Bill Clinton famously said of affirmative action, “Mend it; don’t end it.” He certainly didn’t end it, but then neither did he mend it in any ways that are noticeable today.
Harold Meyerson, the “editor at large” of The American Prospect and regular Democratic columnist for the Washington Post, appears to think that Clinton took the Democrats out of the preference business. In his column today, Meyerson writes that because of “Bill Clinton’s repositioning of the party,” … [n]o longer were the Democrats the party of racial preferences that they had been in the 1970s and ’80s.”
Really? This will come as a rude awakening to all those Democrats who have yet to meet a racial preference they don’t defend, to all those Democrats who made Sen. Lieberman abandon his past skepticism about preferences and kowtow to Maxine Waters et. al. before they would support him as Gore’s VP, to Clinton-appointed judges who continue to support things like 20 point admission bonuses based on race (Ginsburg and Breyer in Gratz), and to all those Democratic senators who oppose President Bush’s judicial nominees in large part out of fear that those nominees oppose racial preferences.
Perhaps Mr. Meyerson has been “at large” too long.
CORRECTION [24 Feb.]
I received the following correction from Kirk Kolbo, who allowed me to quote it here. For those of you who don’t recall, Mr. Kolbo was the plaintiffs’ lead attorney in both the Gratz and Grutter cases, and he did an outstanding job.
Actually, Breyer joined in the judgment (though not the Court’s opinion) striking down the 20-point system in Gratz, which made it 6-3. Only Bush 41’s Souter joined Ginsburg in voting on the merits to uphold the system in Gratz, with Steven dissenting and opining on procedural (standing) grounds only.
I sent an email thanking him for his correction and asking if he had any thoughts about why Breyer voted with the majority in Gratz but did not sign the opinion. After a flattering statement about this blog that I modestly omit (but not so modestly as to let the compliment go un-noted), Mr. Kolbo replied:
As to why Breyer did not sign the majority opinion in Gratz, I can only guess that he had reasons for voting to strike down the system that were somewhat different or narrower than expressed by the majority opinion. It could be, for example, (I speculate) that he thought a point system was okay–even an automatic one–but that 20 points were too many. But the preferences in Grutter (which he of course voted to uphold) were also large, so his vote in Gratz is something of a mystery.
Well I guess the Supreme Court was wrong when they speculated that we’d have affirmative action for another 25 years. Boy you gotta watch those Republicans. They must have been pushing affirmative action since tyhe Dems weren’t.
Leftists must truly believe that most people are cretins.