Reaffirming Affirmative Action

Is there any limit to the craziness of Affirmative Action?  Evidently not.

The Supreme Court can look us all in the eye and say palpably evil and stupid things, as we all know. Any and all voting rights/affirmative action statutes should have been knocked down to begin with, of course, if the Court is really into equal protection under the law.  Clearly, it's into nothing of the kind.

Affirmative action, of course, is the exact opposite of equal protection, and lays down the rule that whatever trendy minorities there are will receive preference in everything from education to employment to justice, and all the stuff in between.  They shuffle the minorities around a little now and then, including homosexuals and Muslims, making tortured definitions of what constitutes being "Hispanic," and pretty much assigning heterosexual White Christian males to step back and let everybody else cut in line.

Some of us are too young to remember life without Affirmative Action, so here's a summary of what the whole thing means and why it was instituted and why it still exists, and the interesting fact that it will apply to all the illegal aliens the politicians want to give amnesty to, from Steve Sailer:

The Abolition of Racial and Ethnic Preferences

by Steve Sailer

In America’s fifth year of having a black president, the five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices had an opportunity on Monday to abolish racial and ethnic preferences for violating the 14th Amendment’s requirement of “the equal protection of the laws.” But they were unable to pull the trigger and so they merely sent the case back down to a lower court while recommending stricter scrutiny.

Will the Five live long enough to have another chance to get their courage up? An actuary could calculate the odds. (Scalia is 77, Kennedy 76, Thomas 65, Alito 63, and Roberts 58.) I suspect the chances aren’t that high.

Few have mentioned that the affirmative-action non-decision interacts deleteriously with the Schumer-Rubio bill that would boost immigration. The great majority of amnestied illegal aliens and new immigrants brought in under the bill, plus their descendants unto the seventh generation, would be eligible for racial or ethnic privileges.

These benefits are a zero-sum game that, mathematically, have to come out of the hides of the legally unprivileged such as non-Hispanic whites. As the number of Hispanic beneficiaries rises, the burden on non-Hispanics also rises.

It’s bizarre that immigrant groups—who chose to come to America, warts and all—are recipients of affirmative action. Indeed, it’s so inexplicable that virtually nobody attempts to explicate it. Even more strangely, opponents of ethnic preferences have largely failed to attack this indefensible salient. (Likewise, the quotas angle goes almost unmentioned in the immigration “debate” such as it is.)

Instead, everybody wants to argue over whether or not African Americans should benefit from quotas and disparate-impact lawsuits as compensation for slavery. I’ve been following these debates for 40 years, but they don’t seem to make much progress, just as the performance gap between whites and other races hasn’t changed much over those four decades.

But then, the most popular clashes tend to be the least resolvable. Baseball’s All-Star Game has been going on since 1933, for instance, and you might think that by now they’d have figured out whether the American or National League is better. But they keep playing the damn thing. You might almost imagine that the All-Star Game isn’t a serious quest for a permanent solution, that it’s actually distracting entertainment intended to perpetuate itself. The last 35 years of the Supreme Court arguing over quotas for blacks has been similarly diverting and unserious. It’s a perennial hot-stove topic that occludes more relevant questions such as immigration policy.
(Read the rest HERE.)