Regular readers will know that although I have disagreed with Washington Post columnist William Raspberry frequently (this, this, this, this, and this are just a few), I always respect his thoughtfulness and his basic fairness.Today’s column, however, severely tests that respect.
Raspberry begins:
If you’re concerned about the rightward drift of the U.S. Supreme Court, you may be hoping — as I am — for a smoking-gun revelation that would disqualify John G. Roberts Jr.
“Sometimes,” he continues, “we even imagine we’ve found the damning evidence.” And what is that damning evidence? Why, it’s the new liberal mantra:
He wanted, his memos confirm, to limit the reach of the Voting Rights Act, to do away with such race-conscious approaches as school busing and affirmative action, to curtail the application of Title IX to equalize opportunity for women, and to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear certain classes of civil rights cases.
By now I expect to hear liberal partisans argue that Roberts wanted to “limit” the reach of the voting rights act when in fact what he did was oppose a radical redefinition of voting rights — from a right to be free from racial discrimination in voting to a new right to have districts created so that minorities can elect the candidates of their choice (it goes without saying that all minorities want the same thing). But I wouldn’t have expected Raspberry, who is usually more careful, to echo this partisan slant.
Nor does Raspberry usually succumb to euphemism, such as describing racial school assignments (busing) and racial preferences in hiring as “race-conscious approaches.” It’s not the consciousness of race that makes affirmative action objectionable the way it is implemented; it is the preferences, the assigning of burdens and benefits based on race. Roberts did indeed oppose those practices, and I hope he still does.
The rest of Raspberry’s column is given over to what he doesn’t recognize as a fundamental contradiction.
First, he writes that Roberts
has been, virtually since his arrival in government, not just a counsel but an advocate of positions that, to civil rights partisans, for instance, seem well out of the settled mainstream.
And what “settled mainstream” would that be? The one that supports racial busing of school children and racial preferences in hiring and admissions? I suspect there is a mainstream of opinion about busing and preferences, but it most definitely is not one that supports those practices. Roberts, I believe, is actually well within the mainstream of opinion on these issues, and it is Raspberry is out of it, high and dry on the left bank. These issues are “settled,” moreover, only when they are decided by courts and executive agencies with no input from actual voters, who reject them whenever given an opportunity. That’s why Democrats in Michigan are trying so hard to keep MCRI off the ballot. If Raspberry knows of heretofore hidden polling data showing that the “mainstream” supports racial quotas and racial busing, he should cite it.
But then, after arguing that Roberts is “well out of the settled mainstream,” Raspberry, seemingly forgetting that accusation, then asks:
Don’t the American people understand the danger of letting the Supreme Court become, in essence, a partisan of one side in a closely divided nation?
This Roberts must be quite a guy if he can, even without a phone booth in which to change into his Superjurist uniform, be well out of the mainstream at the same time that he represents “one side in a closely divided nation.”
What Raspberry is really saying here is that one half of a closely divided nation is out of the mainstream.
Some mainstream.
UPDATE [16 Aug.]
See Hugh Hewitt’s excellent critical comments on this Raspberry column.
I think he makes perfect sense. He is referring to the settled mainstream of civil rights advocates. Any “mainstream” in their writing is what liberals say it is, no more, no less. What a majority of Americans believe has nothing to do with it. Liberals neither know, nor care what other-than-liberals believe.