The Court

I can't say I'm surprised by the decisions handed down from the Supreme Court this week. No one should be shocked that Alito and Roberts side with Scalia and Thomas, and that Kennedy is going to give them their majority most of the time. The surprise will be decisions that aren't 5-4; I suspect that there will be fewer of those 7-2 decisions with only Scalia and Thomas dissenting.

But my lack of surprise doesn't mean I'm not disgusted, especially with striking down the school integration plans in Seattle and Louisville. The disingenous claim to be remaining faithful to Brown v. Board, that the way to end racial discrimination is to stop discriminating by race, might be true in some sort of theoretical idealistic paradise. In the real world, though, decisions about who goes to which school are made by race either way, either because of the de facto segregation of our neighborhoods or (as Seattle and Louisville tried to do) by using race to try and mitigate the effects of residential segregation. The Court's solution seems to be to just pretend that if we ignore the issue, it will go away.

For all the damage that the Bush administration has done to our government, our standing abroad, our very meaning as Americans, the Court they've given us may be the worst long-term damage. Even a Democrat in the White House next will be unlikely to be able to do much about it; the most likely Justices to leave next are Stevens and Ginsburg. Unless we can convince Cheney to take Scalia duck-hunting again...