Scalia: Affirmative Action May Send Them Darkies African Americans To Classes (Or Universities) Too Advanced For Them

I do not mean to say Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a racist... I don't know what his motivation is... only that the consequence of his assumption of Black academic inferiority is de facto racism. Here's Scalia, as quoted in Tierney Sneed's article at TPM:

[Scalia] pointed to those who "contend it does not benefit African-Americans to—to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less—a slower-track school where they do well."

Someone should inform Justice Scalia that there is a good word for people who believe that stereotype: bigots. Some other conservative Justices (see article) may need similar reminders.

Given the political activist nature of the conservatives on the current Court, I cannot see this rhetoric from the bench as anything but an attempt to kill affirmative action while the Court still has a scant majority of Justices willing to do so. If that happens, we will have to add affirmative action to the list of erasures by the Court that Congress must, to the extent possible, reinstate.

‘Politicians In Robes’

Adam Liptak at NYT examines several studies on the degree to which Supreme Court justices and other federal judges decide cases in ways representative of the politics (specifically, the party) of the president who appointed them. The short answer: the federal judiciary is thoroughly politicized, especially recently in the tendency of Republican-appointed justices to support the (extreme) conservative side in politically charged decisions.

(The title of the post is a fragment of a quotation from the conclusion of Epstein, Landes and Posner's book, The Behavior of Federal Judges, as quoted by Liptak: “... federal judges are not just politicians in robes, though that is part of what they are.”)