President Bush Calls Univ. Of Michigan Admissions Policy Unconstitutional
Experts discuss the newly announced White House position on the politically
charged Univ. of Michigan race-based admissions cases the Supreme Court
will review later this term. President Bush entered the debate over
affirmative action Wednesday, calling a University of Michigan Law School
program to encourage minority acceptance in college "fundamentally flawed"
and unconstitutional. In a statement that firmly entered the White House
into the most significant affirmative action case in years, the president
said the Supreme Court should strike the Michigan system down.
RAY SUAREZ: We pick up the story now with Terrence Pell, president of the
Center for Individual Rights, which is representing the white students in
these cases; Walter Allen, a professor of sociology at the University of
California, Los Angeles - he was an expert witness on behalf of the
minority student interveners when the cases were in the lower courts;
Christopher Edley, professor at Harvard Law School - as special counsel to
President Clinton, he led a White House review of affirmative action
programs; and Carol Swain, a professor of political science and law at
Vanderbilt University.
Let me start by getting all your reactions to the president's statement and
also an idea of where this now places the White House in the national debate.
Terrence Pell?
*TERRENCE PELL: Well, we are very pleased, obviously, with the president's
announcement today. He correctly recognize that the type of race
preferences used by Michigan are not only unconstitutional, but they're
unnecessary, and it's time for our country to move beyond that sort of
heavy consideration of race in college admissions...
[You might wonder about now, as I did, where Mr. Pell and the Center for
Individual Rights are coming from and how much this kind of expertise
costs. Thanks to Media Transparency
http://www.mediatransparency.org/search.php for this]
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fromthewashingtonpost
Affirmative Action Again Facing a Court Test
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 21, 2001; Page A02
On the issue of affirmative action in higher education, the conservative
lawyers at the Center for Individual Rights are purists: Racial
preferences, they say, are unfair, unconstitutional and should be abolished.
Over the last eight years, as the Clinton administration battled to save
affirmative action under the "mend it, don't end it" slogan, the center
pressed its case in federal courts across the South, Midwest, and West
Coast -- with considerable success.
A federal appeals court invalidated programs to boost minority enrollment
in the state universities of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi; a district
court struck down a similar program at the University of Michigan's law
school.
Now, with Bill Clinton out of office and President Bush settling into the
White House, the Center for Individual Rights may be on the verge of a
national breakthrough.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court will consider the group's petition for a
hearing on affirmative action in higher education. If the justices grant
it, the stage will be set for a monumental legal struggle next year that
could affect every middle-class voter with college-bound children.
The largely conservative court's recent decisions narrowing the scope of
affirmative action in other contexts "give us reason to hope we have a good
chance of winning," said Michael Rosman, the center's general counsel.
The center has one former associate seemingly bound for a top job in the
Bush administration: Solicitor General-designate Theodore B. Olson
volunteered to help it argue, and win, a 1996 case that ended
race-conscious admissions policies in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Many other actual or prospective administration officials have expressed
views similar to the center's though none has a direct connection with the
group.
But just as liberal advocacy groups frequently pressured the Clinton
administration, the Center for Individual Rights views itself as an outside
force, working through the courts to make sure that even a conservative
Republican administration cannot avoid the issue of affirmative action.
"We feel there is room for someone on the right who tells the truth on this
important issue and sticks with that truth regardless of what kind of
administration is in power," said *Terence J. Pell, the group's chief
executive, who was a civil rights official in the Reagan administration
Education Department.
Some Republicans view the center's campaign with considerable ambivalence.
Opposition to affirmative action has been a Republican theme for years,
helping the party cement the loyalty of white male voters. But it does not
play as well among independents, especially white women.
"On an intellectual level, plenty of white voters feel we ought to have a
color-blind society," said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who has studied
voter attitudes on race for the Ford Foundation. "But then they come to the
view that we don't have a color-blind society today, and they don't want to
turn the clock back."
These fault lines are mirrored in the personnel of the Bush administration,
which contains both critics of affirmative action such as Olson and
supporters such as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
Much of big business -- a key part of the Republican political coalition --
has embraced affirmative action, both to have a workforce that reflects the
demography of its customers and to avoid discrimination lawsuits from
minorities. Major corporations such as General Motors and Microsoft have
publicly weighed in against the center in the lower courts.
"The issue of race is radioactive for this administration," said Clint
Bolick of the conservative Institute for Justice.
During the 2000 campaign, Bush finessed the affirmative action issue,
voicing opposition to "quotas" while embracing race-neutral "affirmative
access."
This was the approach Bush took as governor of Texas, after the center's
landmark appeals court victory in 1996 in the case of Cheryl Hopwood, a
white student who had been refused admission to the University of Texas law
school while minorities with lower test scores were admitted.
Bush enforced the ruling but also backed a new law that aims to achieve
racial diversity in the university by granting automatic admission to every
Texas public high school student who graduates in the top 10 percent of his
class.
It may be harder for Bush to straddle the issue in the context of a Supreme
Court case because the justices would probably ask the administration to
submit its own view of the case.
If confirmed as solicitor general, Olson would write that brief -- though
he has left open the possibility of recusing himself because of his past
work with the center. It is also possible that the administration could
decline to weigh in.
If the administration sits the case out, however, it would be a net gain
for the center over the Clinton years. Then, the Justice Department opposed
the 1996 Hopwood ruling and urged the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully, to
review it.
Created in 1989 by former Reagan administration attorney Michael McDonald
and conservative scholar Michael Greve, the Center for Individual Rights,
with 10 full-time employees and an annual budget of $1.9 million, receives
most of its funding from libertarian and conservative foundations such as
those run by Richard Mellon Scaife.
At the heart of its legal case is a debate over the Supreme Court's
fractured decision in the 1978 Bakke case. In Bakke, a five-justice
majority struck down a California medical school's admissions program that
set aside a fixed percentage of slots for minorities. Four dissenting
justices voted to uphold the program, saying it was necessary to compensate
for past discrimination.
But Justice Lewis F. Powell, in an opinion fully joined by no other member
of the court, wrote that schools could consider applicants' race as a "plus
factor" in admissions -- not to meet a quota, but to ensure a diversity of
viewpoints in the student body.
Since the Powell opinion, added to the four dissenters' view, created a
five-vote majority in favor of some use of race in admissions, many have
treated Powell's opinion as authorizing universities to practice
affirmative action.
In subsequent cases, however, the court has struck down affirmative action
programs in government contracting and employment, holding that
race-conscious programs must be viewed with "strict scrutiny" by courts to
prove that they are "narrowly tailored" to meet a "compelling government
interest."
Against this backdrop, the center developed the argument that Powell's
opinion was not truly a majority view of the court in 1978. It argues that
diversity-based affirmative action must pass muster under the court's later
decisions -- that is, diversity must be shown to be sufficiently important
to justify discriminating in favor of blacks.
It cannot be, the group argues, because there is no necessary link between
the color of one's skin and the viewpoint one would bring to an academic
setting.
[? at this point one wonders how the term "diversity" can be used without
reference to "the color of one's skin" ]
"Blatant racial preferences are the lazy man's way of achieving diversity,"
said Curt Levey, the center's spokesman. The group says it has no objection
to the "affirmative access" alternative Texas adopted after Hopwood.
But such plans have their own flaws, such as the fact that the Texas plan
can produce diversity only as long as high schools draw from racially
segregated residential areas, affirmative action backers say.
"There is an easy assumption that there are other ways to accomplish
diversity," said University of Michigan President Lee Bollinger. "At the
end of the analysis, there simply is not a reasonable alternative."
Last December, in a case brought by the center's clients against the
University of Washington law school, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,
based in San Francisco, decided that Powell's opinion was still binding
precedent and upheld the school's use of race in admissions -- the opposite
of the result in the Hopwood case.
Because of this conflict among lower courts, there is now a fair chance the
Supreme Court will heed the center's request to settle the matter.
Even if the court decides to pass this time, it will almost certainly have
to deal with the issue before Bush's term ends in 2004 because of two other
suits brought by lawyers with the center against the University of
Michigan. One Michigan district judge upheld affirmative action in
undergraduate education at the university, while another struck down the
law school's program -- and both cases are being appealed.
#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--# add your own comments
Afirmative Dis-Action (english)
Vish Varnay 6:22pm Thu Jan 16 '03
comment#229043
What I don't see being discussed is the elitest preferential system which I
have entitled "Afirmative Dis-Action." The action being such as one G.W.
BU$H*T getting preferential treatment towards his admission into Yale! The
world knows Dumbya's S.A.T. scores would have rejected his admission, let
alone his I.Q. The spoiled rich kid got the nod only because his criminal
father is an alumnus. By this a person of minority status, who more than
likely had higher test scores, was denied admission into Yale because of
Elitest "Afirmative Dis-Action!"
Legacy Quotas (english)
antiphone 8:27pm Thu Jan 16 '03
comment#229068
Good point V.V., Edwards is raising the legacy quota issue.
-Class Dismissed
John Edwards proposes to end legacy preferences in university admissions --
or at least give it the old college try.-
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/01/bennett-d-01-03.html
-George W. Bush was a legacy admission at Phillips Academy aka Andover and
then Yale University, where he neither applied nor distinguished himself.-
-Bush coasted through business school and went on to a mediocre career as a
businessman, repeatedly saved from failure -- and eventually made a
multimillionaire -- by dint of his family connections.-
-The legacy-admissions issue, then, casts Edwards as the embodiment of the
American dream and Bush as its antithesis. As Edwards put it in a speech on
education this November at the University of Maryland in College Park, "The
legacy preference rewards students who had the most advantages to begin
with. It is a birthright out of 18th-century British aristocracy, not
21st-century American democracy. It is wrong." Later he added, "There is no
royalty in America." The imagery is clear -- George W. equals George III --
and the rhetoric familiar. It is the language of populism, but with a
twist: It is a middle-class populism, one pitched to the slice of society
that is wealthy enough to send its kids to college but not established
enough to be part of the club.-
. . . . . . . . .
While the NYT pours on the sugar
With His Eye on Two Prizes, the President Picks His Words Carefully
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/16/national/16ASSE.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
-That effective use of language, and the ability to present conservative
positions while still appealing to a broad political spectrum, is without
doubt a hallmark of Mr. Bush's political skill.-, says Adam Nagourney of
the New York Times in his analysis.
This is pure B. S. and if the Times can't find reporters who can resist the
temptation to suck up and regurgitate this semantic swill they will loose
what credibility they have left.
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=229013
