Good Rulings, Bad Precedent
Posted on June 29th, 2009
by Daniel McCarthy |
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The Supreme Court today ruled in favor of a firefighter suing the city of New Haven for denying him a promotion on account of his race (he’s white). In doing so, SCOTUS overturned an appeals court ruling from Sonia Sotomayor. Earlier in this session, the Supreme Court delivered two other rulings that might seem encouraging on the civil liberties front: the court decided that school authorities may not strip-search a 13-year-old girl as part of the all-important War on Ibuprofen, and the court ruled that defendants can cross-examine forensic technicians. (That latter decision found Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined by John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Souter — with a similarly mixed coalition of “liberals” and “conservatives” in dissent. Interesting that the two Dubya-appointed conservatives justices, Roberts and Alito, opposed the older conservatives on this question of state privilege.)
These might be considered three wins for civil liberties, and in the context of the legal system as it stands, they are. But should any branch of the federal government be telling the state of Connecticut what firefighters to hire or prescribing to Arizonans what a school principal may or may not do? It makes a joke of the notion of federalism that the U.S. Supreme Court can dictate policy at such minute levels. We do have state courts and legislatures to provide redress for these kinds of grievances (though they’re just as bad as SCOTUS, if not worse). If we must have a nationalized judicial system, it ought to rule justly, but this is not the way our federal republic is supposed to work. That knowledge should temper our celebration even of apparent civil-liberties victories like these.
Filed under: Courts, liberties
Read Scalia’s concurring opinion. He makes the point that the issue is fundamentally a 14th Amendment one. I.e., Employment discrimination by the State is an explicit violation of the Equal Protection clause. He notes that the Court dances around it with cowardly evasion.
I’m not a lawyer, but Scalia’s reasoning points to the 800 pound gorilla in the living room that transcends State’s rights. That case belonged in front of the Supreme Court.
Um, Mr McCarthy, I don’t know if you are really into “facts”, but it was not about telling the local government “who” to hire or promote, relating to the firefighters.
They entered into a contract, under which the firefighters agreed to outlay money and effort, under the promise that:
#1 - if they placed highly on the test, there would be a promotion and raise in pay
#2 - the test had been modified and approved, previously, for equality to all races.
The firefighters, having “done their part” of the agreed-to contract, now “owned” the promised reward under the contract.
The local government unilaterally voided the results, but refused compensation to these firefighters, due to what seemed purely a racially-based motivation to uphold “affirmative action”, beyond simple encouragement, but rather a blatant preference for a racial quota in the test result.
What many would have preferred from Judge Sotomayor, would have been an in-depth analysis of the application of contract law, and whether or not the process had been tainted by racial preference. The fact that she immediately dismissed it out of hand, practically without comment, and that this seemed to be consistent with some of her other actions and comments and opinions, cause some to question whether she is a reverse racist.
(That is, President Obama seems to think that the US must be “forced” to apologize to foreign countries, by ceding previous manufacturing, political or military advantages. Judge Sotomayor seems to believe that “white people” need to apologize, by being forced to accept judicial favortism, based on racial stereotypes.)
While your comments, about the Fed trying to tell local government “who” to hire, are in keeping with my current low opinion of the Obama administration, that is *not* what this Supreme Court ruling was about.
Where am I going wrong?
Our belief in Federalism shouldn’t hamstring us in seeking what freedom we can secure in the current debauched system.
Yeah I think SteveM’s point about the firefighter case not really being a federalism matter is probably also the case with the strip search case too, perhaps even moreso.
That is, just as Scalia saw the firefighter’s redeeming their 14th Amendment rights of Equal Protection I’d bet that schoolgirl’s complaint was founded on the 14th’s Due Process clause as well.
Thus, if you want to argue federalism here then your real complaint is with the Framers of the 14th because of course the 14th was indeed expressly aimed at the states, and therefore you aren’t talking about some unintended and unconstitutional federal aggrandizement of states’ rights at least.
Cheers,
The last example is the strongest case. It’s sort of a due process/equal protection clause issue, but “due process doesn’t have to be identical in every sate. That said, it’s fairly ludicrous that some states don’t allow certain witnesses to be cross examined.
As for the war on ibuprofen (a phrase I shall repeat as often as I can fit it into conversation issue, thank you) isn’t strip-searching a 13-year old an unreasonable search?
And also, what everybody else said about Ricci.
All of our courts, top on down, have eroded state’s rights & our Constitutional rights. They don’t study the Constitution anymore, just precedent. A bad ruling keeps repeating itself & our laws continue to have no meaning. As far as race goes, why can’t we all be Americans? You want a promotion, work for it & try being a team player, not an agitator.
Federalism has been a joke for since United States v. Darby and Wickard v. Filburn. It became a very, very bad joke with the passage of the various “civil rights” laws of the Sixties and the contemporaneous innovation of the “unfunded mandate.” Just replace the word mandate with the word dictate if you don’t get the point.
http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2009/05/anti-anti-government.html
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Preemption, in this case, does not refer to the “Bush Doctrine” in international affairs, but rather a quiet and largely unremarked upon policy by which the Federal government presumptively and preemptively overturned State-based laws in areas of interest to private business interests. According to one person quoted in the article, “‘It’s environmental law, it’s drug law, it’s mortgage law, it’s a whole host of areas where the Bush administration was really aggressive about using regulatory action to clear state and local laws that businesses and corporations didn’t like,’ said Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center.” Federal regulation was regularly, even promiscuously used to overturn legitimate State legislation in areas where private business demanded uniformity for the sake of efficiency, profit, and economies of scale. So much for the idea that the States are the “laboratories of democracy.”
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Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.