The recent ruling on racism which you cited was a proper response to the times in which we live. It does not allow racism or discrimination; it gets the government out of the business of favoring certain groups as a remedy for past and existing racism and discrimination. Affirmative action is as example of benign, well meaning discrimination on behalf of the government to undo malicious discrimination. It's time has come and gone. You don't need to foaming at the mouth right winger to believe that government's address of discrimination should not also, in itself, discriminate.

Hey. Is is what would be considered a "conservative" judgement? Sure. Is it some scary take over of the US Constitution by right wing ideologues? Hardly.

You went a long way to suggest that abortion rights are under fire, and fell further short of suggesting that McCain would stuff a right winger on the Court if he had a chance. He's a conservative. He will promote conservative ideas, of course. But is famous for pissing off the far right wing, especially on social issues grounds. I don't see him pandering to the hard right once he gets in.

No, the USSC has not lurched hard to the right as we are always, forever, warned about. Thank God, it seems that all justices, even the "right wingers" and "left wingers" are pretty steady and and solid constitutional scholars, not ideologues with an axe to grind.

I could agree with you regarding John Roberts. I'm not so sure about Alito.

@ EarlyBird:

"I do not believe he would attempt to do anything to overturn Roe v. Wade, or put in a hard right winder into the Court should an opening occur during his presidency."

Your belief in John McCain's intentions are misplaced:

<link> <link>

When McCain says unequivocally that Roe vs Wade should be overturned, I'm inclined to take him at his word.

Obama 08!

If you really think that Obama would make a bad President, regardless of what Dean, Hillary or any of the other "let's all pull together" crowd might say if he is the candidate, you must be true to your belief and try to stop it from happening. Given that McCain is a moderate Republican, I believe that Obama (with all of his faults) would be worse for the country than McCain. The choice is easy! Simply divorce youself from party labels. Think for youself!

If you really think that Obama would make a bad President, regardless of what Dean, Hillary or any of the other "let's all pull together" crowd might say if he is the candidate, you must be true to your belief and try to stop it from happening. Given that McCain is a moderate Republican, I believe that Obama (with all of his faults) would be worse for the country than McCain. The choice is easy! Simply divorce yourself from party labels.

"Given that McCain is a moderate Republican..."

It is not a given that McCain is a moderate Republican. On most issues he toes the Republican party line as laid down by George W. Bush. McCain represents Bush's third term.

Obama 08!

Yep, I totally agree with 'think for yourself'! Pat Buchanan announced on CNBC one evening that if "you think George Bush is hawkish, you haven't seen anything yet. John McCain makes Bush look like Gandhi! " Last time I looked, Buchanan's party label has never been close to Dem. If you believe that Bush3-McCain policies of ongoing indefinite war vs Islamoterrorism IS the defining issue of the 21st century, how can you vote otherwise? Do keep in mind that it threatens to bankrupt us financially(as befell the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) in addition to continuing to erode our moral leadership authority across the globe, while giving jihadists (crazy though you think they may be) even more 'hateful' evidence of our "evil infidel" intent. I'll vote Dem, but not because of the label, thanks:)

I do support your right to choose, but could you please get McCain to at least raise some tax $ from corps and most wealthy individs to pay for 'his war' which a majority of Americans are against? And while you're at it, can't we get him to come 100% out against torture and unlimited Presidential authority to: a) eavesdrop on both your and my phone conversations and emails b) redefine the Geneva convention as he sees fit, including possibly declaring either you or I an "enemy combatant" and throwing us in jail or Guantanamo or worse without even the right to a lawyer? and,,,,, It's fun to actually talk about issues instead of rhetoric, thx:)

Thoughtful post, I manifestly "am not," as you say. You are wise to bring the Republican Party into the discussion. It also voided votes--if only by half. Its officials may be politically more astute, but they are not characteristically better democratic citizens. Voiding is voiding. It should never happen--not whole, not in part. The political system should be organized around the fundamental of counting votes, rather than having vote counting as an expendable appurtenance subject to the discretion of a party committee.

I think my point is wholly valid. You say

"Where you get a little crazy, Issywise (no heeznot), is in comparing this machinery to Stalin and Iran or Jim Crow."

To which I respond, of course, there are apparently distinguishing differences in the motivations behind communism, Jim Crowism and what has happened in this years primaries. Communism is totalitarian and contemptuous of democracy. Jim Crow was fundamentally based on race hate.

But the distinguishing differences aren't so relevant in the effect they have on votes on election day. Both the communists and the Jim Crowers voided votes for the same purpose as the parties had this year---maintaining their power. If the votes wouldn't have threatened their power, all three groups would have counted the votes. After reforms imposed democracy on Soviet communists and American Southern racists, both showed the capacity to function within a democratic system and still pursue their hateful purposes.

In all three cases--communism, Jim Crow and American political parties in 2008, at the moment individual voters were told they didn't matter, it was done in service to the preservation of power held by officials who didn't want power to flow to voters. In the case of the parties this year, the contested power was the power to set the schedules for presidential primaries.

Sure there is a difference between race hate, totalitarian communism and voiding votes just to enforce a party's power to decide what primaries will matter, but not so much a difference: In all three cases, party officials enforce their will by denying the right of voters to participate in decision-making. The evil of vote voiding is the same in every case.

You ask, ..how do you maintain the "retail" style of politics that brings candidates to states like NH and Iowa and South Carolina, while ensuring that all votes matter?"

The parties don't. They most certainly don't void votes to enforce their preference for any state's ascendancy over others.

The system of the parties deciding which primary voters will be most important is dead. It died when Floridians and Michiganians noticed that the parties' decisions had left them not mattering for a third of a century. That's too long for such a system to be defensible. Again, 49 year old Floridians have never cast a primary vote that mattered. George Wallace was on the ballot the last time a Florida voter mattered in a presidential primary. Is that justified by something that Iowa and New Hampshire have?

Primaries are American elections, conducted under law-- thousand of laws that ensure against corruption. They cost tens of millions of tax dollar to run. The states operate them with the help of tens of thousands of volunteers. The parties benefit by free publicity and by having the cloak of democratic credibility placed on them by all this public effort.

Americans perform a secular sacrament when they cast their vote--reassuring themselves that in America the individual matters and any one of us has the power to change the world for the better. These are core American values that we pound into our children's attitudes.

The preference for ad infinitum special importance for New Hampshire and Iowa, enforced by the disenfranchisements of millions of other voters, flies the face of these core American democratic values. We are all supposed to count and count equally.

Americans won't stand in line not mattering indefinitely. The day has come where that expectation in primary scheduling cannot be continued.

As a matter of law, state legislatures control when elections will be held in their states. The parties can't change that. Michigan's and Florida's voters won't be any more willing to follow party orders in 2012 than they were this year. If the DNC had thought it through, they'd have figured out that "punishment" would ensure defiance from a whole states full of disenfranchised Americans. We're not sheep and they are most certainly not politically astute.

Should the parties disenfranchise (partial or whole) all the citizens in those states again in 2012? What do you think the chances are that other states will join the "rush to the front" in 2012?

If we are going to have a rational system (and we most certainly haven't had one yet) Congress is going to have to act to organize the primaries or the state governments themselves--accountable to voters as they are, unlike the party committees, will have to collectively displace the party committees from the scheduling. The party committees have proven themselves too incompetent and too devoid of basic American values to be left in control.

You likely fear an ad hoc jumble. I think that would be an improvement over vote voiding.

Congress and the state legislatures should also enact laws extending one-person one-vote to primaries. Party operatives should deprived of their vote altering playgrounds.

I don't know that we loose a thing by displacing Iowa and New Hampshire from their "traditional" perches. You assume the smallness of those chosen states serves to produce better national candidate selections. It is just as reasonable to assume that their homogeneity and their very atypical smallness obstructs the selection of the best possible national candidates. A preference for the few deciding for the many--especially when elections are involved, should have to overcome a presumption against it.

Personally, I'm tired of hearing the voters in New Hampshire and Iowa crow about how important they are. Their enhanced importance is paid for by other voters who don't matter at all. I have nothing but contempt for the voters in New Hampshire and Iowa who celebrated the disenfranchisements of Michigan and Florida voters. They were celebrating the protection of their own primacy through the disenfranchisement of other Americans. They are scum. They are akin to the Soviet party members who supported Stalin. They are the moral equivalent of the"well-meaning" Whites of the Jim Crow South who didn't wish evil on "darkies," but knew it was best for the "darkies" that they didn't matter on election day.

So your distinction seems not to be such as big a difference after all. I don't think I went a "little crazy" at all. I think I got it exactly right--uncomfortably right: vote voiding is the reality that should be focused on. Focusing on the assumed motives of the voiders doesn't really change the reality.

"One of my (many) character flaws is uncontrollable sneering when people compare even our goofiest voting practices with third-world snotlockers."

Yeah, there is nothing like a Arab national lecturing an American on the failures of our democratic system--this seems to be a fate assigned to me of late.

I went to college in the late '60s. For four years, I held my tongue while a overwhelming majority of my colleagues--at least those who talked about such things, self-righteously lectured me on the failings of American democracy. I didn't open my mouth for fear of what I'd let loose.

Now, through some kind of Greek play interaction of the gods, I write posts like those above. I've become what I hated most forty years ago.

Of course, all those Utopians who used lecture me forty years ago are now appliance corporation executives and investment bankers, so maybe I'm caught in some kind of natural balancing conducted by the cosmic ether itself.

Somehow it is reassuring to me that, at the time Lake Erie caught fire and burned for three days near Cleveland during my college years, scientist thought it would take millenia for the lake to recover as much as it actually did in about ten years when the pollution sill cocks were shut off.

EarlyBird:

We'll have to disagree about disabling the government's ability to remedy the consequences of past government racism by mandated ignorance of the race of victims when fashioning remedies.

It is a self-blinding that we don't do with any other victims. It is racial discrimination itself--dressed with the reassuring deceptive label "color blindness." If a rule only applies to people of one color, it doesn't matter what you call it, it is racial discrimination.

Nobody else gets the treatment, only Black victims of discrimination get that treatment. It guts Brown.

What is special about racial discrimination that remedies to it should be tied down in ways we don't apply to any other kind of discrimination?

The Robert's doctrine is an irrational disengagement of the power of human reason: Where else do we say, "Yes, there is a problem, but we're going to close our eyes before we fashion a solution?"

What about "our times" justifies this new discrimination to preserve the effects of old discrimination?

You say the Roberts doctrine "...gets the government out of the business of favoring certain groups as a remedy for past and existing racism and discrimination." But the process of favoring and disfavoring certain groups is on-going today. It is ongoing today. It is ongoing outside the small sphere of of remedies and courts.

Do you doubt as a matter of fact that the consequences of racist government policy continue to exist today? Do you think the consequences of racial discrimination in the past are in the past, so that no American is disadvantaged today because of his race?

Why should the Constitution deny the vital information of the relevant characteristic of the victim of the process of fashioning any remedies? Why should the Constitution do this only in the case of the victims of racial discrimination.

The information is denied by the Constitution no where else. What is it about "our times" that makes Constitutionally mandated ignorance of a victim's race necessary when remedying racial discrimination?

Race and only race during remedy efforts is so affected by the Constitution.

I went to a post graduate school where the application to admission rate was something like 10 or 20 to 1. A small group of spaces were set aside for Americans who'd been educated in poor public schools because of the national tradition of racism. It wasn't their fault that they'd been born where they were born to the families they'd been born into. They had been born with all the rights and hopes of all other Americans and yet were condemned by the circumstances of their race and birth to disadvantages that courts had found, before they were born, were the result of racist government behavior.

They'd gone to their poor public schools and pushed on to college. They'd shown enough promise in college that they were given the opportunity to enroll in the post graduate school even though their pure performance measures were not up to the 1 in 10 or 20 standards applied to the rest of us.

At first, they stuck out like a sore thumb. They didn't know some very basic things all the rest of us had picked in primary or secondary school. They'd had crappy schools. But, by half way through the program--a year and a half, they'd completely caught up and were indistinguishable by all measures from the rest of us. They were, in fact, qualified to be with us and their being with us enhanced our educational experience. It also offered promise to kids being born today in the still unremedied circumstances my colleagues had been born in.

By the "color blind" only during the remedy process, while the still function harming process was anything but "color blind in its creation, these Americans would have been denied good primary and secondary educations and despite their promising performance in college, denied admittance to post graduate studies that they were vested by God with the means to master as well as any of us more advantaged enrollees.

You call that justice "in our times?"

What Roberts is saying is that after the harm has been done, after you've come to the government for a remedy, the government--as a matter of new constitutional mandate, must not consider your skin color in fashioning a remedy though it was your skin color that provoked the illegal discrimination in the first place. The government can consider anything else about a victim when fashioning a remedy, but not his skin color.

What makes you think "our times" make this new racial discrimination an appropriate government response to existing racial discrimination? Closing our eyes is never a good idea. Ignoring a problem is also never a good idea--including during "our times."

We do disagree.

Having said all of this, let me anticipate an argument: To say something is not an appropriate constitutional doctrine is not to say that every effort made to remedy a problem is a good idea. The legislatures are supposed to try and modify solutions to problems on an ongoing basis.

What's happened here is that that process has been abandoned and the whole matter has been booted to Judge Roberts who has decided the government must keep all hands off the problem.

Just because you don't think some solutions tried were wise, shouldn't mean we are barred by the Constitution from trying any.

Issy, I believe things like affirmative action and other programs focused on black people in particular were big necessary doses of medicine for a big disease.

I won't for a second say that racism is dead and buried, not by a long shot. A white guy like me married to a black woman knows better. But certainly a lot of that disease has been ameliorated.

So now, a lot of people, including black Americans, have seen that the medicine may in and of itself be part of the problem. You don't keep providing massive doses of chemo when the cancer is in remission or under control, to keep the medical analogy going. What happens then is that you insult the whole body too much.

We may be at that time when simply demanding an equal playing field may be enough. So many of the legs up that were given to black Americans became devastating crutches for the most vulnerable, poor black Americans. Most of black America shot into the stable middle class. Too many of them were actually hurt by the help.

Remember, these programs, affirmative action and the like, were never supposed to be permanent, and the goal was never perfect racial harmony. Let's not pursue utopia. By doing so we end up seeing every racial divide as some enormous chasm.

A lot of smart and decent people have looked up and said, "Hey, in 2008 can we address discrimination of a particular group with programs that are fair to all people?" Maybe for instance, the common deminator is poverty and single motherhood, ills which befall any and all groups. Can we focus on that, rather than race, and get the job done for all races including those we believe are most discriminated against?

At some point we have to fashion color blind remedies or we'll never get beyond color.

I agree with everything you've said.

I still think that building selective treatment of a class of individuals into the Constitution (victims of racial discrimination) is a bad idea. It is counter equal protection under the law and inconsistent with the direction the law should be going.

It also would have kept my classmates out of post graduate school even though, in my opinion, they had as good or better right to be there than anybody else.

But then, I knew them didn't I. That's kind of the point--the solutions should run to individual Americans as much as possible and not by blind application of classes.

Roberts created a new class. It is a very bad opinion.

.

The fundamental question is what right to the political parties have in determining their own processes? As you say, the parties get considerable public benefits. On the other hand, they are still not public entities. The bottom line: they are allowed to set their own rules.

The representatives of the people of Michigan and Florida made a decision fully knowing the consequences: they could move their primaries and be stripped of their delegates or they could leave their primary as scheduled and hoped that the races wouldn't be over by then. Unlike the citizens of the Soviet Union or Iran or black people under Jim Crow, the vote were taken away because of the actions of freely elected representatives. That is the difference between the situation in the Democratic party and that of corrupted states.

Michigan and Florida could have held their primaries any time after Feb 5. Moving them to January 15 was excessive and motivated not be a desire to merely "count" but to count more. When I looked at the primary schedule this fall (to work out an advertising sponsorship of the primary coverage on an cable network) I figured February would be a key month as the primaries went from Super Tuesday to the Texas and Ohio contests in May. As a political lay person, it appears I have more sense than the legislators of Florida and Michigan.

The rules are in place for a reason: to preserve the tradition of the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire and to prevent the chaos of states moving their contests in a never ending game of leapfrog. The party leaders took action not only to preserve there power, but because commonsense called for action. If there are no consequences to breaking the rules, then what point is there in having the rules? The disenfranchisement of the Michigan and Florida voters - who will get a great deal of attention in the general election - was unfortunate, but necessary.

I don't think that Iowa and NH have the outsize influence that the conventional wisdom says they do. Plus, the retail style politics that happens in those campaigns would be impossible under an alternative schedule. By the way, what alternative schedule and solution do you offer?

To the contrary, Roberts eliminated racial distinctions. He did what you and I wanted him to do.

You insult me!

I didn't want the court to do something stupid. I didn't want the court to do something racially prejudiced, no matter how fancy it was dressed-up. I didn't want the court to pretend it is "color blind" when it is anything but.

Roberts created a new racial distinction and put it in the Constitution. Before the opinion, government was free to remedy the effects of all kinds of discrimination in a rational way. Because of the opinion, there is a distinction between all other kinds of discrimination and racial discrimination and that distinction is that only in racial discrimination is remedy disabled by the amazing requirement that the relevant characteristic of the victims not be considered when fashioning a remedy.

There is one more distinction in the world and it is a racial distinction.

Even if you and I and everybody in Missoula Montana wanted him to do it, it wouldn't make it right. We would be wrong right along with him.