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On the last working day before closing its doors for the summer, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision that rejected integration plans in public school districts in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky. This ruling limits the ways in which a public school system can consider a student’s race in making school assignments, and it is another step backwards in the Court’s retreat from Brown v. Board of Education ’s promise of equal education for all students.
However, while the ruling limits the use of race in student assignments, it does not foreclose the consideration of race altogether. A majority of Justices, including Justice Kennedy and the four justices who dissented from the majority’s opinion, believe that diversity and ending racial isolation are compelling interests that support a narrowly tailored consideration of race in making student assignments.
The ruling illustrates the impact of President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, who have tipped the balance of power on the Court in favor of right-wing conservatives.
In his dissent from the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens, the longest-serving Member of the Court, reflected on the changes he has witnessed in the Court over the course of his legal career: “The Court has changed significantly since ... 1968. It was then more faithful to Brown [v. Board of Education] and more respectful of our precedent than it is today. It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”
The school diversity decision is the latest in a series of 5-4 rulings in which the high court’s new conservative majority narrowly defeated the moderate bloc to issue rulings that chip away at hard-won civil liberties that previous Supreme Court decisions helped to guarantee.
For example, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, the same 5-4 majority that ruled against the school integration plans threw out the job-bias claim of a woman who had worked for many years as a supervisor at Goodyear tire and who was consistently underpaid compared to her male counterparts.
In ruling against Lilly Ledbetter, the Supreme Court conceded that she may have been paid less than she was due, and even allowed that pay disparity could have been, as Ledbetter claimed, an act of retaliation after she rejected the sexual advances of a superior.
Nonetheless, the majority ruled against Ledbetter on the grounds that her complaint was “untimely” – that she had waited too long to file suit against her employer, and could no longer expect compensation for the injustice she endured. This decision severely limits the ability of victims of pay discrimination to recover wages unfairly denied to them, leaving thousands of workers who have suffered wage discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion or national origin with little legal recourse.
In Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Court’s five conservative Justices again voted together, this time to uphold the Bush administration’s power to run its Faith-Based Organization and Communities Initiatives, a program that allows religious social service agencies to compete with secular organizations for taxpayer dollars.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation filed suit against Bush administration officials on the grounds that using tax money for religious beneficiaries violates the First Amendment’s mandate that “Congress shall make no law respecting establishment of religion.” But the Court ruled in favor of the Bush administration on the grounds that the “ordinary taxpayers” of the Freedom from Religion Foundation lacked the standing to make this kind of legal challenge, opening the door for the executive branch to use taxpayer money to promote religion without court scrutiny.
In addition to the decisions described above, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted this term to limit reproductive choice for women and to curtail the free speech rights of students in the public schools. These decisions roll back the hard fought gains of the civil rights and women’s movements and underscore the critical importance of Supreme Court nominations. Sadly, the sharp conservative turn in the Supreme Court may endure long after President Bush has left the White House.
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