Well with all due respect what in the world is an outreach program directed toward the members of one specific race if it is not affirmative action? A school is not an employer, in this instance, where the candidates being equal grant a preference to minority applicants. They are specifically seeking black students, instead of sitting there and choosing from among the best applicants. I can’t imagine a more descriptive term for this behavior.
Of course that is why the world will never have enough lawyers.
First of all, you have no idea whether or not this program had reduced the necessary criteria for minorities in order to admit more. All we know from the cite is that blacks were specifically targeted for recruitment (something which my guess will now be illegal under yesterday’s court ruling, assuming the College of the Holy Cross accepts government funds for any of its programs, and I do assume so.) We don’t have any idea if Thomas would have been admitted or would have received the same financial aid and this I think is the heart of his objection to the plans. In other words he prefers that marginal black students not be admitted at all (if it comes to that) rather than have the pssible taint of an affirmative action admission be applied to him.
It is my understanding by the way, that Thomas finds all affirmative action programs offensive, please provide a cite yourself if you have evidence to the contrary.
Your cite claims Thomas benefitted from affirmative action, but does not support their claim.
You say he was able to attend and graduate because they recruited him under a new program, but that is simple speculation on your part. If Thomas could have gained admission to the school without the program, then the program was not essential to his admission or graduation. In order to establish your point, you need to be able to say that Thomas’ grades and/or test scores were such that he would not have been admitted, but for the affirmative action program. You have not shown this.
OK, then let’s have a cite that Thomas thinks the government should prohibit private institutions from engaging in outreach?
I said we don’t know. If you know, then give us a cite. Without that, we cannot conclude anything.
Your guess would be wrong. This SCOTUS decision was narrowly decided to apply only to public schools. In fact, it doesn’t apply to colleges at all, public or private.
If we don’t have any idea, why are you claiming that he benefited from the program?
Well, the key here is the term “marginal”. We don’t know that he was “marginal”.
You were one the making the assertion, so you need to produce the cite. But if you read Thomas’ concurring opinion in the recent AA case, you can see that he does not oppose all AA efforts:
Back to the OP’s question: were there Presidents who made appointments to the Supreme Court without considering ideology? Fraid so, and most of those Presidents were Republicans.
Gerald Ford plainly wasn’t trying to move the Court rightward when he appointed John Paul Stevens.
And Dwight Eisenhower made his appointments based on geographical and “diversity” considerations. He put ultraliberal William Brennan on the Court because he thought the Court needed a Northern Catholic, while Earl Warren was appointed to make California happy. Eisenhower had no idea how either man would vote (he later indicated they were his two biggest mistakes as President).
Hey, let’s not forget Roger Taney, arguably the worst Supreme Court Justice in history. He regularly and flagrantly violated all law and precedent for his own Southern-leaning bias. The man may actually have caused the Civil War indirectly, conspired outside the court to create rulings acceptable with the South, and blatantly ruled on matters not before the court in the Dred Scott decision.
President Jed Bartlett - simultaneously appointed a strong leftist as Chief Justice and a strong rightist as Associate Justice, to ensure vigourous debate on the Court.
There’s no question that both sides have tried to ‘stack’ the Supreme Court. The main factor has been the extent to which they could actually do so.
Right now, we’re in a period of time (1969-now) where 12 of the last 14 SCOTUS appointments have been made by Republican Presidents. During the 1933-68 time period, the numbers were probably skewed about as strongly in the other direction. Elections have consequences.
Also, there’s the question of who those Presidents felt they could nominate and get confirmed. Breyer and Ginsburg are hardly as liberal as Roberts and Alito are conservative: Clinton wasn’t willing to risk the sort of confirmation battle he’d have encountered if he’d appointed a latter-day William Brennan to the Court. Conversely, I’m sure that Eisenhower didn’t feel he could appoint staunch conservatives. And of course Nixon had two of his nominees (Haynesworth and Carswell) turned down, and Reagan had Bork rejected. (And given what a nutter Bork has turned out to be, we ought to thank our lucky stars.) Not to mention, when Reagan appointed O’Connor, he didn’t reach for the most conservative jurist he could possibly find.
That the political process should play into the selection of the Justices, and of the judges of the lesser Federal courts, is just the way it goes. I think we should acknowledge that it’s a fact of life, and accept that it should apply not only to the President’s judicial appointments, but also to the Senate’s confirmation process.
The sole limitation I’d institute, if I could write one into the Constitution, is to have the appointments to the Federal judiciary be for a fairly long but non-lifetime term - 25 years, say - to prevent any further attempts to stack the Court and the judiciary as a whole not only for the short to medium term, but far into the future as well.
But other than that, I’m perfectly OK with the notion that politics should strongly play in to the selection of our judiciary.
And we have either a 5-4 split or a 4-5 split on most of the critical cases. Doesn’t sound like stacking has been much of a problem. Maybe it would have been different if the openings had occurred with a Dem president, but who knows?
It’s helped that not all the GOP picks have gone as a conservative ideologue might hope, with particular attention to Stevens, O’Connor, and Souter in this regard. But a long enough stretch with one side’s getting the vast majority of the picks can unquestionably do the job: it may have taken 40 years to get us from Warren, Douglas, Brennan, Marshall, and Fortas to Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy, but we’re there.