That Justice Ginsburg’s dissent in Ricci managed to get four out of nine votes points out major flaws in both American intellectual life and in the Supreme Court.

Some of what’s wrong with the Supreme Court is structural. Justices used to drop dead of heart attacks before they aged too far into mental decline. By this point, lots of people have heard about the best solution: replace lifetime tenure with single 18 year terms, with the President getting to select two justices for each election he wins.

What nobody knows, as far as I know, is how to get there from here. How do you work out which Justice gets forced into retirement first to make room for new blood? This could be very hard to work out in a bipartisan manner. (If you have any technical suggestions for how the transition should be managed, please put them in the comments.)

Now that the Democrats have complete power in Congress and the White House, however, they can just go ahead an make this reform on their own. I can’t imagine they would, though.

A more subtle defect in the Supreme Court is the lack of adult supervision. We still have the obsolete system of ailing Justices such as 76-year-old Ginsburg (cancer surgery in February) and extremely elderly Justices (Stevens is a ridiculous 89) being assisted solely by clerks who are largely in their late 20s: the senile being aided by the puerile.

Consider the futility of relying on clerks for a complicated topic like testing in the Ricci case. Do you think Justice Ginsburg’s clerks were told the truth about testing when they were in law school? I don’t care what your LSAT score is, to understand the reality behind Ricci, you have to do a lot of self-education and you have to learn about how the world really works. And that takes time. I moved to Chicago at age 23, and from then on I heard a lot about fireman and policeman testing, but it took me until my mid-30s to develop a mature understanding of the subject that wasn’t just based on idealistic assumptions about how things should work. And I’m still figuring out things about fireman testing that make me say, like Huxley reading The Origin of Species, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that.”

Occasionally, we see Justices instead hiring grown-up clerks with some experience of life (Justice Thomas recently hired a clerk who had already made partner at her law firm), but the salary is only around $65,000. (Supreme Court clerks get big signing bonuses from the private law firms that hire them when their year is up, but still …)

What we need is a modest budget (say, $3 million per year across the 9 Justices) to allow each member of the Supreme Court to hire a mature Chief of Staff to manage the clerks, with, say, a three year term.

On Sunday I considered the curious spectacle of Senator Charles Schumer of New York talking tough about illegal immigration, and even denouncing MSM efforts to euphemize it: Schumer makes Nice: Meaning What?.

I concluded that, especially considering Schumer’s mendacious performance at the Hate Crime Bill hearings late last week the man continues to be a deadly threat to the historic American Nation: and that this wheedling reflects the fact that the Treason Lobby apparently lacks the votes at present to ram through Amnesty.

Thanks DK for pointing out that our old friend Steven Steinlight has also contemplated the “new” Schumer, opting for a Western motif:
The New Sheriff in Town Center for Immigration Studies June 25 2009

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, is point man for President Obama on immigration, riding herd on the Big Push for “comprehensive immigration reform.”… In an embarrassingly transparent effort to pander to his opponents – those of us that believe in the rule of law, giving preference to Americans in the job market as the nation hemorrhages 400,000 jobs a month, and such unfashionable things as national borders – Chuck is doing a Buffalo Bill rodeo show demonstrating his commitment to toughness in general and tough law enforcement in particular. He wants to be seen as the new sheriff in town, and as one tough hombre.

Steinlight isn’t buying:

But Sheriff Chuck: What about past illegal immigration (to the tune of 11-12 million, with some 7 million holding jobs unemployed Americans could use) or present illegal immigration? You and I both know the entire purpose of this Buffalo Bill show about future enforcement is gulling us into legalizing them.

So Steinlight has a good idea:

I don’t know if Chuck’s new diction …is the product of a mini-course on method acting (if you want to persuade those rednecks, act like one!) or whether he’s infiltrating our ranks by cleverly aping our speech patterns. Am I the only one who thinks it might be a good idea to take this guy to the Lieutenant, in the tradition of World War II movies, and test him by asking if he knows who won the 1939 World Series?

Nice job, Steven Steinlight. (His July 1st blog Siren Songs and the New York Times is also amusing: reporting the fact that the Times was the only MSM outlet to report last week’s White House Immigration meeting as extremely encouraging for the Treason Lobby:

Its wildly optimistic assessment of what transpired at the June 25 White House meeting …is not so much contrarian as it is weirdly unique…are we dealing with a delusional mentality or a Machiavellian one?… publishing something so palpably self-deluding simultaneously suggests the sirens’ transformational work is well-advanced.)

Look, Sailer, why do you keep saying that we should keep in mind that Pearl Harbor got us into World War II? Lots of other countries got into World War II without Pearl Harbor happening to them. And even if Pearl Harbor never happened to us, we probably would have gotten into World War II eventually anyway. Therefore, you should shut up, and nobody should ever mention Pearl Harbor again.

Or:

C’mon, Sailer, why are you so evil as to mention the Wall Street Crash of 1929 when discussing the Great Depression? Lots of other countries were involved in the Great Depression. And even if there hadn’t been a Wall Street Crash in 1929, the U.S. probably would have suffered in a Great Depression sooner or later anyway. Thus, logically, anybody who mentions the Wall Street Crash of 1929 should be hounded out of polite society.

Dr. Norm Matloff writes

BusinessWeek was originally going to do a piece on the various players in the H-1B reform movement, but decided to focus on me instead. The article is here: An Academic’s Labor Helps Fight H-1B Visas | Norm Matloff, a computer science professor with a Chinese-born wife, says the U.S. skilled-immigrant visa system exploits workers everywhere, By Moira Herbst, BusinessWeek, June 28, 2009.

Of course, I do have some comments.

As are most advocates on immigration issues, Matloff is a controversial figure. He’s admired by supporters–including activists on H-1B visa issues–but criticized by other academics who don’t share his views and who chafe at his often-abrasive rhetorical style. Critics also suggest there could be a xenophobic undertone implicit in his critique of the H-1B visa program. Matloff posts opinionated blog entries on the Web site of Numbers USA, a group calling for lower levels of immigration. His writing prompted one tech worker, Arthur Hu of Bothell, Wash., to create a Web page criticizing Matloff, whom he calls the “Hatchet Man of Asian Immigration.”

Some of the reader comments on this article take BusinessWeek to task for giving a voice to “Kevin, the IT Grunt,” who is obviously some fringe guy on the H-1B issue. I might say the same for Arthur Hu. With hundreds of millions of Web users, there is likely to be one that rants against any topic under the sun, and it happens that one of Arthur’s topics is me. That’s fine, but some readers of the article may mistakenly take this to mean that Asian-Americans agree with him on the H-1B issue, which they don’t. Every time I’m invited to speak to an Asian-American conference, such as the Asian Pacific American Conference on Law and Public Policy at Harvard and the Asian-American Out of the Silence Conference at Stanford, I get solid support from the audiences. This should be no surprise–with so many Asian-Americans in engineering, H-1B puts their jobs at risk. My support from my own students, two-thirds of whom are Asian-American (not Asian foreign students), is also quite strong. I’m proud to say that they’ve nominated me for various teaching awards, some of which I’ve been fortunate to win.

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Last Thursday, as I noted in A-G Holder: No Hate Crime Protection for White Christians or Servicemen Attorney General Eric Holder made some potentially disastrous concessions while testifying for S.909, the Hate Crime Bill.

The invaluable Rev. Ted Pike has now produced a ten minute video analyzing these blunders, remarking

In Senate testimony last week, Holder attempted to justify passage of the Matthew Shephard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Instead, he worked against it. Holder emphatically said most Americans are not given equal protection with homosexuals (and homosexual pedophiles) by the hate bill. Holder also presented no evidence that states are failing to prosecute hate crimes and need big government to get involved!… As we have seen many times over the last 11 years, God causes hate bill supporters in Congress to bungle, especially when it seems certain the hate bill is about to pass

The video is on his site here. (Also note that you can sign up for email on this legislation at the top of his site.)

Just how dangerous is this situation is well illustrated by the explosion of furious rage on this Canadian blog. The TV signal from Buffalo has the temerity to reach across the border into Hate Speech-policed Canada, as the result of which this woman found herself watching to one of the Silencing The Christians series which says it

…takes you on a journey across the country to meet citizens who have been arrested for speaking out at a public rally, students who are being forced to attend classes that require them to recite verses from the Koran and to stage their own jihad and activists pushing social tolerance to such an extreme that the Bible itself is being labeled “hate speech.”

Her rage knows no bounds

this filth was, in fact, ‘paid programming’…they promote the usual hate-filled, homophobic, ‘gay agenda’ screed, but they go a step further - blaming Pride events and gay rights demonstrations for incidents of violence against Christians….I couldn’t get through the whole thing without throwing up.

But other news from America cheered her:

Happily, it seems I wasn’t the only one repulsed by this crap:
‘Silencing Christians’ paid program draws protest calls, e-mails

TAMPA - A flood of telephone calls and e-mails cascaded into WFLA News Channel 8 on Saturday afternoon and night over the airing of “Silencing Christians…
Stratton Pollitzer, deputy director of Equality Florida, has seen the program and said the message was clearly hate speech.
“I think this program is a piece of homophobic propaganda and it has no place on a major network like NBC,” he said just after 7 p.m., as the program was airing.

(Equality Florida is a Homosexual pressure group. Protest to Stratton Pollitzer)

As matters stand at present, Silencing The Christians probably could not be aired by a Canadian broadcaster. There are plenty of Americans who would, shamefully, like to be able have that power here. As I said last Friday of the Senate Hearings (webcast here on right)

Anyone who reviews the comments and deliveries by Democratic Senators Feinstein(CA), Cardin (MD)and Schumer (NY)(c. 53 minutes, 79 minutes and 89 minutes) cannot doubt that, for them, this legislation is a stepping stone to criminalizing political opinion. Feinstein actually cited the immigration debate as necessitating passing the Bill!

This is a desperately serious matter. With a politicized judiciary, who knows where it will go?The Establishment “Conservative” media and, of course, the Plutocrats of the Immigration reform movement (NumbersUSA, FAIR, and CIS) remain silent.

The Ricci reactions have made more evident that liberals are peeved that anybody takes seriously all that language in the civil rights laws about equal protection. In the liberal mind, the specific wording of the laws was just a sham to get them approved. The laws are really simply about “Who? Whom?” Thus, the idea of civil rights laws being used by the Supreme Court to protect the civil rights of white guys like Frank Ricci is an affront against all that is holy (i.e., civil rights laws).

Consider this entry, From Washingto to New Haven, the Rules They Are A-Changin’, on the Washington Post’s XX blog by Nicole Allan, the Slate intern/Yalie who coauthored with Emily Bazelon that long article in Slate entitled The Ladder.

The plaintiffs in the hotly contested affirmative action case Ricci v. DeStefano stood out among the crowd outside New Haven City Hall today. They wore dress blues and wide smiles or poker-faces that occasionally cracked into grins. They were, but for one, white, and they were celebrating their win in a 5-4 decision handed down by a sharply divided Supreme Court.

Mingling on the sidewalk before the conference, plaintiff Frank Ricci posed for photos with his family. Ben Vargas, the one Hispanic amongst the 18 plaintiffs, grinned beneath his sunglasses and crisp peaked cap. Attorney Karen Torre, surrounded by her clients and jokingly donning one of their caps, delivered a statement in boldly Obama-esque fashion: “We had the audacity of hope—that some court at some point would enforce the letter and spirit of the civil rights laws, accord to firefighters the recognition and respect that they deserve, and reject attempts to lower professional standards of competence for the sake of identity politics.”

It took some audacity indeed to invoke Obama in support of a lawsuit that called into question the country’s most significant civil rights statutes. …

I kept thinking about the black firefighters I’ve been talking to over the past few weeks, none of whom I saw at the press conference. After decades and decades of lawsuits founded upon civil rights statutes, they have started to get ahead. Blacks and Hispanics, who make up about 60 percent of New Haven’s population, are now more or less proportionally represented within the rank and file of the city’s fire department. But their efforts to penetrate the upper management ranks have been less fruitful. Currently, only one of the city’s 21 fire captains is African-American. The anti-discrimination laws that once won them spots in New Haven’s firehouses are now the laws that have planted the smiles on Frank Ricci’s and Ben Vargas’ faces. There go the rules, changing again.

As Strobe Talbott wrote in Time in 1982:

Lenin, with his knack for hortatory pungency, reduced the past and future alike to two pronouns and a question mark: “Who—whom?” No verb was necessary. It meant who would prevail over whom? And the question was largely rhetorical, implying that the answer was never in doubt. Lenin and those who followed him would prevail over “them,” whoever they were.

The funny thing is how modern American liberals consider their Who? Whom? mindset not cynical, but sacred.

Michael Barone has a good column today on Ricci, Firefighter case shows seamy side of racial politics, which is clearly drawn from my stuff. Considering all the mean things I said about him a number of years ago, it’s big of him to be a reader.

From the comments section of my recent post offering a reading list to bring Barry Ritholtz, blogger (The Big Picture) and author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, up to speed on how “Diversity was a major factor in the mortgage meltdown:”

Ritholtz said…My bad — I guess I am not clearly defining what I mean by “Data”.

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Just got my Newsweek and on page 12 is a short piece entitled, “Run to Mexico?” by Alexis Okeowo. It reads in part:

A growing number of international runners are leaving their homelands for an unlikely destination: Mexico. . . .Though the U.S. still boasts more foreign transplants, Mexico’s high altitude, easier visa process and cheaper cost of living are luring some of the sport’s leading figures, including Kenyans Isaac Kimaiyo, Lazarus Nyakeraka and Patrick Nthiwa. Mexico also taxes race winnings by 14 percent, compared with 33 percent in the U.S., which Nyakeraka says makes it a “better option” for runners who send race earnings to family back home.

But there’s an aspect of Mexican culture that doesn’t get reported much:

Yet even as Mexico tries to package itself as a sporting suburb of the U.S., it’s facing one major drawback: racism. African runners complain of constant taunts from fans upset that the newcomers are beating out homegrown favorites. Coaches have complained to officials, to no avail. Last year Kenyan runners won 85 percent of the country’s domestic long-distance races. But organizers have started limiting the number of prizes that Africans can win, regardless of how well they place. In races abroad, all of Mexico’s runners are equal, but at home, it seems that some are more equal than others.

I was pretty surprised that this story saw the light of day, especially in Newsweek.

Half Sigma offers a lucid review of Justice Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion in Ricci:

Instead of rejoicing over the outcome of the Ricci case, the fact that four justices signed on to GInsubrg’s dissenting opinion fills me with both anger at liberals and dread that the liberal viewpoint will eventually triumph over reason and sensibility. Ginsburg writes, “The Court’s order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power.” I translate this as meaning that Obama is going to be president for another seven and a half years, so the liberals are only one heart attack away from reversing Ricci and imposing their will. It’s an unusually unsportsmanlike statement and demonstrates a disrespect for stare decisis that’s unbecoming of a Supreme Court justice. When something like that shows up in a dissent, it indicates that the decision created a great deal of ill will.

As I explained in my previous two posts analyzing the Ricci decision, the statutes passed by Congress are racially neutral and state that it’s unlawful “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” 42 USC §2000e–2(a)(1). It doesn’t say that it’s only unlawful to discriminate against minority races. The Supreme Court has continuously paid at least lip service to the concept of race neutrality, and theoretically there are only a few limited circumstances in which it’s legal to discriminate against whites in order to favor minority races. One such circumstance is in education where the need for “diversity” is such a compelling interest that it allows colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions See Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).

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