Krauthammer: The Left Is Trying to “Institutionalize Affirmative Action”

04.23.2014 | News | Jerome Hudson |

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Michigan voters were acting within their rights when they voted to exclude race as a factor in hiring and state college admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court said that the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong when it voided an amendment to the Michigan state constitution, passed by voters in 2006 (by 58%), prohibiting preferential treatment in public employment, education and contracting based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.

“We leave the decision of affirmative action up to the people, which is exactly the way you want to do it in a diverse democracy with a troubled history,” Krauthammer said. “The court said… ‘we’re not going to have nine rogues decide that this cannot be implemented.’ But what it implied was that it would allow people in a democracy to decide that,” Krauthammer continued.

“The left is trying to institutionalize affirmative action to make it impossible for any legislature or any referendum to ever abolish it–ever, in the history of the country,” Krauthammer said.

Indeed, America walked out of the 19th century of slavery into the 20th century of segregation and Jim Crow. For nearly a century, the Democrats’ post-Civil War discrimination disfigured our republic.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, said segregated facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were equal. Thankfully, 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned Plessy and deemed that “separate, but equal” was “inherently unequal” because a segregated education “generates a feeling of inferiority.”

Ending segregation was a good thing. However, the Pandora’s Box of reforms like President Kennedy’s executive order that led to affirmative action and the forced busing laws passed to enforce Brown created mixed results.

Forced busing ultimately left many school districts more segregated than ever. “White flight” saw large numbers of white families de facto segregating their children to private schools and suburban neighborhoods.

Affirmative action—quotas, race-based preferences, loosened testing and admissions standards—are an affront to America’s most sacred democratic principle: that all men are equal in the eyes of the law. For too long, our laws and court rulings have contorted this value.

The real tragedy for blacks, women, and other minorities is that affirmative action indirectly communicates a demoralizing message of inferiority that reinforces the same separatism it set out to solve. It is simply illogical to think that you can fight fire with fire and get anything but scorched earth.

Reverse discrimination simply cannot cure discrimination.

We are either an affirmative action America, where some among us are held to a lower standard based on skin color or we are all equal under the law, free to fail or succeed no matter what group we happen to be born into. Both cannot be true.

Jerome Hudson

Managing Editor

Jerome Hudson has written for numerous national outlets, including The Hill, National Review, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was recognized as one of Florida’s emerging stars, having been included in the list “25 Under 30: Florida’s Rising Young Political Class.” Hudson is a Savannah, Ga. native who currently resides in Florida.

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