Finally getting it right on affirmative action.

AuthorKrauthammer, Charles
PositionEditorials

Byline: CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Every once in a while a great, conflicted country gets an insoluble problem exactly right. Such is the Supreme Court's ruling this week on affirmative action. It upheld a Michigan referendum prohibiting the state from discriminating either for or against any citizen on the basis of race.

The Schuette ruling is highly significant for two reasons: its lopsided majority of 6-2, including a crucial concurrence from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and, even more important, Breyer's rationale. It couldn't be simpler. ''The Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.''

Finally. After 36 years since the Bakke case, years of endless pettifoggery -- parsing exactly how many spoonfuls of racial discrimination are permitted in exactly which circumstance -- the court has its epiphany: Let the people decide. Not our business. We will not ban affirmative action. But we will not impose it, as the Schuette plaintiffs would have us do by ruling that no state is permitted to ban affirmative action.

Eleven years ago, the court rejected an attempt to strike down affirmative action at the University of Michigan law school. The 2003 Grutter decision, as I wrote at the time, was ''incoherent, disingenuous, intellectually muddled and morally confused'' -- and exactly what the country needed.

The reasoning was a mess because, given the very wording of the Equal Protection Clause (and of the Civil Rights Act), justifying any kind of racial preference requires absurd, often comical linguistic contortions. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his Schuette concurrence, even the question is absurd: ''Does the Equal Protection Clause ... forbid what its text plainly requires?'' (i.e., colorblindness).

Indeed, over these four decades, how was ''equal protection'' transformed into a mandate for race discrimination? By morphing affirmative action into diversity and declaring diversity a state purpose important enough to justify racial preferences.

This is pretty weak gruel when compared to the social harm inherent in discriminating by race: exacerbating group antagonisms, stigmatizing minority achievement and, as documented by Thomas Sowell, Stuart Taylor and many others, needlessly and tragically damaging promising minority students by turning them disproportionately into failures at institutions for which they are unprepared.

So why did I...

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