[EL] Schuette

[Abigail Thernstrom]

	Statement on Schuette that both Thernstroms have given to the Federalist Society:


	Voters can decide they don’t want racial double standards in university admissions. That is the essence of the Supreme Court’s 6 to 2 decision in Schuette. Not a surprise, but nevertheless, very welcome.
  
	We give Justice Scalia an A for his cogent opinion, and suggest that Justice Breyer (who kept his technocratic impulses in check) deserves an award for his new found appreciation of the proper role of voters in the democratic political process. To Justice Sotomayor goes the prize for Best Euphemism. She is worried that the term “affirmative action” has connotations of preferential treatment, and insists that  “race-sensitive admissions policies” is a more neutral term.
 
	One wonders if she would have had any problems with the “religiously-sensitive” policies employed by so many of our leading colleges and universities in the first half of the 20th-century, when they set the admissions bar for Jewish applicants much higher than for Christians, to avoid the danger of having “too many” Jews in the entering class.
 
	Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom



On Apr 22, 2014, at 11:51 AM, Ilya Shapiro wrote:

> Germane to this list because involves voting processes/structures, right?  Here’s my initial press statement:
>  
> It's no surprise that six justices found that a state constitutional provision prohibiting racial discrimination complies with the federal constitutional provision that prohibits state racial discrimination. To hold otherwise would be to torture the English language to the point where constitutional text is absolutely meaningless. The only surprise -- or, rather, the lamentable pity -- is that two justices somehow agreed with the lower court's confused determination that the Constitution requires what it barely tolerates (racial preferences in higher education). Indeed, this case was so easy precisely because it didn't involve the fraught question of whether states can pursue race-conscious measures in order to achieve (some mythical) diversity. Instead, this case was about the democratic process and whether voters can rein in the powers of their state government. The answer to that question, like the answer to the question of whether the Equal Protection Clause mandates racial preferences, is self-evident.
>  
> Ilya Shapiro
> Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies,
> Editor-in-Chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review
> Cato Institute
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>  
> Cato Supreme Court Review:  http://www.cato.org/pubs/scr/index.html
>  
> Watch our 2013 Constitution Day Conference - Supreme Court Review/Preview:  http://www.cato.org/events/12th-annual-constitution-day
>  
> Watch me defend the right to keep and bear arms on the Colbert Report:  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/340923/july-08-2010/automatics-for-the-people---ilya-shapiro---jackie-hilly
>  
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Abigail Thernstrom
Adjunct Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Vice-chair, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2001 - 2013
www.thernstrom.com







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