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Subscribe to RSSThe U.S. Supreme Court term that begins Monday promises to be one of the most important for civil rights in decades, with the potential for blockbuster decisions on issues from race in classrooms and the voting booth to legal recognition for same-sex marriage.
Related: Conservatives warily ponder prospect of an 'Obama court'
Less than a decade after ruling that the nation's colleges and universities can consider the race of student applicants to achieve more racially diverse campuses, a practice now widely used by the nation's selective schools, the court has agreed to take a fresh look.
The new challenge comes from Abigail Fisher, a white student denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin. The school admits the top 10 percent of academic performers from all Texas high schools, then considers the race of applicants as one factor in admitting the remainder of an incoming freshman class.
Evan Vucci / AP
People who waited in line overnight to hear the Supreme Court on a landmark case on health care hold their belongings as they make their way into the court in Washington, Thursday, June 28, 2012.
Fisher did not finish in the top 10 percent at her high school and claims that the consideration of race in reviewing applications cost her a spot at the university.
"There were people in my class with lower grades, who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were accepted into UT. And the only difference between us was the color of our skin," she said.
The university, backed by civil rights groups, contends that while the top 10 percent plan achieves some campus diversity, many of its classes would have only a few, if any, black and Hispanic students without additional considerations of race.
Making it harder to achieve the diversity colleges need, argues Gregory Garre, a Washington, D.C. lawyer representing the University of Texas, "would jeopardize the nation's paramount interest in educating its future leaders in an environment that best prepares them for the society and workforce they will encounter."
The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin joins Morning Joe to discuss President Obama's relationship with the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and his ruling on the Affordable Care Act, and the relationships the justices have with one another.
The Supreme Court that will hear the case Oct. 10 is different from the one that upheld a race-conscious admissions program at the University of Michigan law school in 2003.
"Sandra Day O'Connor was on the court then, and she's been replaced by Samuel Alito, who has much less tolerance for affirmative action," says Tom Goldstein, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who specializes in Supreme Court cases.
O'Connor, who wrote the decision in the Michigan case, retired from the court in 2006.
As a result, says Pamela Harris, a former Obama administration official in the Justice Department, "I don't think anyone thinks affirmative action is long for this world."
Justice Elena Kagan, considered one of the court's liberals, will sit this one out. She was the Obama administration's solicitor general when the Justice Department became involved in the case in the lower courts.
The Supreme Court will take up another racially charged issue this term if, as seems likely, it agrees to consider efforts to scale back the landmark Voting Rights Act.
Passed by Congress in 1965 and renewed four times since then, most recently in 2006, a key provision requires states with a history of discrimination at the polls to get federal permission before making any changes to election procedures -- from redrawing congressional district boundaries to changing the locations of polling places.
Three years ago, the Supreme Court brushed off a challenge to that requirement but strongly suggested that several justices had doubts about its constitutionality, given recent electoral reforms.
"Things have changed in the South," the court said in 2009. "Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare."
Pending cases ask the court to strike down the pre-clearance requirement entirely or throw out the list of areas, consisting of nine entire states, and of 12 cities and 57 counties elsewhere, that must get permission to modify their election procedures.
The current map, says Bert Rein, a Washington, D.C. lawyer representing Shelby County, Ala., includes some localities that have made substantial reforms while missing other parts of the country that have failed to root out discrimination at the polls.
As a result, Rein says, the system is unfair. "Florida has been forced into pre-clearance litigation to prove that reducing early voting from 14 days to 8 is not discriminatory, when states such as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania have no early voting at all."
But Debo Adegbile of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund says the current map is a close enough fit to cover the areas of greatest concern.
"Congress is not a surgeon with a scalpel when it acts to legislate across the 50 states. But it can reasonably attack discrimination where it finds it," he says.
The court is almost certain to take up a host of challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996.
It defines marriage, for the purposes of federal law, as "only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife." As a result, same-sex couples who get married in the states where such marriages are legal are accorded state and local benefits but miss out on more than 1,100 federal ones.
After at first defending the law, the Obama administration notified federal courts early last year that it concluded the law was unconstitutional. House Republicans then took up the law's defense.
A Supreme Court ruling striking down DOMA as discriminatory would not force states to permit same-sex marriage. But it would require the federal government to recognize those marriages where they are legal.
The court could address the issue of same-sex marriage more directly if it takes up the legal challenge to California's Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state.
Legal experts differ on whether the court is prepared to go that far, rather than deciding the DOMA issue now and coming back to the constitutionality of gay marriage in a later term.
"We're not at the point where the Supreme Court will require the state of Mississippi to allow same-sex marriage," says Louis Michael Seidman of the Georgetown University Law Center.
Among other questions the justices will confront:
- Must police get a search warrant before taking a blood sample from a suspected drunk driver?
- How far can police go in using drug-sniffing dogs outside someone's house?
- Can a 1789 law, the Alien Tort Statute, be used to bring lawsuits in US courts for violations of international law that occur in other countries?
- And, in an issue of growing interest to U.S. businesses, should more limits be placed on the ability to bring class-action lawsuits?
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Florida GOP Fired Romney Consultant's Voter Registration Firm After Fraudulent Forms Reported in Palm Beach
The Republican Party of Florida's top recipient of 2012 expenditures, a firm by the name of Strategic Allied Consulting, was just fired on Tuesday night, after more than 100 apparently fraudulent voter registration forms were discovered to have been turned in by the group to the Palm Beach County, FL Supervisor of Elections.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/11798-florida-gop-fired-romney-consultants-voter-registration-firm-after-fraudulent-forms-reported-in-palm-beach
It just keeps getting worse for Willard. LOL
How does one receive expenditures?
The RPOF has been paying this firm millions of dollars to register voters. The RNC has been paying them millions of dollars to register voters in battleground states.
Wow since this articale has nothign to do with the election iw ill just start my own post down here.... I feel for thsi girl I ran into the same sort of issues when I was in college and it came to scholarships at my school. Entry and aid should be based solely on a students qualifications: their grades and how they fit the programs by whatever non racial statistics are used and as far as financial aid is considered it shuld be based solely on financial need and merit-nothing to do with race. I was so excited when I learned that there was a such thing as first generation scholarships-no one in my family had ever been to college and my family couldnt afford to pay for nay of it-it all fell to me, but then I oudn out if you are white then you dont qualify for first generation scholarships. I understadn why the rules were originally placed but they are out dated and no longer effective. they should be abolished and if people want to get into a good college they should have to work for it like everyone else, admission should never have a race factor involved.
"Guidance issued jointly Friday afternoon by the Departments of Education and Justice states that diversity is an important educational goal, and that colleges should be able to use a variety of methods (including the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions) to achieve diversity.
Race can be outcome determinative for some participants in some circumstances. But race cannot be given so much weight that applicants are defined primarily by their race and are largely accepted or rejected on that basis."
The overall tone of the document is one that is supportive of a range of institutional efforts to promote diversity, and that is trying to help colleges assure the legality of their efforts. The guidance suggests that colleges develop formal plans, monitor those plans, and link the plans to educational goals of the institutions."
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/05/obama-administration-issues-affirmative-action-guidance-colleges#ixzz27hUrRM8A
Inside Higher Ed
I think that many of the posts here miss the point.
The reason there are anything resembling quotas due to affirmative action is to attempt to address and redress the damage done by bigotry that for too long barred minorities, including women, from access to advanced education.
It may be that the time for such remedies is past, due to us becoming a more accepting and tolerant society. It also may be that we just haven't gotten to that point yet.
In any case, none of the policies to increase access to education for minorities are the result of any perverse or evil intentioned political scheme. It is just the best way we found to deal with the profound evil of bigotry. You can argue that some other way might have been better but we could not afford to wait and find a perfect solution. So we settled on one that seemed to be reasonably capable of working. Not perfect to be sure - just one that seemed good enough at the time.
Is it now time to take a second look and possibly reconsider?
In a video made public today, but recorded sometime in the summer of 1985, Mitt Romney explains in frank terms how his then newly-minted private equity firm planned on making money.
"Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit," Romney tells employees of Bain & Company, the consulting firm that spawned the new venture.
"If you're head of a large equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money. It's not to create jobs. It's not even to create successful businesses. It's to make sure you're maximizing returns for your investor," President Obama said during an interview with CBS in July, seeking to create a divide between Romney's private success and his potential to manage public economic policy.
Romney faced similar criticism during the Republican primary debates, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry accused Bain of engaging in "vulture capitalism."
Good find! All the Obama campaign has to do is run that till election day.
"Harvest", I love it. No compassion for the people he was ruining.
I feel sorry for the people who lost their livelihoods.
lol, that clip somehow tied into Soylant Green would be perfect!
I have a feeling Willard would like Soylent Green. After all , "it's made out of people!"
lol
there's nothing wrong with what Romney said- only marxists would disagree with what he stated.
Harvesting companies means liquidating them and firing all the employees after gutting them for Bain's profits.
That's gonna go over real well. LOL
So what? Unless employees have ownership they don't have nor should have any say in what happens to a company.
Companies don't exist to provide jobs. Companies exist so that we business owners can generate profits for ourselves and our families. I've started over 100 companies over that past 40 plus years. Most no longer exist. I start them for me, not for employees.
Ah, greed is good. Thanks Gordon. People are disposable as long as you make your profits.
They don't deserve things like workplace safety I suppose, health benefits, living wages or salaries as long as you make your profits, right?
Ever think about how many lives you've ruined along the way?
I said nothing about greed. Do you think making a profit is being greedy?
No employer owes anyone a workplace.
I don't believe in employee benefits other than getting a paycheck for hours worked. That's why I was a independent contractor before owning my own companies.
As we have ALL seen OBUMMER doesn't consider his job to CREATE JOBS EITHER!!!
In his time, he CLAIMS to have created 4.5 million, but that's NOT TRUE like most things OBUMMER SAYS.
Like the attack in LIBYA WASN'T TERRORISM, he said as recently as Wednesday!!!
Fox news reported that it was. from an intel source, a TERRORIST ATTACK, planned and coordinated!!!
Yeah EVEN Panetta said it WAS this week, BUT NOT OBUMMMER!!! No, he's still in DENIAL!!!!
You must have your president confused with the obstructionist GOP who shot down a jobs bill for veterans last week. They seem to be against both jobs and vets. No wonder this election is going so badly for them.
The top 10 percent rule in Texas is the biggest joke you could image. All the intelligent white kids compete against each other while some loser minority student in a s-hole school that no white student would attend is allowed admission. The minority student couldn't have made the top 40% at the white school.
.
This insures the U of Texas has not the best students, just the students that could survive crummy dangerous schools and speak Spanish. Shouldn't they take the best students? And you wonder why other countries are surpassing us.
Why do colleges need diversity? The only thing they need is the most qualified students, irrespective of race and other such considerations, and only based on their academic records.
"As the Supreme Court has recognized, the benefits of participating in diverse learning environments flow to an individual, his or her classmates, and the community as a whole. These benefits greatly contribute to the educational, economic, and civic life of this nation," the guidance states.
"Learning environments comprised of students from diverse backgrounds provide an enhanced educational experience for individual students. Interacting with students who have different perspectives and life experiences can raise the level of academic and social discourse both inside and outside the classroom; indeed, such interaction is an education in itself. By choosing to create this kind of rich academic environment, educational institutions help students sharpen their critical thinking and analytical skills."
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/05/obama-administration-issues-affirmative-action-guidance-colleges#ixzz27i82zd2F
Inside Higher Ed
All a bunch of BS.
yeah, I'm sure you believe everything would be better if it was all white all the time.
Abigail Fisher, next time check "African American" in your application.
Along with our corrupt government, their Elite financial Masters, Wall street manipulators, and Corporate American profiteering monopolies, the so-called peoples representatives in the Judicial System must all be removed, replaced, and/or imprisoned.
We need a government which resembles the one our Forefathers intended for us, not one that enacts self-serving policies to perpetuate corruptness while enriching the few at the expense of the people.
The only four Presidents in the History of the Republic of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy, who challenged the status quo of the Elite Financial Class were assassinated. Coincidence? I don't think so. But I do know, one person at a time can not change anything.
The collective power of this Nation's Citizens is the ONLY thing government fears... and that's the way it was meant to be, not the other way around. Representatives of the people are selected on their supposed ability to protect and defend our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our Freedom, and our Liberties. Not to abuse the power we, the people, vested in them.
Civil Rights? Start with make the '10 Commandments' a Law of the land.
AMEN DOMINGO!!! Could not agree MORE!!!
I don't think it's a coincidence that you can hold such insane opinions and also be a bedwetter. It fits.
Kagan said she would sit this one out because she worked on it before ! Kagan stated this same thing about Obamacare but she lied she did sit in and voted to up hold the ass that gave her this job !
Considering race as an advantage in hiring, or college admissions, or for any other reason is just as prejudiced as excluding someone because of race. Hire or admit the best qualified individuals and eventually your workforce will be superior.
The current court ruling on our civil rights is like putting Charles Manson in Charge!!
This court is the most corrupt in the history of this country; brought and paid for by the Koch Bros., Chamber of Commerce and extreme right wing felons currently in office.
This court in its current make up will never have the people of this country 's thoughts of what should be legal VS these five men who believe they are God.
Aren't there a FEW LEFT WING FELONS in office or PREVIOUSLY in office, there RANDY BOY??? Clinton LIED UNDER OATH AND WAS DISBARRED, as an example. He's A FELON, Like Obama's BUDDY FROM CHICAGO the went to jail for a FELONY, RESCO I think his name was...but OBUMMER got a GREAT DEAL ON SOME REAL ESTATE B4 he got the AXE, right RANDY BOY????
Forget the politics folks. That's for another topic.
I have always (ALWAYS!) contended that affirmative action was nothing more than reverse discrimination in the most blatant and ugly way. The UofT case that will be heard is important in many ways. But it could decide that our institutions of higher learning will be teaching the BEST of our secondary education systems - regardless of race, creed, color, religion or sex.
One other point, Kagan is sitting this deliberation out yet she worked for the Obama administration prior to joining the Supreme Court. So if she's sitting this one out, why the hell didn't she recuse herself when Obamacare was brought before the Court? Something is rotten in Denmark!
My opinion only.
How far can police go in using drug-sniffing dogs outside someone's house?
If it is outside the actual premises...sniff away!
- Can a 1789 law, the Alien Tort Statute, be used to bring lawsuits in US courts for violations of international law that occur in other countries?
Hell, no.
- And, in an issue of growing interest to U.S. businesses, should more limits be placed on the ability to bring class-action lawsuits?
Again, hell, no...in many cases the fact class action law suits exists is one of the only ways people can have justice for harm done by a greedy, unscrupulous business entity.
My opinion only, people should be allowed to sue for a lot more. It will help keep some, not all, business entities honest.
The scum bags in the sc. will do what ever obama tells them to do.
I want to be consistent in my beliefs regardless of race so I'll say this about the white lady who thinks being white kept her out of school. The top 10% get into UT. If you really wanted to get in you should have studied a little harder. I feel the same about people of color, if you want to get in apply yourself, don't spend your time lollygagging. There are other good schools out there. I know a lady who got into an Ivy league school and ended up hating it, getting homesick and going to Junior College before transferring to U. Cal.
There should be no program that allows consideration due to skin color for any reason.
Affirmative action has been a really good thing so everyone, even resistant states, have gotten used to a diverse workplace and hiring, etc., but now it seems like it is reversing itself and excluding some groups. If we can have a black president, is there really any need to hold back a high scoring high school applicant in favor of someone with lower grades? What are we trying to achieve? My impression was that everyone was given a chance based upon their ability. The color of your skin should not have held this young woman back, and based upon the laws of affirmative action, this was illegal. Just because she was white, does not make it any less illegal. It should be based upon ability and her achievements to date.
Obama only advanced in college by claiming to be a foreign exchange student. He wasn't accepted as an American student, given the higher standards. That's why his college and law school records aren't being released, not due to his lousy grades.
Per usual, the 'civil rights' of Caucasian men and Christians is considered unworthy of discussion or protection. The same special interest groups receive the lions share of court time, effort, and resources; but many others must pay, pay, pay more and more taxes for civil rights protections that are never provided. The looney tune left wing hijacked the term 'civil rights protections' over 60 years ago. Many Caucasians have had and still have their 'civil rights' violated by flash mob retaliation gangs that not only goes unreported but also unpunished by the DOJ and unprotected by The Supreme Court. They seem to be playing a very dangerous game protecting only certain groups in America at the expense of others.
Yep.....it's us white Christian men who have suffered throughout our nation's history. It's tragic that we've held only 43 out of the past 44 presidencies, and have made up only 99% of all Congressional representatives.
It's almost like those women and minorities expect us to share power with them. They should consider themselves lucky that we even allow them to vote, right?
It's just that we ELECT those to office by POPULAR VOTE, with the exception of the top job. I know you LIBS would like nothing more than to have a COURT APPORTION MINORITIES, WOMEN, and HOMOS LIKE U SKREKK, to elected office to be 'fair'.
Like striking down what the PEOPLE OF CA VOTED ON TWICE, to define marraige as between a man and a woman. You cry to the courts, unfair, unfair mAKE THEM LET ACCEPT US!!!!
Make them call us homos normal!!! We wnat to be CALLED NORMAL!!!!
Wah, Wah...yeah, libs like having COURTS DICTATE THEIR WILL TO OVERRULE THE PEOPLE!!
It's the COMMUNIST WAY to dictate what people are PERMITTED TO SAY AND DO, u must have the CONSENT OF THE LEFT WING TO SAY WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY, IF NOT, YOU'RE A BIGOT, A HATER!!!
Had this country not taken the "dumbed down" approach to education and social engineering in the name of political correctnessmost of thses problems wouldn't even exist. Congratulations! The melting pot has produced a wonderful stew of stupidity.
Race should no longer be a determining factor. Everyone in the US has an equal opportunity to an education and to earning money. If some are too lazy or too stupid to take advantage screw them. It is about time the citizens take back the US and get the government out of our hair. The states can better govern the country than a bunch of paid off snobs in DC. Pull back the reins on federal government we have given them far too much power.
Unfortunately, our "conservative judge" will likely turn on us as he did with Obamacare on all these issues.
Yeah, all those damned judges want is justice. It's not fair, is it, Bill?