George Will reports on a likely successful initiative on the Michigan ballot this fall to make the state’s law colorblind. Those spearheading that effort, including one of our country’s most admirable and effective troublemakeers--Ward Connerly--and the young woman who actually got the Supreme to side with her against the University of Michigan’s quota system, but not on ccolorblind principles--Jennifer Gratz, have fended off all sorts of thuggish intimidation from various educational and political elites. In GRUTTER and GRATZ, the Supreme Court, arguably in an act of judicial restraint (I’m not endorsing the lame particulars of O’Connor’s opinion in GRUTTER), refused to declare all affirmative action in education unconstitutional. So now the people of Michigan are going to act, quite constitutionally, to remove all legal controversy from the issue. Surely a large part of the cure to Judicial Supremacy is to see that the people must act, usually acting through their representatives, in those cases when the Constitution is not clear enough to produce a legitimate judicial resolution. I could now start to talk about abortion.
Yes. Thank God for initiatives. Frankly, the Progressives got this one right. If a political system is fundamentally corrupt, or is incapable of taking certain needed actions because it is owned by interest groups or mired in an unpopular ideology, there must be a mechanism that allows the people to assert their ultimate supremacy.
That said, the power of the Blob is enormous. So is its ruthlessness. As far as the success of the Michigan civil-rights initiative, I’ll believe it when I see it.