Justice Roberts Is A Very Reasonable Man

by tristero

He’s so reasonable, he can find a reason to excuse anything, even segregation:

In the Seattle case, the Court ruled by a five-to-four vote that the integration plan did indeed violate the equal-protection clause of the Constitution, and Roberts assigned himself the opinion. The Chief Justice said that the result in the Seattle case was compelled by perhaps the best-known decision in the Court’s history, Brown v. Board of Education. In that ruling, in 1954, the Court held that school segregation was unconstitutional and rejected the claim that segregated schools were “separate but equal.” In Roberts’s view, there was no legal difference between the intentionally segregated public schools of Topeka, Kansas, at issue in Brown, and the integration plan in Seattle, five decades later. In the most famous passage so far of his tenure as Chief Justice, Roberts wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Roberts’s opinion drew an incredulous dissent from Stevens, who said that the Chief Justice’s words reminded him of “Anatole France’s observation” that the “majestic equality” of the law forbade “rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

Read more about an atrocious part of the Bush legacy that will endure for perhaps 30 years or more: the Roberts court.