Roger Clegg: ‘I think it’s fair to describe this as a crisis’
The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg, blogging at The Corner, dubs the coming months “Civil-Rights Summer,” because of several related issues. “Wise Latina woman” Sonia Sotomayor faces what I predict will be an easy confirmation process, and the Supreme Court will hand down rulings in the Ricci v. DeStefano and Voting Rights cases.
In Ricci, New Haven decided not to promote white firefighters who qualified for promotions because too few minorities qualified for promotions. In the Voting Rights case, the plaintiff seeks to eliminate Section 5’s pre-clearance requirement for changing voting procedures.
Clegg, who’s heard the oral arguments in both cases, says liberals won’t be too happy about the rulings. (I’m holding out hope the court properly interprets the Constitution and leads us in the direction of colorblind government policy.) Leftists will want the decisions in those cases overturned, naturally. Nothing new here to see. But here’s the novelty: a biracial president is on the hot seat. Clegg writes:
I think it’s fair to describe this as a crisis. The way it plays out will determine (not finally, since nothing is ever final in politics) but for some time whether America has shrugged off the principle of E pluribus unum. This, notwithstanding the fact that, in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic society, it is untenable to have a legal regime in which citizens are sorted according to skin color and the national origin of one’s ancestors, and treated better or worse depending on which box they check.
We know that the Democrats in Congress will do the wrong thing — that is, they will do whatever they can to advance the use of racial preferences to the nth degree. They are hopeless. The question is, what role will the Republicans play — and what will President Obama do?
It’s going to be an interesting summer.
