The Bush Legacy: The Conservative Activist Supreme Court. White Men Rejoice!

This was the test case for judicial activism, and the conservative activist Justices passed with flying colors. Is WHITE a color? (rhetorical) Reuters pronounced it so:

“By a 5-4 vote and splitting along conservative and liberal lines, the justices overturned a ruling for the city by a U.S. appeals court.”

It’s time to actively protest the direction and activism of the countries highest court, or the following part of the story will take on a surreal form of legitimacy.

"The appeals court's ruling in … is expected to be a focus of questioning by Republicans at Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearing scheduled for next month."

Republican Senators will play off the judicial activism and “white men are victims” decision to trounce Sonia Sotomayor’s well thought out majority opinion. The hideous racism on display by this conservative court will turn racial progress back a half century.

As thinkprogress.org wrote: "the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has given employers broad discretion to reconsider a promotion test whose results favor one race over another. Today’s ruling creates a new standard which says that an employer’s decision to toss out a hiring test must have a “strong basis in evidence” showing that the test preferred one race over another."

Another words, these tests must clearly state they will prefer one race over the next. If not, there’s nothing to make one think there is a problem. What a simple world it’s turning out to be after all.

Justice Kennedy held: "Without some other justification, this express, race-based decision making violates Title VII’s command that employers cannot take adverse employment actions because of an individual’s race."

On the liberal end of the court:

Justice Ginsburg in dissent insists that better tests were available and that the majority misconstrues the good-faith basis of the city: "The white firefighters who scored high on New Haven’s promotional exams understandably attract this Court’s sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them. New Haven maintains that it refused to certify the test results because it believed, for good cause, that it would be vulnerable to a Title VII disparate-impact suit if it relied on those results ... the Court pretends that “[t]he City rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white.” Ante, at 20. That pretension, essential to the Court’s disposition, ignores substantial evidence of multiple flaws in the tests New Haven used. The Court similarly fails to acknowledge the better tests used in other cities, which have yielded less racially skewed outcomes.

It would be hard to argue against such reasoning, unless your hell bent on ideological outcomes.

The Robert’s court should be proud.