Charybdus said:

The goal here ought to be to improve ALL schools rather than shipping minority students to suburban, mostly white schools. It just doesn't seem fair to me that the minority students would have to get up at 4:30 AM every day to go to school miles away from home to satisfy a quota. Why not ship in the white kids and improve minorty-heavy schools?

Why not take all that money being spent on bussing and spend it on computers or books or teacher pay raises? I understand what was trying to be accomplished by the bussing, but I think there is a time when enough is enough.

Its a complicated issue and I don't claim to know everything about it, but people should try to keep an open mind and hope that this decision promotes equality rather than enforce quotas.

Just recall opinions are like assholes, everyone has them and they all stink!

The Supreme Court told Seattle and Louisville, and hundreds more cities and counties, last month that they have to scrap their integration programs. There is a word for judges who invoke the Constitution to tell democratically elected officials how to do their jobs: activist.

President Bush, who created the court's conservative majority when he appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, campaigned against activist judges, and promised to nominate judges who would "interpret the law, not try to make law." Largely because of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, the court has just completed one of its most activist terms in years.

The individuals and groups that have been railing against judicial activism should be outraged. They are not, though, because their criticism has always been of "liberal activist judges." Now we have conservative ones, who use their judicial power on behalf of employers who mistreat their workers, tobacco companies, and whites who do not want to be made to go to school with blacks.

The most basic charge against activist judges has always been that they substitute their own views for those of the elected branches. The court's conservative majority did just that this term. It blithely overruled Congress, notably by nullifying a key part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, a popular law designed to reduce the role of special-interest money in politics.

It also overturned the policies of federal agencies, which are supposed to be given special deference because of their expertise. In a pay-discrimination case, the majority interpreted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a bizarre way that makes it extremely difficult for many victims of discrimination to prevail. The majority did not care that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has long interpreted the law in just the opposite way.

The court also eagerly overturned its own precedents. In an antitrust case, it gave corporations more leeway to collude and drive up prices by reversing 96-year-old case law. In its ruling upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, it almost completely reversed its decision from 2000 on a nearly identical law.

The school integration ruling was the most activist of all. The campaign against "activist judges" dates back to the civil rights era, when whites argued that federal judges had no right to order the Jim Crow South to desegregate. These critics insisted they were not against integration; they simply opposed judges' telling elected officials what to do.

This term, the court did precisely what those federal judges did: it invoked the 14th Amendment to tell localities how to assign students to schools. The Roberts Court's ruling had an extra fillip of activism. The civil rights era judges were on solid ground in saying that the 14th Amendment, which was adopted after the Civil War to bring former slaves into society, supported integration. Today's conservative majority makes the much less obvious argument that the 14th Amendment protects society from integration.

With few exceptions, the court's activism was in service of a conservative ideology. The justices invoked the due process clause in a novel way to overturn a jury's award of $79.5 million in punitive damages against Philip Morris, which for decades misrepresented the harm of smoking. It is hard to imagine that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, who were in the majority, would have supported this sort of "judge-made law" as readily if the beneficiary were not a corporation.

The conservative activism that is taking hold is troubling in two ways. First, it is likely to make America a much harsher place. Companies like Philip Morris will be more likely to injure consumers if they know the due process clause will save them. Employees will be freer to mistreat workers like Lilly Ledbetter, who was for years paid less than her male colleagues, if they know that any lawsuit she files is likely to be thrown out on a technicality.

We have seen this before. In the early 1900s, the court routinely struck down worker protections, including minimum wage and maximum hours laws, and Congressional laws against child labor. That period, known as the Lochner era _ after a 1905 ruling that a New York maximum hours law violated the employer's due process rights _ is considered one of the court's darkest.

We are not in a new Lochner era, but traces of one are emerging. This court is already the most pro-business one in years, and one or two more conservative appointments could take it to a new level. Janice Rogers Brown, a federal appeals court judge who is often mentioned as a future Supreme Court nominee, has expressly called for a return to the Lochner era.

The other disturbing aspect of the new conservative judicial activism is its dishonesty. The conservative justices claim to support "judicial modesty," but reviews of the court's rulings over the last few years show that they have actually voted more often to overturn laws passed by Congress _ the ultimate act of judicial activism _ than has the liberal bloc.

It is time to admit that all judges are activists for their vision of the law. Once that is done, the focus can shift to where it should be: on whose vision is more faithful to the Constitution, and better for the nation.

Subrosa said:
The idea of "equality" is amorphous at best. This decision draws a clean line between de jure segregation and de facto segregation and says that while the former is (rightfully) impermissible, it is actually impermissible to do anything about the latter.

Heathen_Dave said:

When you say it like this, it doesn't do a good job of promoting your argument. Since so many people choose where they live based on the quality of education in an area, is it really government's place to usurp that decision and move their children to schools that are farther away solely because that school needs more racial diversity?

This sort of forced diversity is treating symptoms of a deeper issue. Cosby knows the score.

Necia said:
More on topic: if, in any of the constitutional law coursework I've done, I'd tried to twist Brown to argue what Thomas and Scalia and Roberts and Alito argued here, my prof wouldn't have let me continue more than thirty seconds into such a bullshit interpretation.

Subrosa said:

Moreover, it's not an affirmative action case at all. That's the thing that so many people are missing about this. This case is NOT NOT NOT about giving any one race preference when it comes to admissions at better schools. This case is about the absolute destruction of programs that ensure that people who are going to public school are exposed to different races, different cultures and different values than the ones of their own.

This case is about undoing the practical impact of Brown, not racial preferences.

Heathen_Dave said:

When you say it like this, it doesn't do a good job of promoting your argument. Since so many people choose where they live based on the quality of education in an area, is it really government's place to usurp that decision and move their children to schools that are farther away solely because that school needs more racial diversity?

This sort of forced diversity is treating symptoms of a deeper issue.

Cosby knows the score.

Strelnikov said:
1. Obviously. But you need a high school diploma to get into college, don't you? Notice I said "hope" of higher education, an education in public schools is certainly part of that hope.

'Tis often best to read the comment prior to responding.

2. That doesn't change my opinion. Those who are open to diversity will always be, and those who are not will only cause problems. I come from a suburban school, so the vast majority of us were white, but there were Muslims, Jews (me), African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Catholics, Protestants, Wiccans, homosexuals, anything you can imagine. It is certainly a public high school's job to educate students about diversity, but admitting "diverse" people over those who would normally go to that school is not the way to do it. How about having a well-funded foreign language department? Perhaps bringing in speakers on the subject, or just visitors from other states, regions or countries? Perhaps the school could actively participate in exchange programs and actively promote them. Brown v. Board of Education was about cultural exposure, certainly, but moreover, it was about opportunity, and picking and choosing students to force diversity is a structural denial of opportunity.

It is, however, a very difficult decision, because cultural diversity and opportunity are two very important things in this country.

Necia said:
Actually, I did read your comment prior to responding. I still fail to see how most of your comment is relevant to the factual issues of the case or to the constitutional law questions at hand. Yes, you need a high school diploma or its equivalent to get into college. No one's being denied a high school diploma based on race. Therefore, I do not see how your point about higher education relates.

I also don't see how your suggestions affect the issue of maintaining racially integrated public schools. All of those things would be lovely to have in public schools, and ideally, if all public schools were funded as well as those in wealthy suburbs, maybe all public schools would have such things--but those things don't do anything about the issue of maintaining racial integration in our public schools. Your suggestions are fine ones, but I don't see how they really pertain to the facts of the cases at hand, or to the constitutional questions posed by these cases.

Strelnikov said:
There is no issue of racial inequality here,

so the only plausible reason for forced integration is to promote cultural diversity and tolerance, which can be done without displacing people.

Subrosa said:

This is total bullshit.

Not with the same effect it can't.

Strelnikov said:

I'm not saying that there is no issue of racial inequality period, just that such things can't be solved by integrating schools. Racial inequality is an issue of socioeconomic status and deep seated bigotry. As I said before, I would be happy to endorse integration between wealth levels or between family education levels, but to do it because of race just seems wrong.

Subrosa said:

This is not a case where people are being bussed across county lines or they move into an area where they were unaware there was bussing. This is a case where a democratically elected school board under mandate from the people who voted them in instituted a program in an attempt to lessen the impact of de facto segregation.