Place in the Sun

Concept art for Blade Runner (1982) by Syd Mead, the darkest movie I've ever seen, and I don't mean in spirit, I mean in inadequate lighting. I literally couldn't follow the plot, and I still don't really know what happened.

In a way, most of the miraculous Supreme Court decisions of this session weren't that miraculous: marriage equality was happening in any case, whether the Court managed to participate in it or not, and the Kennedy ruling was more a recognition of reality than a breaking of new ground; and the conservative attacks on the Arizona Redistricting Commission and the Affordable Care Act (the Moops-invading-Spain case) were so deeply stupid that it would have been really frightening if they had succeeded.

That's not so true of Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project, which we talked about last January, in which the Texas DOH appealed the decision of a federal district court against policies found to be furthering racial segregation, on the grounds that they weren't doing it on purpose ("Now that racism no longer exists, segregation can only happen by chance; nothing we can do about it"). The correct answer is that the Texas DOH policy (not issuing federal tax credits to landlords in the Dallas suburbs who wanted to rent to low-income and mostly African-American tenants, but only to landlords in the city itself) had a disparate impact on the African-American community and is thus illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968; but this kind of argument has fallen on hard times in recent years. In education it's virtually dead, as school systems South and North continue to resegregate and state authorities continue to seek ways to favor charter schools for black kids and private (often religious) schools for white ones. There was a real fear that the Court would be killing it in housing law as well, as it almost did in a couple of cases of 2012 (the parties settled under pressure from the Obama administration).

Anyway, it didn't happen; Kennedy's opinion in the Texas case ruled the right way, and as the Times notes in an editorial today, we're already starting to see some positive action:

National Review MLK Day Fail: Disparate impact

Update: While I was out doing things today Scott Lemieux literally wrote this piece for me, ten times wittier and more concise, of course, and leading with a remarkably similar joke. It was the first thing I read after posting. But there's a bunch of other stuff in this one anyhow. Besides I've got the picture, and the National Review piece we're writing about is actually a lot worse than Lemieux even realized once you get to the second paragraph.

From somebody else who likes to run photos of Dr. King smiling and wearing a hat, at Relationships Matter Now.

As most conservatives understand, Dr. Martin Luther King uttered only 35 words in the course of his entire life—

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

—and what he meant by those words, oddly, was, "If a white student scores two points higher on the LSAT than some given black student, then the white student should be admitted to the University of Michigan Law School."

This year, though, it was looking different, and I'd begun to think all the conservatives were fleeing from the usual celebration of the conservative Dr. King (Edroso finds a brand-new strain of condemning the liberal-fascist Dr. King, emitted into the ether by Ann Althouse, discussing how LBJ and MLK plotting the push for new civil rights legislation in 1965 took their inspiration from Hitler, because of course Hitler was totally ruthless in his passion for racial integration and voting rights and whatever it took to get more civil rights legislation passed in Germany), but a Roger Clegg at the National Review hasn't given up, and offers a learned legal four-little-children argument to commemorate the holiday: