AFTER HOURS: SCOTUS SIDES WITH THE PEOPLE

This week's Underwood Award winner lowers the bar even further, and the Supreme Court goes negative on racial preferences. Is this a victory against discrimination? Or a setback for racial equality? Watch John Phillips, Leo Terrell, Tammy Bruce and Scott Ott discuss.



Let the People Decide

Every once in a while a great, conflicted country gets an insoluble problem exactly right. Such is the Supreme Court's ruling this week on affirmative action. It upheld a Michigan referendum prohibiting the state from discriminating either for or against any citizen on the basis of race.

The Schuette ruling is highly significant for two reasons: its lopsided majority of 6-2, including a crucial concurrence from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and, even more important, Breyer's rationale. It couldn't be simpler. "The Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs."

Finally. After 36 years since the Bakke case, years of endless pettifoggery - parsing exactly how many spoonfuls of racial discrimination are permitted in exactly which circumstance - the Court has its epiphany: Let the people decide. Not our business. We will not ban affirmative action. But we will not impose it, as the Schuette plaintiffs would have us do by ruling that no state is permitted to ban affirmative action.

Also read: Sonia Sotomayor Through the Looking Glass