Disaster by Decree

...The Court's "remedy" rationale has allowed it to The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 27 require racial discrimination to compel integration while claiming to eliminate all discrimination, and--at least in the Court's own mind--has obviated any need to reconcile such a requirement with the constitutional principle enounced in B,'own...

...Well taken as Weaver's point is, I confess that I find the sport of discovering potential candidates as interesting as the next man...

...And by forcing the socialists to assume the blame for something they had not brought about, Wilson gave Adolf Hider a political tool that he was destined to wield with devastating force...

...But one cannot read the book, I am convinced, without arriving at a better understanding than one had before of the horrific events in Europe between 1920 and 1945...

...Graglia argues that this is true most of all of the Court's busing decisions, and that in no other area of constitutional law are events less likely to vindicate the Court's rulings...

...Beginning with the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which barred the use of racial criteria in assigning children to public schools, Graglia traces the Court's capricious course to its present position mandating the busing of schoolchildren on the basis of race...

...When the Court so blatantly enacts its own personal ideological preferences, it does more than usurp the legislative role: it supplants the rule of law and reason with the perverse quirks of unelected and unaccountable officials...

...Big Jim," as he is known, has climbed the political ladder in thoroughly traditional fashion as the "crusading D.A.," a role which once brought Thomas Dewey within a step of 28 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977...

...Perhaps the most significant contribution of Professor Graglia's book is to point out the dangers of an errant Supreme Court...

...By forcing the abandonment of the neighborhood school, court-ordered busing has lessened community support for public schools and has limited parental participation in and supervision of their operations...

...Jim Thompson, and Republican Futures tions: For example, a given statement or position is more often presented on the evening news as "X, in an effort to appeal to group Y, today pledged support for program Z," rather than "X indicated today his belief that sound public policy called for adoption of program Z." In this context, picking contenders for the Oval Office becomes something akin to guessing first-round draft choices, or speculating on who will be chosen Most Valuable Player --a fact which, among other unfortunate consequences, tends to trivialize the serious business of choosing a Chief Executive...

...Finally, in Swarm v. CharlotteMecklenburg (1971) and afterward, the Supreme Court ruled that racial balance was required, as was cross-district busing where necessary to achieve it...

...tortured Terry 0 'Rourke is t~ Los Angeles attorney...

...In part, I suppose, the fascination with trying to spot future Presidential candidates reflects the increasing tendency of the media to view politics almost exclusively as some kind of competitive sporting endeavor...

...In effect, he made the Jews sacrificial offerings to a concept...

...Carter has hardly had time to savor his triumph over President Ford, and already our pundits and commentators have started surveying the results of senatorial and gubernatorial races in an effort to cull the names of those who may someday stand in Carter's shoes...

...With disturbing frequency, the Court has abandoned its traditional role and has become the initiator of massive social and political changes, often giving no reasons for its decisions, or reasons that ignore or miscite precedent, evade key questions, and ignore or distort facts and fundamental realities...

...According to the traditonal teaching of American government, the Court's role is to check the excesses of the legislative and executive branches with a dispassionate and reasoned "second look" rooted in the Constitution...

...New impetus for the desegregation movement came in 1964 with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, which reaffirmed Brown's prohibition against discrimination in education...

...Even the most skeptical reader must agree with Professor Graglia's conclusion that even if "compulsory school racial integration could somehow be defended, the performance of the Court in imposing it could not...

...Until Power placed him above the law, or rather made him a law unto himself, he was little more than a fanatical patriot of iron will, a forensic genius determined to lift up his adopted people after the ignominious Armistice in 1918, the result, he believed, of betrayal at home rather than defeat abroad...

...The Supreme Court's compulsorybusing decisions are virtually unparalleled examples of judicial obliquity and obfuscation...

...The November 2nd balloting has heralded the arrival of some possibilities on the Republican national scene, however, and a few of these gentlemen have already garnered some serious attention...

...Of the two, Thompson has received by far the more media coverage...

...Court-ordered busing has become the most divisive domestic issue of the 1970s-directly affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of parents and children, and contravening the fundamental principle that government should make no decision based on racewand Professor Graglia's account of the Supreme Court's role in reintroducing race as a permissible and sometimes constitutionally required basis of government action should astound even the most hardened critics of the Court...

...He believed, Toland writes, "that he was observing God's injunction to cleanse the world of vermin...

...In recent years, as Alexander Bickel and other scholars have observed, the Supreme Court has increasingly relied more on subsequent events to vindicate its decisions than on the methods of reason...

...BOOK REVIEW Disaster by Decree Lino A. Graglia / Cornell University Press / $11.50 Terry O'Rourke Professor Lino Graglia of the University of Texas Law School has written a concise and lucid account of the Supreme Court's decisions on race and education...

...reading of statutes, and seeming absence of neutrality and objectivity...

...As Paul Weaver has remarked, modern reportage has adopted a kind of "game" vocabulary in describing elecPeter J. Rustboven is a practicing attorney in Indianapolis...

...Tennessee's Howard Baker and Texas convert John Connally seem to be in the forefront of talk about 1980, although the largely liberal press still cherishes residual (if mostly wistful) hopes for individuals like Senator Charles Percy of Illinois...

...Certainly this was the case with his infamous Judeophobia...

...This last election has proved no exception: Mr...

...As I've said before, Adolf Hitler is a splendid work of biographical art--well written, objective throughout, filled with fascinating details, free of the psychoanalytical claptrap that mars so much contemporary biography,, instructive in the best sense, and more than a little humbling in the tale it tells about a genius (or call him monster, if you will) who contained within his being elements of Everyman, albeit blown up to epic size...

...In no other book that I know of has Hitler been made more convincingly real...

...And finally, increasing numbers of leading educators--many of whom are former supporters of busing--have concluded that school racial balance serves no educational purpose, but instead lessens a school's academic performance, increases racial tensions, and results in violence and disorder...

...Two of these--James Thompson, newly elected Governor of Illinois, and Richard Lugar, Senator-elect from Indiana--hail from my own section of the country, and I believe they present an interesting contrast in terms of the types of candidates the GOP may someday choose to place on a national ticket...

...That such a people should have followed him over the brink is a sad commentary on human nature...

...With the defeat of President Ford, most current speculation has focused, naturally enough, on possible Republican hopefuls...

...Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy ('I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so'), he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God...

...Toland leaves no doubt that in the final years Hitler had succumbed to a messianic delusion--that is, he had begun to confuse his will with the will of God...

...It was the Idea of Jewishness, rather than individual Jews, that he opposed with single-minded fury...

...In addition, the Act expressly stated that it did not "empower any official or court of the United States to issue any order to achieve a racial balance in any school by requiring the transportation of pupils or students from one school to another or one district to another in order to acheive such racial balance...

...That Hitler should have commanded such allegiance from so generally enlightened a people is a testament to his magnetic personality...

...It is one of the worst examples of the modern Court's tendency, so aptly described by Milton Handler, to indulge in "overgeneralization, disrespect of precedent, needless obscurity of opinions...

...The language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not, however, deter HEW's Office of Education...

...The Act's definition of "desegregation" was clear-cut: " 'Desegregation' means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but 'desegregation' shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance...

...After reading this detailed account of his life from its rather ordinary beginnings in Austria, through the years of the First World War (an excellent soldier, he was twice decorated for valor and at War's end was left temporarily blinded by mustard gas), the period of political turmoil and party strife in the 1920s, the fabulous rise to power in the 1930s and on through the cataclysm that followed, I believe I understand him...

...Such men have appeared numerous times in history, but seldom have they had so powerful a following...

...One can find no better instance of idealism gone mad...

...THE NATION'S PULSE by Peter J. Rusthoven Dick Lugar, Of late, it seems that our quadrennial Presidential elections are barely over before speculation begins on likely contenders for the nation's highest office four years hence...

...It is important to note that...

...In addition to its logical shortcomings, Graglia faults the "remedy" rationale for failing to comport with what the Court was actually doing...

...Graglia thoroughly demonstrates that while imposing its requirement of racial balance the Supreme Court has never openly stated that school racial imbalance is unconstitutional...

...many of the socialists were Jews--a fact that lodged in the fevered brain of Hitler, who was then recuperating from his war wounds...

...Toland attaches great importance to the fact that Woodrow Wilson refused to make an armistice with the Kaiser and the imperial German generals, who had lost the War, but insisted on dealing only with democratic elements in Germany--that is, with the socialists...

...tion prohibited by Brown...

...instead, the Court has required racial balance under the guise of "remedying" the state-imposed segrega...

...Court-ordered busing has accelerated the deterioration of the cities as middle-class whites flee to the suburbs to escape busing, leaving behind smaller and smaller numbers of white children to be reshuffled...

...Despite the Supreme Court's claims to the contrary, Graglia's analysis Of its opinions indisputably establishes that each succeeding decision made it clearer that the "school racial separation being 'remedied' could not be attributed to unconstitutional segregation, and that, in fact, it was simply school racial separation or imbalance itself, however caused, that had become unconstitutional...

...That Hitler possessed many of the ordinary virtues and traits of a man of his time makes him all the more frightening to behold...

...Just what moral there is in the study God only knows...

...It is difficult to dispute Graglia's conclusion...

...In what Graglia rightly describes as an "administrative and judicial pei-version of legislative purpose," the Office of Education promulgated, and the lower courts upheld, a series of administrative guidelines purportedly designed to implement the Civil Rights Act, but instead authorizing the transfer and assignment of students according to race when the result was to increase racial balance...

...Like all informed critics of court-ordered busing, Graglia applauds Brown's prohibition of state-imposed racial discrimination as a justifiable and understandable interpretation of the Constitution, but he faults the Supreme Court for undercutting the new law with an impression of hesitation and uncertainty in the ensuing decade...