Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Krauthammer's Take   [NRO Staff]

From last night's "All-Stars."

 

On whether the Supreme Court’s ruling on Ricci will affect Sotomayor’s nomination:

 

I think it will have no effect on her ending up on the court.

 

She can look to the four who supported her position, in essence, and also the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, which is a dramatic event, which was a way of emphasizing how legitimate and strong—how legitimate she felt that the position that Sotomayor had upheld was.

 

So I think it really helps her, and this is negligible in terms of her nomination and ending up on the court.

 

However, I think it will have a large effect on affirmative action. What it's going to do is it imposes strict rules and raises the bar considerably for an employer or the government to racially discriminate openly against a group simply to undo the results of a racially skewed exam.

 

It will not do, as New Haven had hoped, to simply claim that there might have existed a test out there in the ether that could have had a less severe racial impact. That won't stand up anymore.

 

And I think it's important, because if you look at the incredible care [taken by] the people who put that test together, [they] tried to make it racially balanced.

 

For example, there were oral exams, nine panels, three judges each. Each of the panels had exactly one white, one Hispanic and one African-American. It shows you how remarkably race conscious, ironically, that the Civil Rights Act has made us.

 

This decision, I think, will go at least some way to undoing that hyper-race consciousness...

 

On the situation in Honduras:

 

Well, the president has a knack for getting all of these big decisions wrong. Two weeks ago, he refuses to meddle in a country where peaceful demonstrators are getting shot by a theocratic dictatorship. He doesn't want to choose sides.

 

And now he's eager to meddle on behalf of the president in Honduras who is a Chavez wannabe, who is strong-arming his way to a referendum—that has been declared illegal by his Supreme Court—as a way to...establish a constituent assembly which will establish a new constitution, which will be a Chavez-like dictatorship.

 

That's what everybody understands in Honduras, and that's why the Supreme Court had ruled the referendum illegal. Only Congress has a right to call it, not the president. Congress had denounced it.

 

The Supreme Court had told the military not to assist in the referendum because it's illegal. So Zelaya fires the chief of staff of the army. The Supreme Court orders him reinstated; he fires him again.

 

This guy is acting extra-constitutionally. Yes, he was elected, but Hitler was as well, and Chavez also was. It's easy to dismantle a democracy if you're president and if you are intent on doing it—-and [Zelaya] is intent on doing it.

 

So our decision ought to be: Yes, a coup isn't a nice thing, but it's preferable to having Zelaya dismantle the democracy. And we should insist on the elections of a president as scheduled in November, so it is a temporary situation.

 

Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions.

06/30 11:25 AMShare