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SO MUCH FOR WISE LATINAS
By Ann Coulter
July 1, 2009
With the Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano this week, we can now
report that Sonia Sotomayor is even crazier than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
To recap the famous Ricci case, in 2003, the city of New Haven threw out the
results of a firefighters' test -- which had been expressly designed to be
race-neutral -- because only whites and Hispanics scored high enough to receive
immediate promotions, whereas blacks who took the test did well enough only to
be eligible for promotions down the line.
Inasmuch as the high-scoring white and Hispanic firemen were denied promotions
solely because of their race, they sued the city for race discrimination.
Obama's Justice-designate Sotomayor threw out their lawsuit in a sneaky,
unsigned opinion -- the judicial equivalent of "talk to the hand." She upheld
the city's race discrimination against white and Hispanic firemen on the grounds
that the test had a "disparate impact" on blacks, meaning that it failed to
promote some magical percentage of blacks.
This strict quota regime was dressed up by the city -- and by Sotomayor's
opinion -- as a reasonable reaction to the threat of lawsuits by blacks who were
not promoted.
That's a complicated way of saying: Racial quotas are peachy.
According to Sotomayor, any test that gets the numbers wrong -- whatever "wrong"
means in any given context of professions, populations, applicants, workers,
etc. -- is grounds for a lawsuit, which in turn, is grounds for an employer to
engage in race discrimination against disfavored racial groups, such as white
men.
Consequently, the only legal avenue available to employers under Sotomayor's
ruling is always to impose strict racial quotas in making hiring and promotion
decisions.
Say, if the threat of a lawsuit permits the government to ignore the
Constitution, can pro-lifers get New Haven to shut down all abortion clinics by
threatening to sue them? There's no question but that abortion clinics have a
"disparate impact" on black babies.
This week, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for the white and Hispanic firefighters,
overturning Sotomayor's endorsement of racial quotas.
But all nine justices rejected Sotomayor's holding that different test results
alone give the government a green light to engage in race discrimination. Even
Justice Ginsburg's opinion for the dissent clearly stated that "an employer
could not cast aside a selection method based on a statistical disparity
alone."
Indeed, the dissenters argued that the case should be returned to the lower
courts to look for some hidden racial bias in the test. For Sotomayor, the
results alone proved racial bias.
The one advantage Sotomayor's talk-to-the-hand opinion has over Justice
Ginsburg's prolix dissent is that brevity prevented Sotomayor from having to
explain why quotas aren't quotas.
That was left to Ginsburg.
Liberals desperately want race quotas -- as long as quotas never come to their
offices.
But they can't say that, so instead they talk in circles for 10 hours straight,
until everyone else is exhausted, and then, when no one is paying attention,
they announce: So we're all agreed -- we will have racial quotas.
Based on her lifetime of experience working as a firefighter, Ginsburg said:
"Relying heavily on written tests to select fire officers is a questionable
practice, to say the least." Liberals prefer a more objective test, such as
race.
Isn't excelling on written tests how Ruth Bader Ginsburg got where she is? It's
curious how people whose entire careers are based on doing well on tests find
them so irrelevant to other people's jobs.
In the middle of a fire, it can either be a great idea or the worst possible
idea to open a door. An excellent method for finding out if your next fire chief
knows the correct answer is a written test.
Unleashing the canard of all race-obsessed liberals, Ginsburg observed that
courts have found that a fire officer's job "involves complex behaviors, good
interpersonal skills, the ability to make decisions under tremendous pressure,
and a host of other abilities -- none of which is easily measured by a written,
multiple choice test."
So does a lawyer's job. And yet attorneys with absolutely no "interpersonal
skills" get cushy jobs and extravagant salaries on the basis of their
commendable performance on all manner of written tests, from multiple choice
LSATs and bar exams to written law school exams.
I note that Ginsburg has not shown any particular interest in rectifying the
"disparate impact" of legal exams: She never hired a single black law clerk out
of the dozens she employed in more than a decade as an appeals court judge. (Her
hiring practices on the Supreme Court are a state secret, but I can state with
supreme certainty that her clerks do not reflect the racial mix of Washington,
D.C.)
But liberals think other people's jobs are a joke, so the testing must also be a
joke. That is -- other than their preferred test: "Is the applicant black,
female or otherwise handicapped?"
There is no test that can prove all things about an employee and so there is no
test that can't be derided by the race-mongers. Which is exactly the point. Get
rid of all tests -- except for lawyers who graduated at the top of their law
school classes at Columbia, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Then liberals are free to
impose racial quotas on other people's jobs without limit.
As crazy as this is, even Ginsburg and the other dissenters made a big point of
pretending there was some flaw in this particular test. None adopted Sotomayor's
position that unequal test results alone prove discrimination.
This suggests that a wise Jewess, due to the richness of her life experiences,
might come to a better judgment than a Latina judge would.
COPYRIGHT 2009 ANN COULTER
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