The Left's Commitment to Racial Discrimination

Cutting through the fog around "affirmative action":

“John Roberts repeatedly expressed hostility to affirmative action and efforts to remedy the sharp disparities between the wages of women and men.” So said Ralph Neas, president of the People for the American Way, Wednesday when formally announcing his group’s opposition to Roberts’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

There are two ways to handle this sort of drivel: The first is to say that a person’s policy preferences are not the same thing as a person’s judicial philosophy, and that only the latter ought to matter to the Senate. This is quite correct, but is a hard to explain in the noisy court of public opinion, and impossible to explain to most Democrats, who deny that there is or ought to be much of a distinction between what you think is good policy and how you vote as a judge. So a backup tactic is probably needed.

This other approach is to say, fine, if you want to have a debate over racial preferences and government wage-setting, let’s have it. But note the subtle shift here, from “affirmative action” to “racial preferences” and from “efforts to remedy the sharp disparities between the wages of women and men” to “government wage-setting.”

As a descendant of Roman slaves, I just want to know when Italy's going to be sending me my reparations check.