Writing in Forbes yesterday, the Goldwater Institute’s Clint Bolick argues that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ricci v. DeStafano should result in renewed attention to education reform and the need to improve educational opportunities for all people: “[The ruling] also brought the nation closer to an important day of reckoning. When blacks and Hispanics flunk examinations, the cause is less likely to be discrimination than the appalling educational conditions to which most economically disadvantaged black and Hispanic children are consigned. “Affirmative action” programs that leap-frog less-qualified minorities over more-qualified non-minorities …
Yesterday’s Supreme Court opinion in Ricci, the New Haven firefighters case, provides a window to what will inevitably be a significant line of questioning in Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings. After all, Judge Sotomayor not only reached the wrong decision in this case, allowing overt racial discrimination in protection of what were essentially soft racial quotas, but she did so in a dismissive one-paragraph opinion which seemed calculated to bury the case from future review. Both her dismissive treatment of important rights in this and a prominent Second Amendment case, and …
