Read More of the Same Day's Blog

A pair of major inside-the-Beltway stories dominated the day's news. ABC and NBC both led with the 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court on racial integration of public schools. CBS chose the defeat of immigration legislation as a Senate filibuster succeeded by a resounding 14 vote margin. The two stories together accounted for fully 40% of the three-network newshole with the Supreme Court nudging out the Senate for Story of the Day honors.

Do public school students have a Constitutional right to be educated in racially integrated classrooms? Do they have a Constitutional right to be free of public school assignment based on racial classification?

Of the nine Justices, four liberals chose the former at the expense of the latter; four conservatives chose the latter at the expense of the former. Justice Anthony Kennedy--"complicating everything," as CBS' Wyatt Andrews put it--chose both. He struck down specific plans in Seattle and Louisville that used race as the criterion to assign students to maintain a racial mix "but also said that sometimes race can be considered as one component to achieve a diverse student population."

With that single swing vote, "this decision vividly reveals how divided this current Supreme Court is on social issues," observed NBC's Pete Williams. He called the liberal dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer "blistering" and his tone "exasperated." ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg (subscription required) noted a lack of the usual sense of decorum: "The Justices took the gloves off. They were angry--one even was rolling his eyes almost in disgust." Chief Justice John Roberts ruled: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race." Dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens insisted: "No member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today's decision."

The immediate impact of the ruling is that "all across the country hundreds of school boards may now have to go back to the drawing board," predicted ABC's Dan Harris. Integration plans have not been banned, noted NBC's Williams, since Kennedy still considered classroom diversity "a legitimate goal--provided schools can figure out how to do it without illegally discriminating." And that is the rub, CBS' in-house legal eagle Andrew Cohen exclaimed: "How in the world are people on the ground--school officials, administrators, lawyers--going to decipher his test?" The upshot, CBS' Andrews concluded, is that "more school lawsuits will be needed to test out what Kennedy means--and many more years in the courts to sort it out."

Andrew Tyndall 6/29/07 6:56:25 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report