We should be clear that Affirmative Action encompasses a lot of stuff that falls outside the scope of this decision. Stuff like recruiting or advertising to target minority students are not the kinds of things the Michigan law was meant to stop. What is under consideration here is using race as part of the admission process itself. One can be in favor of AA without supporting race based admission processes.
Recruiting and advertising are different from affirmative action.
The point was to give a hypothetical showing why just having the same standard for every group is not real equality.
We don’t live in a direct democracy. Majority rule WITH MINORITY RIGHTS. That doesn’t exist as readily when the people can vote directly for discrimination because of sheer numbers.
Not in this context. If the above are being used to redress “past or present practices, policies, or other barriers to equal employment opportunity”, then if could and should be considered AA. See here:
California does a combo package of top 9% at your school, or top 9% in the state gets you into one of the UCs I believe. You end up in Riverside or Merced, but you can get into a UC (no offense to anyone from those areas, but they are the least popular of the UC system).
[quote=“Bricker, post:43, topic:686760”]
Because that is where the sovereignty of the government ultimately rests.
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Of course they have: by referring to the Constitution. But from whence comes the Constitution?
Answer: the people’s will.
The people can vote into office representatives that will amend the constitution. Any provision of the constitution can be amended. The constitution protects against certain majority rules, but is utterly powerless against the supermajority of two-thirds of each house of Congress and three-fourths of the states.
The people’s will is important because the people’s will is the ultimate source of all government power.
According to commentary here on the SDMB, voter ID laws are illicit even though they arise from the legislature. You argue that direct-ballot initiatives are illicit.
How, exactly, should the people express their will?
And what system do you propose in lieu of the current one?
No. But I believe that any measure that does not violate the federal constitution should be permitted.
And I believe that the Supreme Court gets the ultimate decision on the question of what the federal constitution permits.
In this context meaning what? The University of Michigan can and I presume is recruiting and advertising to minority students, but they’re not doing so as part of an affirmative action plan. It’s true that targeted recruiting can be a part of an affirmative action plan. That doesn’t mean recruiting minorities is affirmative action.
The language you’ve quoted is from the EEOC, whose policies regarding this distinction are what I cited.
Please point out where I said direct-ballot initiatives are illicit?
By voting.
That’s the crux of the matter though. I and some SC justices think it does violate the Coonstituion and generally defies common sense.
A
They do, and they ruled. Doesn’t mean their interpretation or reasoning was sound.
And my link was from the Dept. of Labor. Either way, the court didn’t say anything about AA, but rather racial preferences… If your point is that discussion about AA should not include outreach under that umbrella, I think you have not demonstrated that that should not be the case wrt to underrepresented minorities as we are typically discussing in these issues.
Don’t care: you won’t be persuaded no matter what.
I just care about the ultimate effect. You may not agree the majority reasoning was sound; you must agree that regardless, the decision has the effect of setting the meaning of the Constitution for the whole country.
I think Roe v. Wade was poorly reasoned. But I accept it as the law.
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The SCOTUS isn’t last because they are right, they are right because they are last.
The state of Michigan has the option of having another public vote or the state legislature can chose to reestablish affirmative action as a college admission consideration.
Please don’t presume to tell me what I will and will not be persuaded by. I also never said I didn’t accept it as law.
Nice phrase but it is nonsensical. Them being last has nothing to do with them being right or vice versa. Just the fact that the court has reversed its stance on many issues undermines the idea that they are right in every case.
And? What point are you tying to make? I think everyone here is aware that laws and amendments can generally be reversed.
The article strongly implied that it was almost a racist conspiracy, at least the way I read it.
Let’s face it; with about 15% of the population, and about the poorest 15%, it’s was probably a hard sell to make photographic/cinematic film reproduce black skin better, especially if it reproduced white skin worse, independent of any actual racism.
It was likely just a pragmatic business decision- if you had a product where 85% of your market was one way, and 15% was another, would you spend your effort trying to please the 85% or the 15%?
There is nothing in the article that I saw that implied it was a conspiracy of any kind.
What are you trying to say with the last part there?
I doubt it was even discussed. That is the point. I seriously doubt people in the 60’s were worried about the film not showing dark skin well. You missed the entire point of the post. I guess i should just assume you didn’t read it properly given you already accused me of saying exactly the opposite of what I said.
Again, the issue is that people back then just assumed White skin was the correct norm, and were only anchored to that norm because they themselves were White and because they mostly dealt with White people. Such biases creep in more readily in homogeneous environments which is why it is important to have diversity in those places to prevent unconscious biases from taking hold.
You may be thinking about Texas and the recent U Texas v Fishercase SCOTUS bounced back down.
In my view, the disaster for higher education occurs when Universities are not free to take the highest scoring candidates from groups they want to preferentially admit. At Texas the two groups were blacks and hispanics.
When you have a 10% top of class policy, what happens in practice is that the 10% from majority black schools get into University, woefully underperform in already weak classes and generally promote a stereotype that black kids are weak students.
Much better black students whose parents have made it out of the ratty schools need not apply if race cannot be considered. Their background opportunity is on par with other students, but their performance/score gaps are well below their economic peers.
The best students from all race/ethnic groups come from higher-income families, but at all levels of income asians are always at the top and blacks always at the bottom. So you will never be able drive color diversity into any academically rigorous fields without using race. This is a particular problem in STEM fields (along with medicine and law).
The default assumption has been that equal background opportunity will yield equally-performing students, but this has not panned out. So, for example, if U Texas wants the best black/hispanic students it can get, it cannot get them without race-based preference. It has to take its 10% from a class of overall (relatively) weak students at a given high school, but cannot get better black/hispanic students who come from better neighborhoods and have better scores without assigning a race-only weight to pull them up in the admissions process above non-black/hispanics who have outcompeted the black/hispanic students academically.
You’ve spent several posts rejecting the characterizations of your arguments by others.
Why don’t you restate whatever your argument actually is?
I’d like to hear a convincing argument as to how a law enacted by referendum that prohibits using race in university admissions criteria is unconstitutional.
Keep in mind that many of the discrimination protections we have under law are actually the result of Congressional statute like the Civil Rights Act and its associated ancillary acts that have expanded protections to more groups. So there’s actually a lot of objectionable behavior that, sans legislation (which we have) would be perfectly constitutional and in fact was prior to the 1960s widely practiced.
The 14th Amendment requires equal rights and protections for citizens in regard to how the government treats them, in the laws the government enacts and in the rights and privileges conferred by government. It does not guarantee minorities “protection” from otherwise perfectly constitutional referendums just because “minorities were on the losing end of the vote.” That’s what appears to be the argument, and maybe I’m wrong (in fact I know that no one would agree they were making such a foolish argument.)
But at the end of the day Michigan has a referendum process and we know that referendums in general are perfectly constitutional and are an unfortunate but common part of State government. We also know, by being logical and literate humans that a bill prohibiting admitting persons to university while using their self-identified race as a criteria in said admissions could never violate the 14th Amendment. There is no equal protection claim, in fact there is actually a much stronger claim that the practice itself runs afoul of the 14th Amendment and I think over the years the SCOTUS has nibbled around the edges of that question. They’ve already struck down things like strict quotas, for example.
I think that there is an interest in promoting lower class minority (but also lower class persons of any race) advancement into the college system, and I think the SCOTUS recognizes that too–which is why they have been very restrained in how they approach the issue as they recognize that part of this business is a matter of public policy and should be left to laws and not the courts.
Sotomayor on the other hand basically seems to have disliked the law because Republicans supported it and made a frankly disgraceful and embarrassing dissent statement in which she referenced irrelevant things like Jim Crow laws to try and associate her political enemies with racists from the 1950s.
That isn’t hard to find. In post #42 you went on the attack against them:
It’s quite understandable that you’d want to backtrack away from your previous attack on democracy. But for the purposes of this thread, we’re discussing a Supreme Court case where the plaintiffs were clearly anti-democratic. The people of Michigan voted to eliminate affirmative action in their state government. A left-wing group turned to the courts, hoping that the courts would overrule that democratic decision. The Supreme Court said no.
You try to claim that the left-wing group was not trying to mandate affirmative action by getting a court decree. According to you, the State Legislature could still abolish affirmative action; you’re only opposed to the people doing so directly. But suppose that the left-wingers had won in the Supreme Court, and then the Michigan legislature had chosen to eliminate affirmative action. How do we know the same left-wing group wouldn’t have sued again, demanding that the democratic process be nullified a second time? The left has made clear that they don’t respect democracy, regardless of whether it’s expressed through direct voting or through elected leaders.
(Incidentally your understanding of the word “democracy” is incorrect. Government by elected leaders is democracy. Look it up.)
The Republic/democracy dichotomy is one that is for some reason promoted by primary schools in the United States and leads to a lot of Americans asserting that since we don’t practice “Athenian style” democracy we’re not a “technical” democracy.
Something I would be interested in (and haven’t found through google) is the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision on this. My understanding is they struck down the referendum.
I would normally give deference on issues of State law to Sate Supreme Courts.
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When the SCOTUS has reversed itself, it’s latest decision would then be considered what is legally right.
My point is that sometimes, just sometimes, it’s a good idea to readdress the obvious. And it certainly doesn’t hurt the ongoing conversation.
*WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday morning upheld Michigan’s ban on using race as a factor in college admissions. In a 6-2 ruling, the justices said the state did not violate the U.S. Constitution when its voters banned affirmative action. The justices say that a lower federal court was wrong to set aside the change as discriminatory.
…In 2006, 58 percent of Michigan voters approved Proposal Two, amending their state constitution to ban affirmative action. The state justified the vote as an effort to put an end to racial preferences.
…On Tuesday, the justices in the majority stressed that the ruling says nothing about the merits of affirmative action itself, only the process by which a state can ban it.
…Seven other states have banned affirmative action — Arizona, California, Florida, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington*.
Prior to the passage of Proposal 2 in 2006, which lead to the amending of the Michigan Constitution, which lead to this latest ruling, the SCOTUS, in 2003, had ruled 5–4 in Grutter v. Bollinger that race could be used as one of several factors in professional school admissions without necessarily violating the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), was a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority in a 5-4 decision and joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, ruled that the University of Michigan Law School had a compelling interest in promoting class diversity. The court held that a race-conscious admissions process that may favor “underrepresented minority groups,” but that also took into account many other factors evaluated on an individual basis for every applicant, did not amount to a quota system that would have been unconstitutional under Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.
What had changed? In Michigan, race-based admission decisions had been acceptable UNTIL the Michigan Constitution had been changed. The SCOTUS ruling was right in both cases but the situation had been changed by a popular vote.
The instant case began life in federal court. The federal district court in Michigan upheld the referendum. The Sixth Circuit reversed. The US Supreme. Court reversed the Sixth Circuit.