Supreme Court strikes down Louisville school assignment programs

Well, it would kind of suck for someone to say "you are of this race, so you have to go to get bussed to this school."

I am all for diversity, perhaps there are other means of achieving it. Vouchers, anyone?

 

Freaking huge deal, and awful. Welcome back "separate but equal."

GWB stacked that court very nicely, we can all enjoy the fruits of his ideology for decades to come.

 

Treat everyone the same under the law, regardless of skin color? The horror.

 

No Surprising.

Rocket River

 

Resegregation here we come!

 

I think actually in many of the cases, using income to diversify the schools is better than race, SC did not say that is illegal, it just said using race as the only factor is illegal.

 

I can't find it yet, but apparently one of the judges in their dissent yesterday laid into the "conservative block" of the court about changing in one year more precedent than any court in history. Apparently the conservatives on the bench didn't like his comments too much. I've got to find it.

[edit] It was Breyer...

Speaking of the new conservative majority of the court...

"So few," Breyer said, "have so quickly changed so much." He ended his dissent, saying that "this is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret."

Court term ends with obvious frustration

 

It was breyer, read about it in the UChicagoo law school faculty blog, should be in Stone's piece.

 

link?

 

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=131463

I guess people are beginning to ignore basso threads

 

I would seem to me you could get around this with a general lotto system.

 

not seeing the big deal. i grew up in a very poor and black neighborhood. never worried or thought about trying to goto a more white school. The solution is making sure each SCHOOL gets treated equally, then we wouldn't have to worry aobut busing kids.

 

if its that bad, then why would busing kids to that kind of school simply because of their color be any more unfair to them than for the kids already in that school?

I dont know any solutions for the issue, but I'm pretty certain I don't want kids punished educationally simply because they're white.

 

More on the first full year of the conservative cour...er..Supreme Court.

Loyal Bushies on the Bench

Yesterday's 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court in a landmark racial desegregation case, which instructed local authorities "that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together," marked a fitting yet disappointing conclusion to the first full term of President Bush's two Supreme Court appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Reading his dissent from yesterday's decision aloud in the courtroom, Justice Stephen Breyer aptly described the court's sharp rightward slide. "It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much," he said. The majority opinion, authored by Roberts, served as a microcosm for the traits that have quickly come to define the Court: an alarming lack of respect for precedent, irreverence for the democratic process, and disregard for constitutional history. Early in his first term, Roberts publicly proclaimed his desire to seek greater consensus, but his "fractious" Court has produced a "higher share of 5-4 decisions than any term in the last decade." He has forced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg to undertake rare readings of "powerful dissents from the bench," a sign of the concern that marks the new divisive era on the Court. Despite how out-of-the-mainstream the high court currently is, it could get even worse. "It is a conservative court, but at the same time, just barely so," said constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh, noting the "moderating influence" of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Were an opening on the Court to arise in Bush's remaining days in office, he would likely view it as an opportunity to use whatever little political capital he has left to challenge the Senate and empower his legion of "activist conservatives intent on leading a judicial counterrevolution."

AGENDA-DRIVEN DECISIONS: The New York Times opined that yesterday's racial desegregation decision "is the height of activism: federal judges relying on the Constitution to tell elected local officials what to do." But it did not occur by accident. Instead, the newly-emboldened conservative wing of the Court has picked cases on appeal through which it could implement its agenda. When Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was still on the Court, the justices denied review to a racial desegregation school program in Massachusetts. But in June of last year, "the court, reconfigured by the additions of Roberts and Alito, announced, over the unrecorded but vigorous objection of the liberal justices, that it would hear" the school desegregation appeals, even though there was no disagreement in the lower courts on the validity of such programs. In a separate case on price-fixing announced yesterday, Breyer asserted, "I am not aware of any case in which this Court has overturned so well-established a statutory precedent." Slowly, legal and political scholars are taking notice of the Court's new activism. Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said the Supreme Court's decision this week in a campaign finance reform case demonstrated "not a careful, conservative deference to Congress" but instead "a willingness by Roberts to toss aside Congress' conclusions to fit his own ideological predispositions."

A FALSE PROMISE: When Bush nominated Roberts and Alito, he argued they deserved bipartisan support because they would "interpret the Constitution and the laws faithfully and fairly, to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans," and they would not "impose their preferences or priorities on the people." Roberts went before Congress and testified that he had "no agenda." He added, "Saying a judge is result-oriented...[is] about the worst thing you can say, because what you're saying is you don't apply the law." For his part, Alito said he believed "the judiciary has to [interpret broad principles of the Constitution] in a neutral fashion. I think judges have to be wary about substituting their own preferences, their own policy judgments for those that are in the Constitution." (Read more of their false promises here.) Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky writes today that "the testimony given by John Roberts and Samuel Alito at their confirmation hearings just months earlier was a lot of baloney." Alito and Roberts have shown little independence, siding with one another approximately 90 percent of the time. They have voted together in 21 of the 23 cases that have divided the Court 5-4 this year. "Prior to this year, the Court was split right down the middle in the close ideological cases -- each side won about half. But this year, the hard-core conservatives won more than twice as many of the close cases, including virtually all of the most important decisions."

THE ALITO FACTOR: The most devastating change on the Court has been the ideological shift that came with Alito's replacement of O'Connor. "That switch almost certainly changed the outcome of many of this year's most important decisions," with the following results: eliminating the nearly half-century old guarantee of equal pay opportunity for all Americans, regardless of race, gender, age, ethnicity, or disability (Ledbetter); limiting Congress's power to keep corporate money out of federal campaigns (Wisconsin Right to Life); cutting back on protections for reproductive freedom (Carhart); slamming the courthouse door on people who make technical mistakes (Bowles); cutting back on protections for people facing capital punishment by, among other things, allowing imposition of the death penalty on defendants deprived of even minimally adequate representation (Landrigan, Ayers, Uttecht); and making it impossible to challenge the Bush administration when it uses public funds to promote favored religions (Hein). While the media has focused on the fact that Alito the was the number one ally for corporate interests in a Supreme Court term that may have been the most pro-business in decades, what is most notable is Justice Alito's hostility to the rights of workers, shareholders, and consumers.

IT COULD GET WORSE: As much as the Court has lurched to the right in the past two terms, the results could get worse if another Court opening were to occur during Bush's remaining days in office. The oldest justices are John Paul Stevens and Ginsburg, members of the more progressive bloc. Justice Kennedy has generally been a conservative vote, "but unlike Roberts and Alito, he has maintained some degree of independence." In yesterday's racial desegregation decision for example, Kennedy affirmed that school districts can still take race-conscious measures to achieve diversity, though he felt the Louisville and Seattle programs focused much too exclusively on race. In an earlier decision, Kennedy sided with the majority to tell the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its refusal to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from new cars and trucks. Last term, he voted with the majority in Hamdan to limit the Bush administration's extravagant claims of executive power in denying due process to detainees. Among the issues at stake in the future are: a woman's right to choose, the environment, voting rights, congressional power, free speech and the First Amendment, and the protection of fundamental rights and liberties. O'Connor was a key vote on many of these issues, and the new Court could soon have these protections in its crosshairs. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne writes, "If another conservative replaces a member of the court's moderate-to-liberal bloc, the country will be set on a conservative course for the next decade or more, locking in today's politics at the very moment when the electorate is running out of patience with the right."

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport

 

http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2007/06/roberts-alito-a.html

 

No kidding.

Isn't this what the minority community has been complaining about for decades? Treat us equal?

I am to understand this is the way it was:

So, I work hard, make more money, and move into a nicer neighborhood; which will allow my kids to go to a nicer school. Then your kids get penalized by having bus loads of punks fill the seats to satisfy a quota because some jackass parent(s) is lazy, or couldn't keep their legs together when they were 14 years old?

If you don’t want your kids to go to a bad school, then move. If you can’t afford to move, then get a better job. If you can’t get a better job, then go back to school so that you can. If your 15 and a single parent.......you shouldn’t have gotten knocked up so young and now have to live with your decision. How hard is that?

The mentality of sitting around waiting for government help is ridiculous. Why do people expect to have everything done for them? Hard work is a scary word for those that have NEVER tried it.

I think the ruling is great.