"The Way to Stop Discrimination"

It’s located right at the end of Chief Justice John Roberts decision in the case of Parents Concerned with Community Schools vs. Seattle School District (pdf).  You know what I am talking about.

We are talking about John Roberts’ deliberate sound bite neatly inserted into the pages and pages of close legal reasoning.  You know how it goes already.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

My, that’s a concept that we could use around here.  It is a sound bite that we should all hope will echo down the decades ahead.

But I wanted to get the context.  Where did Chief Justice Roberts put the sentence that he knew would be extracted and would be the symbol for the Parents vs. Seattle decision?  The sentence is located right at the end of “Opinion of ROBERTS, C.J.,” right before he writes:

The judgments of the Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits are reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings.
It is so ordered.

Good idea, eh? Reversing opinions from both the Sixth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit Court of Lefties in gross as you might say.

And it is also right before “Opinion by THOMAS, J.”  Justice Clarence Thomas begins his concurring opinion with the words:

Today, the Court holds that state entities may not experiment with race-based means to achieve ends they deem socially desirable. I wholly concur in THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s opinion.

Well, now, that’s a thought.  It recalls the moment in the old Beyond the Fringe sketch where Jonathan Miller talks about Prime Minister Harold Macmillan pressing the nuclear button “or not, as the mood takes him.”  That’s the kind of government liberals like.  It’s the kind of government that can do anything that seems socially desirable.

The only reason, Justice Thomas writes, that he is writing a concurring opinion is “to address several of the contentions in JUSTICE BREYER’s dissent.” As well he might.

But here is Justice Roberts’ sound bite in context:

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis.  The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Of course. That is the essential link. Chief Justice Roberts is directly linking his opinion with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case of 1954.

That was when you could get the Supreme Court to vote 9-0 against racism.  Today you can only get a 5-4 vote to stop discrimination on the basis of race. 

That, I suppose, is progress.

"An Incredible Week"

Let’s just pause for a moment, because for conservatives this week has been Mae-Westian, as in “fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”  It’s been up and down all week.

Some people are getting triumphal, as in Mark Tapscott’s:

First, there was the success of the Right side of the Blogosphere in stopping the attempted revival of the Bush/Kennedy/McCain immigration reform bill in the Senate.

I think that we need to temper the enthusiasm.  The Washington Times’s  Stephen Dinan has it about right.  It was going to be “a defining moment for the old guard.”

Instead, the young guns &mdash, a small, wily group of junior Republican senators, most of them with less than a full term in the upper chamber — sent the bill into a tailspin, tying Democratic leaders into legislative knots and earning enough opposition among senators to block the Senate bill, culminating in yesterday’s vote to kill the measure.

It was the young guns, assisted by the firepower of the conservative New Media, that got the job done. But we can agree with Mark Tapscott to this extent:

Nobody can legitimately doubt now that conservative New Media has genuine political power to shape American public policy.

But let us not get above ourselves.  The New Media is a blunt instrument, like a great army.  The key is to appoint generals who can use the army to fight a great battle and win. 

That is what politicians are for.  When they are not deep in the trough giving out pork to their clients.

After this week, politicians all over America will be getting the message on immigration.

Here is the defining issue for me from Stephen Dinan:

"Those of us who have been on the campaign trail in the last couple of years have had to talk about immigration reform and we’ve campaigned — [Sen. David] Vitter made campaign promises, I made campaign promises — we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship," said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican.

That checks with the results of the cloture vote taken on Thursday, reported here.  The biggest group of Democrats who voted to kill the bill were in Class I, elected to the Senate last November.

No doubt they, like Jim DeMint, were out on the campaign trail talking about immigration reform and making promises.  So they have a pretty good idea about the sentiments out there on immigration.

And I’ll bet that you’d find that about 80 percent of the American people would agree with the notion that “we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship.”

And then there was the Supreme Court’s decision on race and schools.  What a concept from Chief Justice Roberts:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race[.]

Do tell.

Dems Who Voted Against Cloture

The Senate immigration bill didn’t just fail by a whisker.  The vote for cloture on S.1639 went down 46-53. Check the U.S. Senate website.

What’s interesting is the 16 Democrats who voted with the 53 of Senators, Democrat and Republican, to deny cloture.  Let us get this clear. There were 16 Democrats and 37 Republicans who voted against the comprehensive immigration bill brought to the Senate by President Bush, Senator Kennedy, and Senator McCain. Here is the list of the Democratic Senators voting against cloture. Alongside each senator is their class and the most recent year that they faced or will face the voters:

Senator Class Closest election Baucus (D-MT) II 2008 Bayh (D-IN) III 2010 Bingaman (D-NM) I 2006 Brown (D-OH) I 2006 Byrd (D-WV) I 2006 Dorgan (D-ND) III 2010 Harkin (D-IA) II 2008 Landrieu (D-LA) II 2008 McCaskill (D-MO) I 2006 Nelson (D-NE) I 2006 Pryor (D-AR) III 2010 Rockefeller (D-WV) II 2008 Sanders (I-VT) III 2010 Stabenow (D-MI) I 2006 Tester (D-MT) I 2006 Webb (D-VA) I 2006

Notice anything?  The biggest group of senators was recently elected in 2006.  What’s to bet that they said they would stand strong on protecting the border, and they don’t want to be on the wrong side of that promise.

The next biggest group is up for reelection in 2008.  What’s to bet that they want to be on the right side of the voters next year.

The smallest group is up for reelection in 2010.  They are the folks who are the least concerned with what the voters think right now.

This immigration thing isn’t all that hard.

1. Enforce the law
2. Build the fence
3. Clear the backlogs
4. Process the legal immigrants
5. Then... amnesty the illegals

What’s not to like about that?

After Blair: It's the Culture, Stupid

We know now that the Third Way was the left’s backhanded admission that the Reagan and Thatcher years marked the end of left-wing economics.  No longer could center-left politicians propose to direct the economy from the top, backing winners and assuming that only an activist government could keep the economy from running off the rails.

In fact the opposite is true.  The government’s job (and it is a vital one) is to set the legal framework for enterprise and then get out of the way.

The years that led up to the Reagan/Thatcher revolution were the years of the Broken Economy, Andrew Neil writes.  People thought that the healthy growth of the nineteenth century and the immediate post-war era was a thing of the past.  We had entered an era of limits,they realized, and the job of the elite was to manage decline.

Baloney, said Reagan and Thatcher, using the ideas of Hayek, Friedman, and Mises.  The only area of limits, they argued, was the limited grasp of economics and capitalism on the part of the academic middle class.  And then they took power and showed ’em.

But now the center-left gets it, or at least the political cadre does. Or at least it sorta does.

So we won that one.

As a result the era of the Broken Economy is over.  Now we have entered the era of the Broken Society.  As Neil writes:

During the Blair—Brown decade social concerns -- what kind of society we have become -- have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

Now, as then, Britain is in a bigger mess than the United States, and the reason is the same now as it was then.  The British people are more in thrall to the power and the influence of the academic middle class than Americans in the United States.

But the problem, the breakdown of the family and of society at the bottom and the formation of a feral underclass, is the same.  And it issues from the same cause.

The cause is the progressive welfare state.  Today the government showers money upon the non-working poor.  It rewards poor people for failure and it utterly marginalizes lower-class males.

As Patricia Morgan argues,

[T]he state, by providing extensive welfare provision, by financing child-care services and by taxing families on an ever-greater proportion of their income, provides strong incentives for families to break up rather than to hold together, and to form family relationships that are hidden from the authorities. Government policy has crowded out voluntary welfare within families and caused otherwise law-abiding people to commit fraud on a very extensive scale.

The fact is, she argues, women cannot afford to bring up children on their own. Nearly all women need help in time or money, or both.  A mother can either get help from the father, civilizing him into a provider and a role model for her children. Or, in today’s society, she can get it from the state.

The result, we know, is the Broken Society of feral children and single parenthood that infects our inner cities and is always threatening to break out into the general middle class.

Today in Britain, conservative commentators are worried that Gordon Brown has the tactical advantage.  They worry that David Cameron’s conservatives are concentrating too much on wooing upper-middle-class voters with talk about work-life balance and global warming.  They warn that Cameron is creating an opening for Brown to pose as the friend of the middle class who will mend the Broken Society that threatens peoples’ children with street violence and a lousy education.

Maybe.  But the center left still does not understand that it is the very structure, the very nature of the programs that they have brought into government that are the cause of the problem. 

And anyway, if Brown actually fixed the Broken Society, that would realize the vision of the Conservatives.

But is it not likely the Gordon Brown in Britain, or Hillary Clinton in the United States will solve the problem of the underclass or of lousy schools. 

To solve the problem of the Broken Society will require that the left gives up its patronage and its power: over the poor, over education, over health care.  Before it does that it will try every top-down government program in the world.

But the conservative answer will remain the same.  There is such a thing as society; it is just not the same as the state.  The health of a society  comes from the strength of its little platoons, the civic society of voluntary give and take, of charitable giving.  It is precisely what big government programs crowd out.

And I don’t know a single liberal friend who gets it.

Can Government Deliver on Education?

Tony Blair, everyone’s darling, has resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and now Gordon Brown has been appointed by the Queen to serve as his successor.  Everyone is full of advice, of course.

Anatole Kaletsky advises him to concentrate on education. 

If Mr Brown really wants to show that he can think afresh and that he is in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters he should recognise that the people of Britain are far more worried about the daily disappointments of their children’s education — not to mention the physical threats they face on the way to school, as they run the gauntlet of outlaw gangs increasingly addicted to violence

Britain is the home of the “bog-standard” comprehensive school.  If you don’t know exactly what that means, you can still guess. 

But can a centralized government education system ever deliver?  Well, we shall see.

The welfare state is something like 100 years old and in Britain and the United States centralized government education is about 150 years old.  And it shows.

The great promise made by the academic middle class a century ago for its education and welfare state project was that they, the educated and the experts, could make government actually do something to help people.  Don’t trust those dangerous businessmen, they said.  They don’t care about people.  But we do.  Trust us, they said.

And the academic middle class believed themselves.  Yes, they could make government into something it had never been. They could make it deliver.

Let’s face it.  Government is really a patronage and clientage game, always was, always will be.  As long as politicians stick to rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies they know what they are doing.  But when it comes to actually running something, like education or welfare, or immigration (and yes, immigration is just as screwed up in Britain as it is here) government seems to be a complete disaster.

Therein lies our opportunity.  We conservatives should recognize that there is a real possibility that we are entering an end game on government education.

You can put all the funding you like into education (and we have) but it really doesn’t matter.  That’s because it really doesn’t matter if the principals and the teachers in a government education system do their job.  They still get paid and the politicians pay more attention to them than to the voters.

Expect the concept of government education to be tested to destruction in the next twenty years.  Then we should be ready to grab the chance to do some real reform. 

Because we conservatives care about kids.

After all, there’s a difference between conservatives and liberals.  Conservatives have more children.

Flip-flopping: Do We Care?

Apparently there’s a lot of heat about flip-floppers in the Republican presidential race.

Particularly over Mitt Romney.  And people like eyeon08 don’t like it.

But Patrick Ruffini calls for a reality check.  Of course the candidates are flip-flopping.  They are trying to win the support of the Republican base in 2007.  So they are trimming their sails to catch the wind. 

But don’t worry too much that they’ll tack back.

After his public conversion and being pilloried as a flip-flopper, do you seriously think that Romney can walk back his pro-life position without destroying himself? Does anyone actually think that Romney would be so stupid as to advance public funding of elections after running as the enemy of BCRA [McCain Feingold campaign reform]? If Romney runs and manages to get elected as a conservative, why would he revert to a non-winning position?

Ruffini takes a look at recent presidents and finds that they governed pretty well as they campaigned.

Slippery as he was, Clinton ran as a Third Way Democrat and governed that way. Bush the Father was the mixed bag we expected him to be. Once he became pro-life, he stayed pro-life. But no one expected him to be Ronald Reagan ("kinder, gentler nation") and he wasn’t. And what you saw was what you got in Ronaldus Maximus.

So let’s relax and sit back and let the politicians continue with their sweet talking.  Will we or won’t we?  Well, honey, Ah’m not sure that Ah’ve even thought about that.

The Fix Is In

As the Senate voted 64-35 to take up the immigration bill, we the unwashed have to feel that there is something going on that we aren’t a party to.

OK, so Julie Hirschfeld Davis says that the victory of the president and the bill’s backers was a sometime thing.

Their victory was fleeting, though, giving way just hours later to stalling tactics by GOP foes. Conservatives succeeded in delaying until Wednesday consideration of a package of amendments designed to pave the way for a final vote on the bill.

But is all this real, or just kabuki, as Michelle Malkin writes?

More and more, I am beginning to think that the events of Hurricane Katrina are representative.  They represented a failure of government at all levels: federal, state, and local.

We can expect more such failures.  Government is never very good at anything, but the more that it sucks into its orbit the worse that it does.

And today we have a government that just doesn’t care.

This immigration bill is not about doing anything or solving anything.  It is about “doing something,” and that is different.  It won’t really secure the border because that is too hard and governments don’t do hard things.  It won’t solve the illegal immigration problem because the lure of the US economy is just too great. 

The American people will pay for this, of course, good and hard.  And the suits will just ride off into the sunset.