One Utah

I want to acknowledge Frank Staheli’s post below. Until he mentioned it, I had missed the significance of last Thursday’s Supreme Court decision in the consolidated cases of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education — probably the most important ruling on integration since 1954, when the Supreme Court held racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Supreme Court’s reversal of two lower court rulings calls into question hundreds of integration plans currently in place throughout the country, thus rolling back efforts to achieve equality of opportunity in communities everywhere in America. Unlike the Brown case, which was decided unanimously, this was a narrow 5-4 decision written by Bush appointee Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.

Ignoring the continuing impact of racial discrimination, as well as the distinction between using racial categories to insure integration rather than to maintain segregation, Roberts absurdly compared the Seattle and Louisville plans to the pre-Brown period where “schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.” Roberts concluded his opinion with circular logic: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.”

Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote a 77-page dissenting opinion, which concluded: “The lesson of history is not that efforts to continue racial segregation are constitutionally indistinguishable from efforts to achieve racial integration. Indeed, it is a cruel distortion of history to compare Topeka, Kansas in the 1950s to Louisville and Seattle in the modern day.”

Noting the extreme right-wing ideology of Roberts’ opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens—the senior associate justice on the Supreme Court– observed: “It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”

This is just one of the rollbacks engineered by Roberts and fellow Bush appointee Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. With associate justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and, more often than not, Anthony M. Kennedy, they comprise a majority five-justice voting bloc responsible not only for dismantling school desegregation, but also, among other things, limiting the right of workers to sue for discrimination in pay scales, restricting the right of condemned prisoners to seek habeas corpus, curtailing the right of high school students to express themselves off campus, limiting the right of taxpayers to challenge government expenditures on religion, and attacking the right of women to late-term abortions prescribed by their doctors for health reasons. At the same time, the Court has issued pro-corporate rulings protecting the right of big business to influence elections and to manipulate prices and the stock market without incurring any civil liability. A third of the cases this term were decided by 5-to-4 margins. Roberts even disregarded precedent in several key decisions.

The New York Times summarizes the key cases this term. The one thing they all have in common: equality of opportunity loses out.

From Slate’s Emily Bazelon:

“Any hope liberals and moderates had that the Roberts Court would be modest in its ambition were dashed this week with the parade of 5-4 decisions (conservatives win, liberal-moderates lose)…. Roberts may not go in for rhetorical swashbuckling, but he gets the job for the right done.”

UPDATE: Via JM Bell: Know your first amendment - A Game For SCOTUS

This entry was posted Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Civil liberties Infringement, Conservatives, Equality, SLC Politics, The Constitution. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.