfair “grievance politics.”
But Republicans do oppose virtually all measures that might close the gap. It’s not just the Paycheck Fairness Act; take the minimum wage. Republicans (and others) say that 77 percent figure exaggerates the pay gap between equally qualified men and women, because women are clustered in low-wage fields. Raising the minimum wage would be a great way to get at that particular pay-gap widener, since two thirds of minimum wage workers are women. But of course, Republicans oppose not only the Paycheck Fairness Act, but an increase in the minimum wage as well.
Oh, but Democrats continuing to agitate for a minimum wage hike? That’s also unfair “grievance politics,” according to Oliphant, because “it may animate minority voters.” Concern about traditional low turnout in midterm elections, he writes:
… has forced the party to find reasons for people to come out and vote, and they’ve selected issues that target slices of the electorate. Hence, equal pay, an issue that especially resonates with single women; the minimum wage, which may animate minority voters; and immigration reform, which galvanizes Hispanics. And likely coming soon to a [Harry] Reid press availability near you: student-loan modification, teed up for the hard-to-get youth vote.
So let me make sure I understand. Telling your voters, accurately, that Republicans are trying to make it harder for them to vote, and are blocking action on pay equity, the minimum wage and immigration reform is unfair “grievance politics”? Likewise, any effort to deal with the scandal of $1 trillion in student loan debt? Oliphant compares it to the grievance politics practiced by Republicans under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But that form of grievance politics mainly relied on inflaming white voters’ fears of cultural and racial change with false or highly exaggerated claims about Democrats.
I would also argue that when one party’s leaders declare upfront that they’re going to block everything the other party’s president tries to do, and when that party even retreats from solutions to problems that it once favored – in the GOP’s case, that includes the individual mandate, immigration reform, cap and trade, the Voting Rights Act, and periodic increases to the minimum wage — the cultivation of anger in order to turn out voters is an excellent and entirely defensible strategy. In fact, Republican obstructionism seems designed at least partly to demoralize the Obama coalition — many of them occasional voters already discouraged by the political process. If you can convince young people, Latinos and women that voting changes nothing, you can make up for your reliance on aging white voters.
This new story line also reinforces a core Republican claim about Obama and the Democrats: that they’re trying to buy off the electorate with “gifts,” to use sore-loser Mitt Romney’s term. When rich people use the political process to make their lives better, that’s just the way things work. When people who aren’t rich do so, they’re looking for a handout. This new “grievance politics” story line is just one more way mainstream journalism’s weakness for false equivalence, which is intellectually lazy, politically rewards Republicans.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 17, 2014
“An Authoritarian System”: If God & Founders Solved It All, Why Bother With Democracy?
There’s an interesting op-ed up at WaPo today from Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossman arguing that conservatives are only “obstructionists” insofar as “most policies under debate are liberal,” not just now but for decades.
Grossman is implicitly illustrating a point about “constitutional conservatism” that I’ve often tried to make: If the divinely inspired Founders pretty much figured out the ideal governing model for all time (except for that troublesome bit about slavery), then all political controversy involving the limitation of absolute property rights and states’ rights is illegitimate and should be obstructed. This means that strictly speaking the “constitutional conservative” vision is perfectly compatible with an authoritarian system in which “illegitimate” policy options are off the table.
I’m not accusing such conservatives (much less Grossman, who doesn’t Go There at all) of advocating an authoritarian system, though proposals like the Cut, Cap and Balance Constitutional Amendment do indeed seek to permanently proscribe a significant part of liberal social and economic policies. But if conservatives sometimes seem cavalier about respecting democratic norms, including the right to vote, there’s your explanation.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April9, 2014
“The Politics Of Losing Sorely”: How McCutcheon, Citizens United And Voting Restrictions Are Hurting Our Democracy
So let’s get right down to it: when you really think about it, what makes America different from other countries? Yes, there are lots of good answers, but if you ask me, it has something to do with this: one person, one vote.
It’s a pretty simple phrase, but in it lies the promise that no matter who you are, or where you come from, when the rubber hits the road your voice is worth just as much as anyone else’s. You have a say. And no one else’s say is more important than yours.
But for that to work, every citizen in good standing has to have a meaningful opportunity to participate in the process. And the question before us today is: Is that getting easier or harder, and which option is more consistent with our concept of American democracy?
Take a look at cases like Citizens United and, this week, McCutcheon, for example. They do one thing: give the very wealthy more influence over elections in the United States. It’s like saying: instead of an electoral process where everyone’s voice is given the same weight, some people, by virtue of their wealth, are going to get megaphones. Yes, that’s been true, in one way or another, for years, but in its recent rulings the Supreme Court’s been busy making those megaphones even louder.
Something similar is happening on the state level, if only from a different direction. You can see it in the tougher voter ID requirements, the diminution of early voting, law after law aimed at making it harder for some people to vote – in this case, people who just happen to be more likely to vote Democratic. The end result is an electorate with an artificially higher concentration of conservative voters. Terrific for Republicans. Less good for democracy.
Take the federal and state efforts together and it’s a kind of a pincer movement aimed at producing a “representative” government that’s actually a lot more conservative than its constituents, a representative government that’s not really all that, you know, representative.
This is what happens when one segment of the population says: We’ve been losing too much and we’re sick of it. But instead of retooling our arguments to better match where the American electorate is, or trusting in the traditional American way of persuading a skeptical audience, we’re instead going to lift the hood on the democratic process itself and see if we can change the system so that outcomes we prefer become more likely – not because they are more representative of the American people but because we’ve figured out how to get a few more of our fingers on the electoral scale.
But here’s the thing: being a good loser is, actually, an essential part of the American system. Every few years, we expect our politics to spit out a government that roughly reflects the priorities and interests of a majority of its citizens, because we all get to participate in the process equally. We may not like what that government looks like, but we don’t go storming across the Rubicon, angry pitchforks in hand because the inclusiveness of the process gives it a kind of legitimacy that you don’t find in a lot of other places. We live with it because we know it basically reflects the views of our peers (as opposed to: some remote cabal) and because we’ll have a meaningful opportunity to change it next time around.
And the fact of the matter is: its good for the process when someone loses on the merits. Because losing fair and square encourages the loser to stop regurgitating the same losing arguments over and over again, and instead to come up with something better. Isn’t that what we want the competition of ideas that plays out in every election to produce? Or are we instead going to stand by and let the sorest of the losers say: If I can’t win the game as its supposed to be played I’m going to change the game, and I don’t much care if doing so undermines one of the very things that makes America a beacon of liberty in an increasingly Putinized world.
Of course, it isn’t entirely up to us, but that’s what happens when the Supreme Court steps in. For me, that only increases the urgency of the following question: is there a point at which changing the nature of electoral inputs, either by giving some outsized influence over the process or making it harder for others to participate at all, gets so out of whack that it begins to undermine the legitimacy of electoral outcomes? If you really love America qua America, you know that’s a place we should never be.
No we’re not there yet.
But it’s sure not getting any easier.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, April 4, 2014
“In Dire Demographic Straits”: The GOP’s New Voting Laws Are Nothing Less Than A War On Democracy
Can someone please explain to me why the New York Times’ top story from this past Sunday hasn’t provoked nationwide outrage?
Allow me to provide a handy summary: Having spent the last several years trumping up unsubstantiated charges of voter fraud in order to justify new laws and regulations making it more burdensome to vote in poor and minority (read: Democratic-leaning) districts around the country, the Republican Party has now changed tactics. In the name of enforcing the “uniformity” of voting rules, Republican governors and legislatures in a number of swing states have begun to increase the obstacles to voting still further. Some states are requiring that would-be voters show birth certificates or passports (which many poor people don’t possess), while others are curtailing the days, times, and places available to vote (which is particularly onerous for poor people who have little workplace flexibility and often lack transportation).
Let’s leave aside the spectacle of Republicans, usually our most fulsome champions of local control, suddenly banging on about the need for statewide uniformity in voting rules.
What’s far more noteworthy (and frankly pathetic) about these moves is that they’re a tacit acknowledgement by the Republican Party that it’s in dire demographic straits — and that one of the key pillars of its ideology over the last half-century is crumbling right before our eyes.
Ever since Richard Nixon claimed to speak for the “silent American majority,” the GOP has identified itself with the real America, the true America, the America of morals and faith and common sense, as opposed to the ersatz America of secular liberalism made up of judges, professors, journalists, and other elites who control the commanding heights of culture from decadent enclaves in New York and Hollywood. These elites have a pernicious influence and do a lot of damage, Republicans have maintained, but they’re vastly outnumbered by the real Americans who find their natural home in the GOP.
This ideology of righteous majoritarianism received intellectual validation from the first generation of neoconservatives, who wrote during the 1970s about the emergence of a “new class” of liberal professionals whose moral outlook differed from that of the rest of the country. Then, the ideology contributed to the rhetorical populism of the Reagan Revolution. Later, in a purer, high-octane form, it fueled the rise of right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and the rest of a conservative media infrastructure that exists to continually feed the flames of partisan fury through a potent mixture of flattery, demonization, and identity politics. “YOU are the real and righteous Americans,” these outlets tell their loyal listeners and viewers day after day, year after year, “and THEY are illegitimate, immoral imposters who have usurped political power.”
The story was always an exaggeration, but it once had a certain plausibility. Reagan won re-election in 1984 with 58.8 percent of the vote. Millions of his supporters were lifelong New Deal and Great Society liberals who jumped parties to become the fabled “Reagan Democrats.” It seemed for a time like the silent American majority had finally found its voice.
But then the numbers started heading south. George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan with a softer 53.4 percent of the vote, and then went on to lose his bid for re-election in 1992. His son notoriously made it to the White House in 2000 despite losing the popular vote; four years later he won a majority — though, with only 50.7 percent of the vote, just barely. And it’s been downhill ever since.
The grassroots of the GOP and its media cheerleaders like to attribute the party’s losses in 2008 (McCain, 45.7 percent) and 2012 (Romney, 47.2 percent) to the party’s foolish decision to go with presidential candidates who were compromised conservatives. If only they’d chosen real Republicans!
But this is a self-serving fantasy. As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have been arguing for years, with each election cycle providing confirmation of their thesis, the Republican Party faces a possibly intractable demographic problem — with its core voters (older white men) becoming an ever-smaller proportion of the electorate. This means that in the country’s only national election contest (the presidential vote), the popular margin is likely to swing increasingly in the direction of the Democratic Party. Unless, of course, Republicans can keep Democrats from voting.
But what about the GOP’s success at holding on to the House of Representatives in recent years? That, too, is a product of anti-democratic manipulation. The Democrats actually received more overall votes in House races in 2012 but failed to win control of the chamber because the GOP has used state-level redistricting to cram ever-greater numbers of Democrats into smaller numbers of districts, effectively decreasing their political power relative to their raw numbers.
Charming, isn’t it?
But also pitiable. Having built an ideology around the conviction that it speaks axiomatically for the real American majority, the Republican Party has become incapable of coping with evidence to the contrary — and willing to do just about anything, including subverting democracy, to maintain that fiction.
Republicans should be ashamed of themselves — and the rest of us should be disgusted.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, April 1, 2014
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