Fox News Insider
4/22/2014
In a 6-2 ruling, the Supreme Court decided Tuesday that Michigan voters have the right to change their state constitution to prohibit public colleges and universities from taking race into account in admissions decisions. The justices said that a lower federal court was wrong to set aside the change as discriminatory.
Justice Anthony Kennedy said voters chose to eliminate racial preferences because they deemed them unwise. Kennedy said nothing in the Constitution or the court’s prior cases gives judges the authority to undermine the election results.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented…
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Related: First Among Equals. An Orwellian dissent from a muddled ruling.
…The six justices who voted to reverse the Sixth Circuit and let the Michigan amendment stand split 3-2-1 on the grounds for doing so. The result is a clear outcome but a doctrinal muddle. We thought it would be amusing and enlightening to go through the four main opinions in descending order of clarity…
Scalia calls Supreme Court ruling ‘a freedom-destroying cocktail’
Never one to mince words, Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia issued a scathing dissent Tuesday, claiming that the majority ruling in a recent search-and-seizure case “serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity.”…
…“As Justice Harlan observed over a century ago, ‘[o]ur Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,'” Scalia concluded, quoting the dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. “The people of Michigan wish the same for their governing charter. It would be shameful for us to stand in their way.”
And then, the Parthian shot: “And doubly shameful to equate ‘the majority’ behind [the constitutional amendment] with ‘the majority’ responsible for Jim Crow,” he added in a final footnote, citing the first two pages of Sotomayor’s dissent…
