PRESTOPUNDIT

Krauthammer on racial descrimination and the Supreme Court. Quotable:

Issues of this magnitude should never be decided by nine robes. Affirmative action needs to be dealt with by the people in the legislatures and in referendums. I believe that the current dispensation is a travesty. But a very substantial portion of the population reads the Constitution -- and the nation's needs -- quite differently. Under these circumstances, the issue should not be settled by judicial fiat.

We learned from the abortion issue the doleful consequences of such judicial imperialism. In 1973 changes in public opinion and action in state legislatures were altering the landscape on abortion. At which point the court stepped in and took the issue out of the political arena. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued before she ascended to the Supreme Court, "Roe v. Wade . . . halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue." The result has been 30 years of strife and agitation, as a disenfranchised minority continues to carry the fight against policy for which it has no political recourse.

It would be a pity to reenact the experience with affirmative action. Popular referendums have already abolished racial preferences in California and Washington state. Such acts of abolition enjoy the kind of political legitimacy that -- as conservatives, of all people, should acknowledge -- is lacking when handed down by unelected judges.