blum pjt on Fair Representation

==

see shelby art'l V

see Affirmative action

see blum

aclu mirror looks for case/client

---

student for fair admissions

Docket for 20-1199

---

6 23 wiki

edward Jay Blum (born 1952) is a conservative legal strategist known for his activism against affirmative action based on race and ethnicity.^[2] He connects potential plaintiffs with attorneys who are willing to represent them in "test cases" which he tries to use to set legal precedents. He is the director and sole member of the Project on Fair Representation, which he founded in 2005. According to its website, the Project focuses specifically on voting, education, contracting, employment, racial quotas, and racial reparations.^[3] Since the 1990s, Blum has been heavily involved in bringing eight cases to the United States Supreme Court.^[4] He was a key figure in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit.

Early life

Blum was born into a Jewish family in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where his parents owned and operated the local shoe store.^[5] He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1973. He then studied West African writers for a year at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He describes his parents as generally left-wing liberals who supported Democratic presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and that he was, eventually, "the first Republican my mother ever met".^[6] He has said that the anti-Semitic discrimination his family experienced during his youth helped form his beliefs.^[7]

Political interest

While working as a stock broker in Houston, Texas in the early 80s, he became involved in the neoconservatism movement. In 1990, he realized that the Democratic incumbent in his congressional district, Craig Anthony Washington, was running unopposed, so decided to run against him for the Republican Party. During that campaign, Blum and his wife Lark went door-knocking and realized that the boundaries of their district erratically divided streets based on ethnicity, with the suspected purpose to gerrymander a majority African-American district in order to grant increased voting power to minorities.^[8] Blum eventually lost the congressional race. But he and others filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, claiming that the racially gerrymandered districts violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The case, Bush v. Vera, went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Blum's favor.^[5]

Activism

Blum holds a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute(AEI). His areas of research at AEI include civil rights policy, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and redistricting. He has also written the book, The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (2007).

His litigation includes United States Supreme Court cases Bush v. Vera (1996), Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder (2009), Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Evenwel v. Abbott (2016), and Fisher v. University of Texas II (2016).

In Shelby County,the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which subjected certain states and parts of states to federal scrutiny when they tried to modify voting procedures.^[9] This scrutiny, known as "preclearance", was intended to prevent states from enacting voting procedures that disproportionately burden racial minorities. After unsuccessfully lobbying Congress to modify the preclearance rules in the Act's 2006 reauthorization, Blum set out to challenge the Act's constitutionality in court. He wanted to change or eliminate the law because it had led to the pro-minority gerrymandering which he encountered in the 1990s when he ran for Congress.^[8][10]

In Evenwel, Blum recruited Texas voters to sue Texas in a constitutional test case. Texas, like other states, divides its state legislative districts in a way that equalizes the total population of each district. However, some districts have more eligible voters than others because they have fewer minors, non-citizen immigrants, and convicted felons. Blum and his recruited plaintiffs contended that this discriminates against voters in districts with high numbers of eligible voters, since each person's vote has less power.^[11] They wanted the Supreme Court to mandate that districts be drawn based on voter-eligible population rather than total population.In an April 2016 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld Texas's district scheme.^[12]

The Fisher case, which challenged the University of Texas's consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process, was decided at the Supreme Court in 2013 and again in 2016. The first time, the Court bolstered the legal standard that universities must satisfy if they wish to consider race, emphasizing that the use of race is only permissible if race-neutral alternatives would be ineffective at producing campus diversity.^[13] The second time, the Court applied the heightened legal standard to UT's admission policy, concluding that it passes muster and upholding it.^[14]

Project on Fair Representation

Edward Blum is also challenging race-conscious admissions policies at other selective universities, claiming that they do not comply with the strict legal standard set forth in Fisher.^[15] To that end, he has founded Students for Fair Admissions, an offshoot of the Project on Fair Representation. This organization seeks to recruit students who have been rejected by selective universities and file lawsuits on their behalf.^[16] Specifically, Blum is targeting Harvard University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He set up websites called harvardnotfair.org,^[17] uncnotfair.org,^[18] and uwnotfair.org^[19] to attract plaintiffs. Students for Fair Admissions, led by Blum, filed federal lawsuits against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill in November 2014. (SFFA has not sued UW-Madison thus far). 

On October 1, 2019 the Court ruled in favor of Harvard University. In the 130-page ruling, Judge Burroughs found that the University did not discriminate on the basis of race, did not engage in racial balancing or the use of quotas, and did not place too much emphasis on race when considering an applicant’s admissions file. She also wrote that, "Harvard has demonstrated that no workable and available race-neutral alternatives would allow it to achieve a diverse student body while still maintaining its standards for academic excellence."^[20] Other cases are pending in federal district court. Unlike the Fisher case, in which the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, made herself public,^[21] the students rejected by Harvard and UNC have not revealed their identities because they want to shield themselves from potential retaliation.[citation ^needed] ^Rather, the named plaintiff is simply "Students for Fair Admissions", and that organization is prepared to assure the courts that it does in fact have members who were injured by the universities' use of race.[citation ^needed]

Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment

Edward Blum is listed as the President of the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment, which is the plaintiff in lawsuits challenging diversity requirements for boards of certain publicly traded companies.^[22] The group has sued to challenge California's race and gender quotas,^[23] and Nasdaq's comply-or-explain rule.^[24]

Works

• Blum, Edward (2007). The Unintended Consequences of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. AEI Press. ISBN 9780844742571.

See also

• Abigail Thernstrom
• Stephan Thernstrom

Abigail Thernstrom (September 14, 1936 – April 10, 2020) was an American political scientist and a leading conservative scholar on race relations, voting rights and education.^[1] She was an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,^[2] a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and vice chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1975. According to the New York Times, she and her husband Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, "are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit, where they forcefully argue that racial preferences are wrong, divisive and, as a tool to help minorities, overrated. They serve on the boards of conservative and libertarian public-policy institutes."^[3]

---

===

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-casemaker/special-report-behind-u-s-race-cases-a-little-known-recruiter-idUSBRE8B30V220121204

no lnx

Special Report: Behind U.S. race cases, a little-known recruiter

By Joan Biskupic

19 MIN READ

SOUTH THOMASTON, Maine (Reuters) - Sometime in the next few months, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide two cases that could fundamentally reshape the rules of race in America.

In one, a young white woman named Abigail Fisher is suing the University of Texas over affirmative action in college admissions. In the other, an Alabama county wants to strike down a law that requires certain states to get federal permission to change election rules.

If they win, the names Fisher and Shelby County, Ala., will instantly become synonymous with the elimination of longstanding minority-student preferences and voting-rights laws. But behind them is another name, belonging to a person who is neither a party to the litigation nor even a lawyer, but who is the reason these cases ever came to be.

He is Edward Blum, a little-known 60-year-old former stockbroker.

Working largely on his own, with the financial support of a handful of conservative donors, Blum sought out the plaintiffs in the Fisher and Shelby County cases, persuaded them to file suit, matched them with lawyers, and secured funding to appeal the cases all the way to the high court. Abigail Fisher is the daughter of an old friend of Blum’s - a man who happened to call when Blum was in the midst of a three-year search for a white college applicant who had been rejected despite solid scores. Blum eventually got Shelby County to file suit after trolling government websites and cold-calling a county official.

Blum introduced Fisher’s father and Shelby County officials to the same high-priced but politically sympathetic Washington lawyers, who agreed to work for a cut rate to be billed to Blum’s backers. Neither Fisher nor Shelby County is paying to fight the cases that bear their names.

Over the past 20 years, Blum has similarly launched at least a dozen lawsuits attacking race-based protections. In addition to the Fisher and Shelby County cases, two other Blum-backed cases reached the Supreme Court. One struck down majority-black and majority-Latino voting districts in Texas. The other prompted the court to suggest it might eliminate a major portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the conservative-majority bench may now be poised to do in the Shelby County case.

A self-described former college liberal, Blum says that over time he came to believe that race-based policies violate the very principles of equality they were created to uphold. Affirmative action, he said, treats whites unfairly and stigmatizes minorities, and the rule that requires certain, mostly Southern, states to obtain special federal permission for electoral changes - Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act - unjustly punishes them for long-abandoned racist practices.

“The original vision has been turned upside down,” said Blum, whose Toyota minivan haslicense plates reading “1FRSTNE” - short for One First Street Northeast, the address of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

OPERATING FROM MAINE

Blum, who has a runner’s lean build and brown hair flecked with gray, operates from a book-lined office in his white two-story frame house on Penobscot Bay, Maine. He holds an unpaid fellowship with the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and in 2005 formed a not-for-profit legal defense foundation, the Project on Fair Representation, of which he is the sole employee. The organization’s website says it devotes “all of its efforts to influencing jurisprudence, public policy, and public attitudes regarding race and ethnicity.”

The Project on Fair Representation, in turn, is fully financed by a tax-exempt charitable group called Donors Trust, which raises money from a variety of benefactors and directs them to conservative foundations and projects. According to Internal Revenue Service documents, Donors Trust spent about $1.2 million from 2006 to 2011, the most recent information available, on Project on Fair Representation activities. Gifts to charities such as Donors Trust are tax deductible; money given directly to a legal-defense fund that is not a charitable organization generally is not.

Donors Trust, which also handles the administrative side of the Project on Fair Representation, said most of the project’s expenses are for legal fees. Blum said he draws an average annual salary of $50,000, paid by Donors Trust from funds earmarked for his project. He said he and his wife, Lark, a retired insurance agent, also support themselves with income from savings, investments and Blum’s part-time work as a municipal-bond analyst.

Blum said contributors to his project so far this year have included the conservative Milwaukee, Wis.-based Lynde and HarryBradley Foundation, which gave Donors Trust $100,000 to support Blum’s group after Blum wrote them a pitch letter regarding the Fisher case and asking for support with costs. Bradley Foundation president and chief executive Michael Grebe confirmed the gift.

Another is the Searle Freedom Trust, a foundation of the late drug-company scion Daniel C. Searle, which gave Donors Trust gifts totaling $597,500 from 2005 to 2010 designated for the Project on Fair Representation, Searle’s IRS documents show. Kimberly Dennis, CEO of the Searle Freedom Trust, declined to comment on Blum’s project.Blum and Whitney Ball, president of Donors Trust, declined to name other backers of the Project on Fair Representation.

The practice of finding plaintiffs to tee up test cases at the Supreme Court is not new. Liberal groups such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and conservative groups such as the Institute for Justice have been doing it for decades. The organizers typically play prominent roles - either as counsel, as public spokespeople or by filing amicus briefs.

Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a not-for-profit liberal legal-defense fund that has represented parties on the opposite side of Blum-sponsored litigation, said it is rare that Blum’s donors choose to remain anonymous. “There is an issue regarding the transparency of what’s going on” when financial backers of high-stakes cases are not known to the public, he said.

Blum and Donors Trust’s Ball say the financing of Blum’s work is similar to what is done for liberal causes, and say people have many reasons for seeking to give anonymously.

[RELATED COVERAGE

Cases Edward Blum has taken to the US Supreme Court]

SON OF A SHOE SALESMAN

Blum was born in Benton Harbor, Mich., and moved around as a child. His father, Joseph, was a salesman, mainly of shoes. During a tough time when they were living in Florida, Blum said he drove with his father up to North Carolina textile mills to buy bulk loads of women’s underwear, and peddled the packs along the road back South. “He sold them in motels, coffee shops, wherever blue-collar women would give him four bucks for a pack of underwear he bought for a buck and a half,” Blum recalled.

He speaks in plain-Midwestern tones sprinkling his conversation with the Yiddish word emes (pronounced “EM-ess”), which means “truth.” A 1973 graduate of the University of Texas, Blum said he started out as a Democrat, but by the early 1980s began reading the neoconservative Commentary magazine and changed his views. In 1984 he voted for Ronald Reagan. He soon became a successful stockbroker at Paine Webber in Houston. Then, in the early 1990s, came the “acorn that began all my activities,” Blum said.

After noticing that his heavily Democratic district had trouble fielding a Republican congressional candidate in 1990, Blum decided to enter the 1992 Republican primary. He won it, and in the general election faced an African-American incumbent Democrat. When Blum and Lark walked the district to shake hands with voters, he said, he had to carry a map because the borders zigged and zagged. “Multi-ethnic neighborhoods were split apart,” he said. “Block by block. Blacks over here. Whites over here. Hispanics over here.”

Blum lost by a wide margin. At the time, court challenges were starting to mount over “majority minority” districts like his that had been gerrymandered to consolidate minorities and maximize their voting power. In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled that districts appearing to segregate voters by race, even if designed to help minorities, violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equality. Blum decided to sue Texas officials, alleging the districts unlawfully segregated voters by race.

He enlisted five local Republicans to join him, including Al Vera, then a high school government teacher, who became the lead plaintiff. Their complaint went to the Supreme Court. That 1996 case, Bush v. Vera, struck down two majority-black and one majority-Hispanic districts in Texas and ordered the boundaries redrawn. Now retired, Vera said Blum is “like a bulldog once he attaches onto an issue he believes in.”

Blum says he personally fronted about $100,000 of the legal fees in the case, which eventually rose to about $1 million. He initially retained regional lawyers, then sought out a large Washington firm whose top partners had served in Republican presidential administrations. Blum said he and the lawyers eventually recouped virtually all their money, as winners’ legal fees are reimbursed in some civil-rights cases. Bert Rein, partner at the firm now known as Wiley Rein, said he doesn’t recall specific fees but Blum’s account sounds right.

Blum went to court to watch oral arguments. He felt so vindicated that he decided to devote himself nearly full time to the fight against race-based laws and policies. “Seeing how the whole thing can be put back together with litigation,” he said, changed his life. “It really is the emes.”

In 2000, Blum moved to Washington and began working with likeminded conservatives. He spent several years as a senior fellow with the Washington-based conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, and abruptly left in 2006 after a falling-out with Linda Chavez, the center’s president. Neither Blum nor Chavez would discuss the circumstances. By his own admission, Blum operates best solo. “With partners, everyone wants to be the shiniest apple,” he said. “Operating alone, I don’t need to address that.”

SENSING AN OPPORTUNITY

By the mid-2000s, the makeup of the Supreme Court had tilted rightward, and Blum sensed another opportunity. John Roberts succeeded the late William Rehnquist as Chief Justice in 2005, and in January 2006 the conservative Samuel Alito replaced the moderate Sandra Day O’Connor, who several years earlier had cast the crucial swing vote upholding affirmative action in college admissions at the University of Michigan.

Following the Michigan decision, the University of Texas had instituted a modified version of an affirmative action program it had previously discontinued because a lower court in Texas had blocked it. The university guarantees admission to all state high-school graduates in the top 10 percent of their class, but under the new arrangement also allows in some minorities with lower scores in an effort to enhance diversity.

Blum figured if he could find a white student who had been rejected with a record that exceeded the lower criteria used for some minority applicants, he might be able to persuade a majority of the nine justices on the Supreme Court that the practice was unconstitutional. Blum said he also wanted someone temperamentally suited to the long haul of litigation.

He set up a Web address, utnotfair.org, which asked spurned University of Texas students to contact Blum and relate their experiences. He gave speeches to the Young Conservatives of Texas and similar groups, and hounded everyone he knew in the state. “I could bump into people in restaurants and bars that I knew from high school in Houston that had kids graduating from high school,” he recalled. “And I was such a noodge: ‘If she doesn’t get in, I want to represent her.’”

He says he heard from many students, but after two and a half years, none still seemed right. Someone might have had strong grades, he said, but didn’t seem like a person he could work with for a long period or “expose to the press.”

Then, in March 2008, Blum got a call from his old friend Richard Fisher. Blum had met Fisher, an accountant, through business even before Fisher’s daughter Abigail, then 18, was born. The Blums and Fishers had socialized together over the years and Blum attended the wedding of Abigail’s older sister. Fisher, also a Republican with what he says are strong conservative views, knew of his friend’s search.

Fisher told Blum that Abigail had just received a rejection notice from the University of Texas and was heartbroken. He described her scores, and the men agreed she might make a strong candidate to challenge the Texas admissions system. Blum said he told Fisher: “I want you to prepare Abby for being under a microscope.”

Abigail, a slight, strawberry blonde, said she told her father she was willing to lend her name and story to a court case, but she wanted to go about her life privately. “I assumed that whatever would come of it would take a really long time,” Abigail said. “It would be for others.”

Blum told Richard Fisher he had financial backing and Fisher would not have to pay a cent in legal fees. Without Blum’s access to funds, Fisher said, he would never have proceeded. Blum would not discuss the cost. But lawyers who argue regularly before the Supreme Court say constitutional challenges that start in district court and wind up at the high court could cost a total $2 million or more in legal fees.

Slideshow ( 4 images )

Blum retained the Wiley Rein firm again,and within a couple of weeks, the lawsuit now known as Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin was filed at the U.S. District Court in Austin. The lower court sided with the university in 2009, upholding its affirmative action plan. A panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later agreed. Abigail, meanwhile, had enrolled at her second-choice school, Louisiana State University.

A COUNTY IN ALABAMA

A few months after Blum snagged Abigail Fisher, he found another plaintiff to challenge a policy he abhorred as much as affirmative action: Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires all or parts of 16 states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval for any election-law change.

While surfing the Web one day, he saw on the Department of Justice’s site that the agency had rejected a voting map in the city of Calera, at the southwestern tip of Shelby County in central Alabama. That new map dramatically enlarged one of the city’s voting districts, diluting African-American voting strength.

Blum picked up the phone and called the attorney for Calera and greater Shelby County, Frank “Butch” Ellis. The two men immediately clicked. Ellis said he had long been chafing under Section 5 and was intrigued by Blum’s call.

At the time, another Section 5 case that Blum was helping finance was already at the Supreme Court. That case, filed by the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District #1, claimed the South had changed, and the requirement that federal permission was needed for election changes was an anachronism. Blum told Ellis that if the Texas utility case didn’t strike down the rule, he thought the Shelby County situation might one day make a better case.

When the Supreme Court in 2009 sidestepped the issue of Section 5’s constitutionality and ruled on a narrower issue, Blum called Ellis again. Like the Fishers, Ellis was enticed by Blum’s promise that the county’s challenge would cost it nothing.Shelby County v. Holder was filed in April 2010, at the U.S. District Court in Washington. Last May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling against Shelby County, and in November, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

Bert Rein of the Wiley Rein firm, which Blum retained for both Shelby County and Fisher, declined to discuss its fees. When asked how much money he thought each case would cost, Blum said, “Low six figures.”

PLAINTIFF IN PAJAMAS

On the morning of February 21, 2012, when the Supreme Court announced it was taking the Fisher case, its eponymous plaintiff was still in bed in her Baton Rouge apartment, just a few months from graduation. Her father called to tell her the news, and Abigail began jumping up and down in her pajamas. “That was the most excited I had been throughout the four years,” she said. “My dad and Edward were way more passionate about it.”

Blum then stage-managed some publicity for Abigail, who previously had not appeared in public in connection with the lawsuit. He hired a small production company to make a YouTube video about the case, featuring critics of the university’s program and Abigail. In it she said students had been accepted with lower grades and fewer activities than she had, and the “only other difference between us was the color of our skin.”

University officials say such differences arise from their interest in bringing together as diverse a group of qualified students as possible. They acknowledge that some minority applicants with lower scores than Fisher have been admitted. But they also say that a significant number of African-American and Hispanic applicants with scores identical or higher than hers have similarly been denied admission at the highly competitive campus.

On the morning of Supreme Court oral arguments in October, Blum arranged a car and driver for himself, Abigail and her parents. When they arrived at the court building, they tried to avoid the protesters in the front, most of whom supported affirmative action and were carrying signs with messages such as “diversity works” and “expand opportunity.” Blum and the Fishers headed for a rear door, but were turned away because it was only for employees. They eventually found the proper entrance and took seats in the rear of the courtroom.

After the hearing, standing in front of the marble-columned building surrounded by her parents, lawyers and Blum, Abigail recited from memory a statement Blum had written for her.

She thanked the Supreme Court for hearing her case and the lawyers for representing her. “I hope the court rules that a person’s race and ethnicity should not be considered when applying to the University of Texas,” she said.

It did not occur to her to thank Blum, she said. He had not put that in the statement.

Reporting by Joan Biskupic; Editing by Amy Stevens and Howard Goller

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

==

nyt

Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics

Justice Clarence Thomas was given a $15,000 bust of Lincoln in 2001 by a group for which a friend is a trustee.

By Mike McIntire

June 18, 2011

PIN POINT, Ga. — Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.

Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.

“And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’ ” Mr. Varn recalled, adding that he was later told by others not to identify the friend.

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The project throws a spotlight on an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship that appears to be markedly different from those of other justices on the nation’s highest court.

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.

Although the Supreme Court is not bound by the code, justices have said they adhere to it. Legal ethicists differed on whether Justice Thomas’s dealings with Mr. Crow pose a problem under the code. But they agreed that one facet of the relationship was both unusual and important in weighing any ethical implications: Justice Thomas’s role in Mr. Crow’s donation for the museum.

The code says judges “should not personally participate” in raising money for charitable endeavors, out of concern that donors might feel pressured to give or entitled to favorable treatment from the judge. In addition, judges are not even supposed to know who donates to projects honoring them.

While the nonprofit Pin Point museum is not intended to honor Justice Thomas, people involved in the project said his role in the community’s history would inevitably be part of it, and he participated in a documentary film that is to accompany the exhibits.

Deborah L. Rhode, a Stanford University law professor who has called for stricter ethics rules for Supreme Court justices, said Justice Thomas “should not be directly involved in fund-raising activities, no matter how worthy they are or whether he’s being centrally honored by the museum.”

On the other hand, the restriction on fund-raising is primarily meant to deter judges from using their position to pressure donors, as opposed to relying on “a rich friend” like Mr. Crow, said Ronald D. Rotunda, who teaches legal ethics at Chapman University in California.

“I don’t think I could say it’s unethical,” he said. “It’s just a very peculiar situation.”

Justice Thomas, through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, declined to respond to a detailed set of questions submitted by The New York Times. Mr. Crow also would not comment.

Supreme Court ethics have been under increasing scrutiny, largely because of the activities of Justice Thomas and Ms. Thomas, whose group, Liberty Central, opposed President Obama’s health care overhaul — an issue likely to wind up before the court. Mr. Crow’s donation to Liberty Central was reported by Politico.

In January, the liberal advocacy organization Common Cause asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Justices Thomas and Antonin Scalia should have recused themselves from last year’s Citizens United campaign finance case because they had attended a political retreat organized by the billionaire Koch brothers, who support groups that stood to benefit from the court’s decision.

A month later, more than 100 law professors asked Congress to extend to Supreme Court justices the ethics code that applies to other federal judges, and a bill addressing the issue was introduced.

It is not unusual for justices to accept gifts or take part in outside activities, some with political overtones.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer has attended Renaissance Weekend, a retreat for politicians, artists and media personalities that is a favorite of Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg participated in a symposium sponsored by the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and a philanthropic foundation once tried to give her a $100,000 achievement award. She instructed that the money be given to charity.

[Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery where Justice Clarence Thomas's mother worked, on the site of the old cannery. Mr. Varn said Justice Thomas put him in touch with a buyer to restore the property and build a museum.]

But in the case of Justice Thomas and his dealings with Mr. Crow, the ethical complications appear more complex.

Conservative Ties

Mr. Crow, 61, manages the real estate and investment businesses founded by his late father, Trammell Crow, once the largest landlord in the United States. The Crow family portfolio is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and includes investments in hotels, medical facilities, public equities and hedge funds.

A friend of the Bush family, Mr. Crow is a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and has donated close to $5 million to Republican campaigns and conservative groups. Among his contributions were $100,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group formed to attack the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, and$500,000 to an organization that ran s urging the confirmation of President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Crow has not personally been a party to Supreme Court litigation, but his companies have been involved in federal court cases, including four that went to the appellate level. And he has served on the boards of two conservative organizations involved in filing supporting briefs in cases before the Supreme Court. One of them, the American Enterprise Institute, with Mr. Crow as a trustee, gave Justice Thomas a bust of Lincoln valued at $15,000 and praised his jurisprudence at an awards gala in 2001.

The institute’s Project on Fair Representation later filed briefs in several cases, and in 2006 the project brought a lawsuit challenging federal voting rights laws, a case in which Justice Thomas filed a lone dissent, embracing the project’s arguments. The project director, an institute fellow named Edward Blum, said the institute supported his research but did not finance the brief filings or the Texas suit, which waslitigated pro bono by aformer clerk of Justice Thomas’s.

“When it came time to file a lawsuit,” he said, “A.E.I. had no role in doing that.”...

===

---

https://www.propublica.org/article/a-colorblind-constitution-what-abigail-fishers-affirmative-action-case-is-r

when the NAACP began challenging Jim Crow laws across the South, it knew that, in the battle for public opinion, the particular plaintiffs mattered as much as the facts of the case. The group meticulously selected the people who would elicit both sympathy and outrage, who were pristine in form and character. And they had to be ready to step forward at the exact moment when both public sentiment and the legal system might be swayed.

That's how Oliver Brown, a hard-working welder and assistant pastor in Topeka, Kan., became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that would obliterate the separate but equal doctrine. His daughter, whose third-grade innocence posed a searing rebuff to legal segregation, became its face.

Nearly 60 years after that Supreme Court victory, which changed the nation, conservatives freely admit they have stolen that page from the NAACP's legal playbook as they attempt to roll back many of the civil rights group's landmark triumphs.

In 23-year-old Abigail Noel Fisher they've put forward their version of the perfect plaintiff to challenge the use of race in college admissions decisions.

Publicly, Fisher and her supporters, chief among them the conservative activist who conceived of the case, have worked to make Fisher the symbol of racial victimization in modern America. As their narratives goes, she did everything right. She worked hard, received good grades, and rounded out her high school years with an array of extracurricular activities. But she was cheated, they say, her dream snatched away by a university that closed its doors to her because she had been born the wrong color: White.

The daughter of suburban Sugar Land, Texas, played the cello. Since the second grade, she said, she dreamed of carrying on the family tradition by joining her sister and father among the ranks of University of Texas at Austin alumni.

And the moment for her to lend her name to the lawsuit might never be riper: The Supreme Court has seated its most conservative bench since the 1930s. The Court is expected to issue a decision any week now in what is considered one of the most important civil rights cases in years.

On a posted by Edward Blum, a 1973 University of Texas graduate whose nonprofit organization is bankrolling the lawsuit, she is soft-spoken, her strawberry blond hair tucked behind one ear. Not even a swipe of lip gloss adorns her girlish face.

"There were people in my class with lower grades who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin," she says. "I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?"

It's a deeply emotional argument delivered by an earnest young woman, one that's been quoted over and over again.

Except there's a problem. The claim that race cost Fisher her spot at the University of Texas isn't really true.

In the hundreds of pages of legal filings, Fisher's lawyers spend almost no time arguing that Fisher would have gotten into the university but for her race.

If you're confused, it is no doubt in part because of how Blum, Fisher and others have shaped the dialogue as the case worked its way to the country's top court.

Journalists and bloggers have written dozens of articles on the case, including profiles of Fisher and Blum. News networks have aired panel after panel about the future of affirmative action. Yet for all the front-page attention, angry debate and exchanges before the justices, some of the more fundamental elements of the case have been little reported.

Race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas's decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher.

In 2008, the year Fisher sent in her application, competition to get into the crown jewel of the Texas university system was stiff. Students entering through the university's Top 10 program — a mechanism that granted automatic admission to any teen who graduated in the upper 10 percent of his or her high school class — claimed 92 percent of the in-state spots.

Fisher said in news reports that she hoped for the day universities selected students "solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it." But Fisher failed to graduate in the top 10 percent of her class, meaning she had to compete for the limited number of spaces up for grabs.

She and other applicants who did not make the cut were evaluated based on two scores. One allotted points for grades and test scores. The other, called a personal achievement index, awarded points for two required essays, leadership, activities, service and "special circumstances." Those included socioeconomic status of the student or the student's school, coming from a home with a single parent or one where English wasn't spoken. And race.

Those two scores, combined, determine admission.

Even among those students, Fisher did not particularly stand out. Court records show her grade point average (3.59) and SAT scores (1180 out of 1600) were good but not great for the highly selective flagship university. The school's rejection rate that year for the remaining 841 openings was higher than the turn-down rate for students trying to get into Harvard.

As a result, university officials claim in court filings that even if Fisher received points for her race and every other personal achievement factor, the letter she received in the mail still would have said no.

It's true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.

Neither Fisher nor Blum mentioned those 42 applicants in interviews. Nor did they acknowledge the 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher's who were also denied entry into the university that year. Also left unsaid is the fact that Fisher turned down a standard UT offer under which she could have gone to the university her sophomore year if she earned a 3.2 GPA at another Texas university school in her freshman year.

In an interview last month, Blum agreed Fisher's credentials and circumstances make it difficult to argue — as he and his supporters have so ardently in public — that but for her race Fisher would have been a Longhorn.

"There are some Anglo students who had lower grades than Abby who were admitted also," Blum told ProPublica. "Litigation like this is not a black and white paradigm."

Blum started his one-man nonprofit, the Project on Fair Representation, in 2005. The organization is funded by deep-pocketed conservatives to, according to its website, influence "jurisprudence, public policy, and public attitudes regarding race and ethnicity" in voting, education, contracting and employment. To do so, Blum — who is not a lawyer — helps arrange pro bono representation to fight race-based policies that were meant to address inequalities.

According to a Reuters profile, Blum has brought at least a dozen lawsuits against such programs and laws — including four that made it to the Supreme Court. He has two on the current docket, Fisher and the Shelby County, Ala., case challenging a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

In the Fisher case, while the young woman may have lent her name to the lawsuit, the case before the Court has very little to do with her. Her name appears just five times in the thousands of words that make up the body of the complaint. She has already gone on to graduate from Louisiana State University, her second choice, and is working in finance at a firm in Austin.

Asked by a news reporter what harm she had suffered, she cited only her inability to tap into UT's alumni network and possibly missing out on a better first job. If she wins, Fisher seeks only the return of her application fee and housing deposit — a grand total of $100 in damages.

So while the Fisher case has been billed as a referendum on affirmative action, its backers have significantly grander ambitions: They seek to make the case a referendum on the**14th Amendment**itself. At issue is whether the Constitution's equal protection clause, drafted by Congress during Reconstruction to ensure the rights of black Americans, also prohibits the use of race to help them overcome the nation's legacy of racism.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that the Constitution bars any and all laws and government programs that consider race. But Blum and his supporters, seeing an opening with the current Court, seek to overturn more than a century of precedent.

The true crux of the suit is not Fisher's failed application, but that government officials violate the constitutional rights of white Americans when they consider race in a way that might help African-Americans and Latinos.

"An argument can be made that it is simply impossible to tease out down to the last student who would have been admitted, and who would have not been admitted, had they been a different skin color," Blum said. "What we know is skin color is weighed and ethnicity is weighed by the University of Texas in their admissions process, and that alone is enough to strike down the plan."

Blum and his supporters say the reasoning is simple. The Constitution is colorblind and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from treating people differently because of race.

It's an argument first successfully championed by the NAACP and other civil rights groups, most notably in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court declared the notion of "separate but equal" to be a fallacy.

"In its history, colorblindness has this progressive, anti-racist push behind it," said Ian Haney-López, a constitutional scholar at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

But following the Brown decision, the very groups that had ardently — and violently — defended laws mandating separation by race used the notion of a colorblind Constitution to challenge court orders to integrate schools.

"They began to say, yes, the Constitution is colorblind, and so the state cannot distinguish between races when it tried to remedy segregation," he said.

As a result of Southern resistance, it would take six years after Brown before 6-year old Ruby Bridges, wearing crisp white socks and black-bowed shoes, became the first black student to attend a white elementary school in the South. The image of the diminutive brown-skinned girl who needed U.S. marshals to protect her from an angry white mob inspired Norman Rockwell to preserve the moment in a painting that now hangs in the White House occupied by the first black president.

Initially, the Supreme Court unambiguously knocked those arguments down. In a 1971 ruling, it said that government could not mandate colorblindness when doing so would defeat the integration requirement of Brown v. Board of Education. A few years later, in a ruling on affirmative action, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take race into account. There is no other way."

But as the Supreme Court's make-up has grown more conservative, it has taken up a steady stream of so-called reverse discrimination cases, in which white plaintiffs have argued that race-specific measures born of the civil rights movement discriminate against white Americans and violate the 14th Amendment.

Supreme Court decisions have eroded programs and laws that use race to remedy inequalities, but not eliminated them altogether. And in a 2003 opinion written by centrist Sandra Day O'Connor, the justices narrowly upheld affirmative action in college admissions when it is the only means to ensure diversity.

But the Court's make-up changed in what scholars consider a significant way when Samuel Alito, considered the third most conservative Supreme Court justice since 1937, replaced O'Connor in 2006. Since then, several justices have made their constitutional disdain for race-conscious programs known. In a controversial 2007 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts sent a clear message when he used the equal protection argument at play in Brown v. Board of Education to strike down voluntary desegregation plans in schools.

Evoking a colorblind Constitution, Roberts said, "The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

And just last month during oral arguments over the constitutionality of a key aspect of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Antonin Scalia derisively called what's considered the most successful civil rights law in history a "racial entitlement."

Public opinion on race has changed over time as well. In the 1950s, surveys show, most white Americans believed that black Americans faced substantial discrimination but that they themselves experienced little. Today, despite gaping disparities between black and white Americans in income, education, health care, homeownership, employment and college admissions, a majority of white Americans now believe they are just as likely, or more likely, to face discrimination as black Americans.

Blum chose the University of Texas to mount what could be a decisive challenge to affirmative action in college admissions because it already had what was regarded as a "race-neutral" process — the Top 10 program. Since many Texas high schools remain segregated, taking the top 10 percent of students from black and Latino high schools ensured a substantial population of students of color at the UT.

As a consequence, Blum believed he could challenge whether the additional use of race to fill out the entering class passed constitutional muster.

To get standing in court, Blum needed a victim. That's when he started looking for a version of the Brown family, someone who could represent the arguable hurt caused when public officials used race.

This approach, too, mirrors an NAACP tactic from half a century ago. Then, knowing the Supreme Court was unlikely to throw out segregation in one fell swoop, the civil rights group brought a narrower challenge to segregated school facilities first.

One of those cases, ironically, targeted the same university as Blum — the University of Texas at Austin. The university, which had been closed to black students since its founding, denied the law school application of Heman Marion Sweatt because the state constitution required that black and white students attend separate schools.

Because Texas had no black law school, the NAACP sued, arguing that the state violated the constitutional mandate to provide equal facilities for black and white students. The Supreme Court ruled that the hastily put together black law school created to avoid admitting Sweatt could not possibly be equal. It ordered Texas to admit Sweatt as its first black student in 1950.

That suit launched the stone that would shatter separate but equal just four years later when the Court struck down segregation in schools in Brown.

Blum and his supporters hope to use the Fisher case, and the 14th Amendment challenge to the Voting Rights Act that Blum is also behind, in the same way.

According to Blum, the Constitution sees affirmative action policies — in college, in contracting, in employment — and Jim Crow laws as twin evils.

"I don't see the distinction," he said.

But several constitutional scholars interviewed for this piece dispute this notion. Neil Siegel of Duke University called this interpretation of the 14th Amendment "perverse." Georgetown law professor Girardeau A. Spann called it "discriminatory."

While the 14th Amendment doesn't mention race, the drafters went on to pass race-specific legislation aimed at helping former slaves and other black Americans overcome more than a century of racial oppression.

Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said that the concept of colorblindness holds great rhetorical appeal but that "there is no basis for concluding that the 14th Amendment equal protection clause requires colorblindness." In drafting the 14th Amendment, he said, Congress recognized "an enormous difference between a white majority disadvantaging minorities and a white majority acting to remedy past discrimination."

Conservatives challenging these types of programs purport to champion the legacy of the civil rights movement, Haney-Lopez said, but the historical roots of their efforts are much more cynical.

"I think that is incredibly important that people realize that today's proponents of colorblindness pretend that they are the heirs to Thurgood Marshall and John Marshall Harlan," he said. "But that is a lie. They are the heirs of Southern resistance to integration. And the colorblindness arguments that they use come directly from the Southern efforts to defeat Brown v. Board of Education."

Ilya Shapiro, a senior constitutional studies fellow at the Cato Institute, which filed an amicus brief supporting Fisher, thinks otherwise.

"I am not going to speak to anyone else's motives. It is unfair to paint people with the Jim Crow brush because they have those kinds of arguments," he said. "I don't like people being judged based on the color of their skin." If a program "treats people different because one has a different skin color, I find that offensive and I think the Constitution does as well."

But when asked why the drafters created programs targeted to black Americans if they did not intend the Constitution to allow the government to use race to help minority groups, Shapiro said, "It was a curious period."

At the same time Congress drafted the equal protection clause, he said, it also "voted for segregated schools in the District of Columbia."

That example is the very same one that segregationists Strom Thurmond and Richard Brevard Russell used when they drafted the 1956 Southern Manifesto urging officials to resist the Supreme Court's use of the equal protection clause to overturn school segregation.

The impact of a ruling that bans all racial considerations by universities, employers and governments "could have devastating impact on the ability to overcome past inequalities," Siegel said.

Few experts think Blum and his supporters are apt to win that big a victory in the Fisher case. And so he will likely be on the hunt again for another case, and another perfect plaintiff.

Nikole Hannah-Jones covered civil rights and fair housing for ProPublica. Previously, she covered governmental issues, the census, and race and ethnicity at The Oregonian.

• Nikole.Hannah-Jones@propublica.org
• @nhannahjones

---

---

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/news-outlets-unearth-more-donors-trust-recipients/

donors use charity to push free-market policies in states

By Paul Abowd

February 14, 2013

Charity acts as screen for conservative foundations that feed network of state-based think tanks, media outlets.

Virginia-based charity Donors Trust has promised anonymity to donors who seek to fund “sensitive or controversial” issues.

A Center for Public Integrity report last week lifted that veil — at least partially — revealing dozens of conservative foundations that together in recent years have given tens of millions of dollars to Donors Trust .

Donors Trust, in turn, has funded a nationwide network of free-market think tanks, media outlets and university programs to the tune of nearly $400 million since 2002.

Recently, much of that funding has gone toward state-based policy efforts. For example, Donors Trust provided 95 percent of the funding for a conservative media clearinghouse called the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which runs a network of state-based blogs.

While many of the charity’s 193 donors remain anonymous, a variety of media reports have shown where Donors Trust money ends up:

Climate change-denial

In late February, The Guardian GUK reported that 46 percent of Donors Trust grants in 2010 went to groups opposing climate science. Between 2002 and 2010, the group gave $118 million to about 100 such groups.

A detailed 2012 report published on DeSmog Blog ties Donors Trust to a vast climate science denial machine through its generous support for theHeartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank that mobilized support for the tobacco industry before shifting its focus to climate change. BUCHHOLTZ?]

An October episode of PBS Frontline said Donors Trust has become “the number one supporter” of climate denial groups like Heartland and the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity after industry giants such as ExxonMobil curtailed funding to Heartland following public protest.

Islamic radicalism

Donors Trust made its largest grant in 2007 to a New York-based group called Clarion Fund. The $17 million donation went toward the production of a documentary called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”

Seven weeks before the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president, Clarion distributed millions of copies of the movie, which stirred fear about Islamic radicalism, by inserting DVDs as ads in daily newspapers nationwide.

Reports later suggested that Chicago businessmanBarry Seid may have passed the $17 million through Donors Trust to Clarion. Seid and Donors Trust director Whitney Ball co-chair another foundation called Chicago Freedom Trust.

Academic coups?

In 2010, a free-market professor of economics whose research is funded through Donors Trust laid out his “Free State” plan for libertarians to migrate to and take over the state of New Hampshire.

In 2009, Donors Trust passed about $600,000 in donations to Shimer Collegewhile conservative Chicago businessmen, including Seid, attempted unsuccessfully to take control of the small liberal arts school.

‘Fair representation’

A Donors Trust subsidiary called the Project for Fair Representation has led legal challenges to affirmative action programs and, more recently, to the Voting Rights Act, according to reports by Reuters and The New York Times.

The project sought out and tapped the majority-white Shelby County, Ala., as plaintiffs in a challenge to Section 5 of the Act,which gives the U.S. Department of Justice power to approve or reject changes to electoral laws in 16 states, mostly in the south. The case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

---

---

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-supreme-court-strategist-20151222-story.html

Conservative legal strategist has no office or staff, just a surprising Supreme Court track record

[Abigail Fisher, Edward Blum

:{:{}:

}:

David G. Savage Contact Reporter

The most effective legal strategist before the Supreme Court these days is a retired stockbroker and liberal-turned-conservative who admits he sometimes finds plaintiffs by cold-calling strangers on the phone.

“I don't have a staff or an office,” or for that matter, a law degree, said Edward Blum, 63. He researches his cases on a laptop and describes his Project on Fair Representation as “me and a website.”

But Blum offers something that has proved far more important: a conservative take on 1960s-era civil rights principles that has won favor with the high court. These include the idea that the government may not consider race, even if it's to help minorities, and that election districts must be equal, based on the “one person, one vote” rule.

With the fierce focus of an outsider, Blum has put those issues squarely before the Supreme Court justices, who last month debated two Blum-backed cases: one over who should count when election districts are drawn and another about whether race can still play a role in college admissions.

Typically, the justices vote to hear a case when lower courts are divided, but occasionally an appeal poses an entirely new question and asks the justices to upset a long-settled practice. These are the kinds of cases that Blum has succeeded in bringing to the court.

His ideas are radically conservative. ... But in person, he is a soft-spoken, friendly guy.

— Jon M. Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, which opposes Blum in affirmative action and election districts cases

In his biggest victory to date, Blum challenged the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as outdated and a recipe for “racial gerrymandering” of election districts. The law had required some Southern states to win approval from the Justice Department before changing their election laws. The Supreme Court agreed with Blum's position in 2013, striking down that provision.

“He has had a remarkable run,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer for the libertarian Cato Institute. Shapiro describes Blum as the “architect” of the strategy even though he prefers to stay behind the scenes. “He is not an angry guy who wears an agenda on his sleeve.”

Civil rights advocates say Blum's victory in the Voting Rights Act case “gutted” the measure and allowed Republican-led states to pass voter ID laws that now threaten voting by minorities.

“His ideas are radically conservative,” said Jon M. Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which opposes Blum in the affirmative action and election districts cases. “But in person, he is a soft-spoken, friendly guy.”

Blum says his cases often stem from personal experience, such as the election district case. Blum, a Texas native who now lives on the coast of Maine, knew from his time living in Houston that some of the city's council districts had twice as many voters as others, even though they had equal numbers of total residents.

There, as in many parts of the nation, the growing population of immigrants has meant that some of the districts that elect a city council, a state legislature or the U.S. House of Representatives may have far fewer voters than others with the same total number of people.

Blum believed these stark differences were unconstitutional — a violation of the “one person, one vote” rule — and he focused on the Texas state Senate districts.

“I did it all on Google,” he said in an interview, describing how he went about setting up his case. “I identified the districts that were the most malapportioned.”

He found a rural and heavily Republican district in east Texas that had 574,000 adult citizens who could vote, and another, which included Brownsville on the Mexican border, that had only 350,000 eligible voters. Since both districts had about 800,000 residents according to the census data, they were each due one elected representative, Texas officials said.

:{:{}:

}:

First, Blum needed a plaintiff. “I looked for people who were active in Republican politics, and I made a dozen or more calls” before reaching the Republican Party chairwoman from Titus County. “When Sue Evenwel answered the phone, she was interested and agreed to be the plaintiff,” he said.

To no one's surprise, a three-judge panel in Texas dismissed the case of Evenwel vs. Abbott and ruled that the state was fully justified in drawing districts based on their “total population,” which has been the common practice nationwide. The plaintiffs, the judges said, are “relying upon a theory never before accepted before the Supreme Court or a circuit court.”

But when the lawyers hired by Blum appealed, the justices voted to hear it, even though there were no conflicting rulings from other parts of the country.

In a rarity, lawyers for the Obama administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott found themselves on the same side, opposing Blum. They cited two powerful arguments for maintaining the current system.

Affirmative action at universities in doubt as U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments

The Constitution speaks of “counting the whole number of persons in each state” when dividing the House seats among the states. How can it be unconstitutional then to use the same count when dividing districts within a state? Justice Elena Kagan asked during Dec. 8 arguments. Others noted that census data are the most reliable available, although they include the count of all residents, not just citizens.

During the argument, however, the court's conservatives said they were troubled by what Justice Anthony M. Kennedy called the “huge disparity” in the voting population of the two Texas districts. A ruling in Blum's favor could lead to a significant shift in political power, especially in states such as California with large immigrant populations.

Just presenting the issue to the court counts as a victory of sorts for Blum.

“Getting a case in front of the Supreme Court is much more difficult than winning there,” said James Bopp Jr., a Terre Haute, Ind., lawyer whom some compare with Blum. About 99% of the more than 8,000 cases appealed annually to the high court are turned down without a hearing.

Bopp, a staunch antiabortion activist, filed a series of free-speech lawsuits challenging campaign-funding limits. One of them, the Citizens United case, led to the 2010 ruling that struck down the laws that banned campaign spending by corporations.

:{:{}:

}:

Blum says he got interested in elections when he ran a losing campaign for a House seat in Houston in a district that he says was drawn to elect a black Democrat.

He grew up in a solidly Democratic household and was a campus liberal at the University of Texas in Austin, but he shifted rightward in the 1980s when he was working at an investment firm. The congressional race was “probably unwinnable” for a Republican, Blum said, and he and his wife decided to walk the district, passing out leaflets and talking to voters. They discovered they were repeatedly crossing the district lines.

“We would talk to blacks on one side of the street and whites on the other. It was the most eye-opening part of it,” he recalled.

He lost as expected, and then he did the unexpected by filing a lawsuit contending that it was unconstitutional to draw the district lines based on race.

Finding a lawyer was hard. “I consulted with several lawyers who said that claim would go nowhere,” he said. Two prominent Washington attorneys said they would consider taking the case, but only for a $1-million retainer.

For black students at Texas, Supreme Court remarks are a burden added

“I didn't have that kind of money,” he said, but eventually he found a real estate lawyer in Monroe, La., who agreed to take the case for $7,000. Blum put his name on the suit, but made his lead plaintiff a campaign volunteer named Al Vera who had served in the Navy and taught civics in high school.

Three years later, in a case called Bush vs. Vera, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas districts as “racial gerrymanders,” saying that the “use of block-by-block racial data was unprecedented.”

Emphasizing that his legal victories have also aided liberals, Blum notes with pride, “This principle has been embraced by the people who opposed it then.”

He was referring to a decision in March when the justices, by a 5-4 vote, ruled in favor of the Alabama Black Caucus and its Democrats, who sued after the Republican Legislature shifted tens of thousands of black voters into already black-majority districts. This racial line-drawing was unconstitutional, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said, citing the Bush vs. Vera ruling.

Blum is viewed as a thorn in the side by liberal civil rights advocates, who still resent his victory in the 2013 Voting Rights Act case, Shelby County vs. Holder. Blum's opponents are worried his latest case could endanger another liberal bedrock: affirmative action.

When the University of Texas decided to revive a race-based admissions policy that had been suspended, Blum decided to sue his alma mater. His plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, is the daughter of a former business colleague. The Supreme Court heard the case of Fisher vs. University of Texas on Dec. 9, the day after the election district case was argued.

Blum says he has turned to conservative donors and foundations to help fund his cases. They include the Searle Freedom Trust and the Bradley Foundation, he said, but not the billionaire Koch brothers, as some have suggested.

He spends little time in Washington, although he has a part-time fellowship at theAmerican Enterprise Institute. In mid-December, Blum and his wife drove south, and they plan to spend the winter in Tallahassee, Fla. Part of the appeal, he said, is Florida State University's law school, where he plans to brush up his legal skills by attending classes on constitutional law and American legal history.

“The professors said they would be glad to have me sit quietly in the back,” Blum said, adding that he expects to be back in Washington in June in time for the rulings on his two cases.

david.savage@latimes.com

==

Project on Fair Representation is a legal defense fund founded and led by Ed Blum with an agenda "dedicated to reversing race-based legal protections".^[1] The Project is financially supported by Donors Trust. ^[2]

The Project on Fair Representation funded the challenges in Supreme Court cases Shelby County v. Holder and Fisher v. University of Texaswith funds from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation funneled through Donors Trust. Both challenges were organized by Ed Blum. In Shelby County v. Holder the Court's ruling severely limited the Voting Rights Act and Fisher v. University of Texas, which attacked university affirmative admissions programs, was differed to a lower court.^[1]

Related Sourcewatch pages

• Donors Trust
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

External Articles

• Brendan Fischer, For Bradley Foundation, Challenging Affirmative Action & Voting Rights Is Part of Long-Term Crusade, PR Watch, June 27, 2013.

References

1. ↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:1.0^ ^1.1 Brendan Fischer, For Bradley Foundation, Challenging Affirmative Action & Voting Rights Is Part of Long-Term Crusade, PR Watch, June 27, 2013.
2. Jump up↑ Project on Fair Representation, About Us, Fund website, accessed August 22, 2013.

==

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/06/12142/bradley-foundation-challenging-affirmative-action-voting-rights-part-long-term-cr

The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is one-for-two in legal challenges to civil rights and racial equality this term, with the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in one case bankrolled by Bradley, and in another, remanding an affirmative action case to a lower court, turning back the Bradley-backed challenge. The cases represent the latest in the Bradley Foundation's long-term effort to dismantle the gains of the civil rights era.

In the 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Court effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, which had required states with a history of legalized racial discrimination to get pre-approval from the federal government before making changes to either voting laws or procedures. One day earlier, in Fisher v. University of Texas, the Court punted on a challenge to affirmative action, sending the case back to a lower court rather than outright prohibiting the consideration of race in college admissions.

The challenges to both the Voting Rights Act and university affirmative action programs were organized by the same activist, who has acknowledged that he receives funding from the Bradley Foundation -- a Milwaukee-based funder of right-wing causes that has long targeted racial equity.

Same Group and Donors Behind Fisher and Shelby County Cases

The group that brought both challenges is the Project on Fair Representation, a legal defense fund dedicated to reversing race-based legal protections and whose website says it devotes "all of its efforts to influencing jurisprudence, public policy, and public attitudes regarding race and ethnicity."The Project was founded and led by one person, Ed Blum, who coordinated the challenges in both the Fisher and Shelby County cases.

Blum has likened his role in high-profile litigation to "Yenta the matchmaker." "I find the plaintiff, I find the lawyer, and I put them together, and then I worry about it for four years," he said.

Blum urged Shelby County, Alabama, to bring its Section 5 challenge after the Department of Justice blocked its effort to dilute the voting power of its growing African-American population. He also connected with Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin and claimed it was because of her race. Blum was also behind the last Voting Rights Act challenge to make it to the Supreme Court, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder.

The Project on Fair Representation covered the legal fees in both the Shelby County and Fisher cases using funds filtered through the secretive Donors Trust, which has been described as a "Dark Money ATM" since it stealthily funnels money from the Kochs, Bradley and other funders to organizations in the right-wing network.

Typically, the identity of Donors Trust funders remain secret, but two of Blum's donors have been revealed: the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which gave at least $100,000 to bankroll Blum's latest legal challenges, and the Searle Freedom Trust, which for years has funded the Project on Fair Representation.

Bradley, which is headed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's campaign chair Michael Grebe, hands out $30 million in grants each year, and its support of Blum's group is only one example of its long-term effort to roll-back both voting rights and affirmative action.

With Bradley-Funded Challenge, Court Eviscerates Voting Rights Act

"Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions," Roberts wrote in the Shelby County case, joined by four other conservative justices. "African- American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by §5 [of the Act], with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent."

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the four dissenting justices, said: "In the Court's view, the very success of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dormancy." Invoking the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, she wrote: "'The arc of the moral universe is long,' he said, but 'it bends toward justice,' if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion. That commitment has been disserved by today's decision."

"Hubris is a fit word for today's demolition of the VRA."

Bradley's role in attacking voting rights is not limited to its support for Blum and his Project on Fair Representation.

In advance of the 2012 elections, Bradley was revealed as the secret funder that had bankrolled giant billboard ads, exclusively in neighborhoods of color, stating "Voter Fraud is a Felony" during a period whenvoter IDwas on hold in Wisconsin and many were confused as to its status. It funded groups that employed James O'Keefe, whose heavily-edited undercover videos hyped voter fraud allegations and helped take down ACORN, which had helped millions of low-income people register to vote. It also funded the legal advocacy group that represented O'Keefe.

Both Bradley and Searle have funded the American Legislative Exchange Council, which promoted voter ID laws in states across the country. And in the wake of Shelby County, ALEC-inspired voter ID bills and other restrictions will likely take effect across the South. As many as eleven percent of registered voters don't have government-issued photo ID and would be unable to vote under the laws, with those percentages even higher among communities of color and students.

Bradley also backs state-based conservative think tanks like Wisconsin's MacIver Institute, which have advanced unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to drum-up support for restrictive laws like voter ID. And it has given millions to groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, which have long hyped voter fraud and called for more restrictive voting measures.

Shelby County Means ALEC-Inspired Voter ID Law Will Be Implemented in Multiple States

As J. Christian Adams writes in a publication from the Bradley-funded Federalist Society: "those states that fall under Section 5 will be able to enact voter identification laws without seeking clearance from the federal government."

Indeed, just hours after Shelby County was published, Texas' Attorney General announced the state's ALEC-inspired voter ID law, which could disenfranchise up to 800,000 registered voters but was blocked by a federal court under Section 5 last year, would immediately take effect; so will the state's problematic redistricting map, which had been blocked by a federal court due to its discriminatory impact.

Mississippivoters will also be subjected to a voter ID requirement, since state officials need not wait for federal pre-clearance to implement a 2011 constitutional amendment. South Carolina's voter ID law, which was initially stalled by the DOJ, will also take effect. A strict voter ID law passed in Virginia this year -- which likely would not have been pre-cleared under Section 5 -- can also be implemented without federal approval.

True the Vote,whose poll watchers have been accused of voter suppression and which was awarded a $35,000 grant from Bradley in 2011 (later rescinded because the group hadn't received its 501(c)(3) status), stated:

"This is without doubt a step in the right direction for our Republic."

Hiccup for Bradley's Long Fight Against Affirmative Action

The Bradley-funded effort to end affirmative action in the Fisher case was less successful than the attack on Section 5. The challenge to the University of Texas' admissions program was kicked back to a lower court for further proceedings, albeit with instructions that the court more strictly scrutinize the university policy. Affirmative action supporters didn't celebrate the decision, but breathed a sigh of relief that the Court didn't entirely ban consideration of race in college admissions.

The case was only one front in the Bradley-funded war on affirmative action.

It has been a top funder of the Center for Individual Rights, a right-wing legal organization that has challenged affirmative action laws across the country (and where Ann Coulter worked as a litigator in the 1990s). CIR litigated two of the most significant affirmative action cases in recent decades, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, both decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. It had a major victory in the 1996 Hopwood v. Texas case in the 5th Circuit that radically reshaped diversity programs at the University of Texas -- potentially even banning recruitment of people of color -- until the decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The group represented the sponsors of Proposition 209, the 2001 California referendum that eliminates affirmative action in state programs, among other efforts. Bradley has given at least $2 million to CIR since 1989.

The Bradley Foundation has also given millions to Ward Connerley's anti-affirmative action "American Civil Rights Institute," including $700,000 in 2001 to support the Proposition 209 ballot initiative, and in 2005 awarding Connerley a $250,000 "Bradley Prize." And it has consistently funded the National Association of Scholars, giving millions to the group whose mission is fighting affirmative action by building scholar networks and organizing conferences and panels on college campuses across the country.

Bradley has also given over one million dollars to the "Center for Equal Opportunity," whose activities include traveling the country urging Republican legislators to crack down on affirmative action programs, which it claims constitute "reverse discrimination."

In 2011, a Center for Equal Opportunity representative claimed the University ofWisconsinwas guilty of "severe racial discrimination" -- a questionable assertion given that just 2.6 percent of the university's 42,180 students are African-American and 3.8 percent are Hispanic -- prompting protests from students already energized in opposition to the agenda of Governor Scott Walker, whose campaign chair and transition team leader was Bradley CEO and President Michael Grebe.

Bradley Foundation Is Not Going Away, and Neither Are These Fights

The Bradley Foundation is one of the largest "philanthropic" organizations in the country and has funded an array of organizations advancing right-wing causes, ranging from school privatization (as documented by One Wisconsin Now at BradleyWatch.org) to Islamophobia, union-busting, "tort reform" and other issues. Between 2001 and 2010 it gave over $350 million to hundreds of institutions, which is nearly as much as the seven Koch and Scaife family foundations combined.

(See a full list of Bradley Foundation contributions here).

Which means the Bradley Foundation is not going anywhere anytime soon -- and battles over racial equity, voting rights, affirmative action and a range of other issues will continue to be funded and fought for years to come.

---

This article has been updated.

ALEC Exposed

Democracy

Politics

Race / Ethnic Issues

Wisconsin Protests

News

==

http://kochcash.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Embargo_Report.pdf   kochtopus

==

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/03/11999/racial-entitlements-long-term-effort-end-voting-rights-act-and-affirmative-action

The U.S. Supreme Court may roll back two pillars of the civil rights era this term -- the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and affirmative action -- both of which have long been targeted by the right-wing and whose challenges are backed by the same set of deep-pocketed ideological funders.

Scalia Sees Voting Rights and Affirmative Action as "Racial Entitlements"

Wednesday's oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder indicated hostility among some justices towards Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), which requires states with a history of state-sanctioned racial discrimination to get federal pre-approval before implementing changes to their voting laws or procedures. Congress has renewed it four times since 1965 with significant bipartisan support, most recently in 2006, when every U.S. Senator voted for it.

But that support was "very likely attributable to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement," Justice Antonin Scalia asserted from the bench. "Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes," he said, a characterization of the landmark civil rights law that was met with gasps in the courtroom.

This is not the first time Scalia has talked about "racial entitlements" -- and his perspective will almost certainly apply to another civil rights case in the Court's docket this term.

"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement -- even for the most admirable and benign of purposes -- is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred," he wrote [3] about affirmative action in a concurring opinion in the 1995 case Adarand Constructors v Pena, a decision that enacted a high bar for government affirmative action programs.

Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed similar support for so-called color-blindness under the law. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," he wrote [4] in a 2007 case striking down the consideration of a student's race by school districts striving for diversity in schools in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky. Likewise, in a 2009 decision about the VRA, Roberts expressed a view that race matters less today, and therefore Section 5's federal pre-clearance requirement may no longer be justified since "things have changed in the South."

Roberts and Scalia have another bite at the affirmative action apple this term. In October, the Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v University of Texas, which challenges race-conscious university admission policies. Questioning from Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia indicated the Court may have a five-justice majority to reverse parts of a 2003 ruling that allowed consideration of race in college admissions (a decision that came before President George W Bush named two justices to the court).

The statements from these justices on affirmative action and voting rights reflect a view that race plays little role in America today (! [5]), or at least that it should no longer be acknowledged under the law. In fact, "explicit anti-black attitudes" have actually increased [6] over the past four years, particularly among Republicans, according to research by social scientists at Brown and the University of Michigan.

If the Court sides with plaintiffs in Fisher and Shelby County, it would be a victory for the right, which for decades has been laying the groundwork for rolling-back these sorts of progressive gains by adopting the terminology of "color-blindness."

Long-Standing Opposition to Affirmative Action, Section 5

Both the VRA and affirmative action grew out of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and have been targeted for reversal ever since by generations of reactionaries.

President Lyndon Johnson's support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act led to realignments within America's two major political parties. Southern Democrats like "Dixiecrat" Senator Strom Thurmondof South Carolina defected to the Republican Party, and over time many voters who had long supported "the Party of Lincoln" shifted their allegiance to Democrats.

Ronald Reagan'sopposition to civil rights programs, for example, was a key part of his effort to win the presidency by appealing to the racial views of white Southern voters. He famously kicked-off his successful presidential bid by declaring his support for "state's rights" at a Mississippi event held just a few miles from where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964. "States rights" had been a rallying call for Southern states opposing Brown v. Board of Education and the end of racial segregation, and provided a facially neutral way to oppose the VRA's Section 5 federal pre-clearance requirements. He called the VRA "humiliating to the South" and described affirmative action as a form of "reverse discrimination" where whites are "victims." As legendary campaign consultant Lee Atwater acknowledged [7] after the campaign, the way Reagan discussed voting rights and affirmative action was part of a careful effort to garner the votes of white Southerners by using "abstract" and coded language to avoid express racism.

Once elected, Reagan stopped enforcing several affirmative action programs, and his Justice Department began filing amicus briefs in support of white men claiming injury from the programs. In 1982, when the Voting Rights Act was up for reauthorization, John Roberts was working for the Reagan Administration and argued for [8] a watered-down version of the law. After Congress rejected the administration's efforts and passed a strengthened VRA with bipartisan support, a hesitant Reagan nonetheless signed the reauthorization -- prompting Roberts to write [9] "we were burned." President Reagan also appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justices who passed the litmus tests of a narrow view of affirmative action and civil rights laws: Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, who are still on the Court, as well as William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor.

Right-Wing Institutions Laid Groundwork

Part of the long-term success of modern Republicanism, which grew out of opposition to the civil rights gains of the 1960s, is attributable to the development of a network of right-wing funders and well-funded institutions starting in the mid-1970s. For example, in 1973, legendary right-wing activistPaul Weyrich co-founded both the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heritage Foundation.

ALEC, as the Center for Media and Democracy has documented, has advanced an array of policy initiatives at the state level to advance a right-wing agenda, for example by privatizing public institutions like education and prisons, and by successfully promoting efforts to restrict voting rights (some of which have been thwarted in the past year by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act). In addition to voter ID legislation [10], ALEC has adopted model bills like the deceptively named "Civil Rights Act" [11] to end affirmative action programs run by states and universities.

The Heritage Foundation has become one of the largest think tanks in the country, and has long[12]opposed[13]affirmative action and Section 5. In recent years, Heritage Foundation legal fellow Hans Von Spakovsky (who was recently profiled by [14] New Yorker author Jane Mayer in a piece crediting research from CMD) has promoted the myth of rampant voter fraud to justify restrictive state voting laws. He argues [15] that Section 5 is an outdated statute that allows the feds to trample on state liberty and has also opposed [16] affirmative action.

The last three or four decades have also seen the development of an array of legal institutions attempting to achieve right-wing political victories through the courts. The best known is the Federalist Society, which has contributed to the development of legal theories to advance preferred policy outcomes through the judicial system, and has cultivated a network of like-minded lawyers and judges, including Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts.

And these groups have been funded by a shared set of wealthy donors. In the 1970s and 1980s, foundations created by the Coors and Scaife family fortunes provided the seed money for groups like ALEC and the Heritage Foundation. The Bradley Foundation and Koch family foundations also provide tens of millions to an array of right-wing organizations.

Likewise, the current Supreme Court challenges to both the Voting Rights Act and university affirmative action programs are backed by top funders of the movement and were organized by the same right-wing activist -- and are carrying forward this long-term project to roll-back the gains of the civil rights era.

Same Group and Donors Behind Fisher and Shelby County Cases

The Project on Fair Representation is a "legal defense fund" dedicated to reversing race-based legal protections, and its director, Ed Blum, coordinated the challenges in both the Fisher and Shelby County cases. Blum has likened his role in high-profile litigation to "Yenta the matchmaker."

"I find the plaintiff, I find the lawyer, and I put them together, and then I worry about it for four years," he said [17].

Blum urged Shelby County, Alabama, to bring its Section 5 challenge after the Department of Justice blocked its effort to dilute the voting power of the growing African-American population. He also connected with Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin and claimed it was because of her race. Blum was also behind the last Voting Rights Act challenge to make it to the Supreme Court, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder.

The Project on Fair Representation's legal fees are entirely funded by the secretive Donors Trust, which has been described as [18] a "Dark Money ATM." Donors Trust funnels money from the Kochs and other funders to organizations in the right-wing network, but keeps the original donors secret.

Blum's known contributors include the Bradley Foundation, which also bankrolls groups promoting voter suppression, writes [19] Ari Berman of The Nation:

Blum's group does not have to disclose which funders of Donors Trust are giving him money, but he has identified two of them: the Bradley Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust. The Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation paid for billboards in minority communities in Milwaukee during the 2010 election with the ominous message "Voter Fraud Is a Felony!", which voting rights groups denounced as voter suppression. Both Bradley and Searle have given six-figure donations to ALEC in recent years, and Bradley funded a think tank in Wisconsin, the MacIver Institute, that hyped discredited claims of voter fraud to justify the state's voter ID law, currently blocked in state court.

The Bradley Foundation has also been a major funder of attacks on affirmative action. It has given millions to Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action "American Civil Rights Institute," and it has given over one million dollars to a group that calls itself the "Center for Equal Opportunity," whose activities include traveling the country [20] urging Republican legislators to crack down [21] on affirmative action programs, which it claims constitute "reverse discrimination." In 2011, a Center for Equal Opportunity representative claimed [20] the University of Wisconsin was guilty of "severe racial discrimination." This is a difficult claim to believe given that 2.6 percent of the university's 42,180 students are African-American and 3.8 percent are Hispanic, much lower percentages than the general population.

Legal Victories May Not Help GOP's Long-Term Viability

Institutions [22] of higher [23] education [24] -- and many employers [25] -- indicate that taking race into account remains an important tool for promoting diversity in classrooms and the workplace, particularly to help compensate for the institutional forms of racism [26] that contribute to ongoing inequity.

And civil rights groups strongly contend that Section 5 remains a vital part of the VRA's goal of protecting access to the ballot box. The Act was designed to end decades of racist Jim Crow voting restrictions, like literacy tests, which might have been facially neutral but had a racially discriminatory impact. And in the past year, Section 5 has been applied to block the wave of voter ID restrictions passed in states like South Carolina [27] and Texas, as well as to stop discriminatory redistricting in Texas and to keep Florida from reducing early voting hours in certain areas. Like the Jim Crow-era restrictions, the ALEC-inspired voter ID laws and limits on early voting would disproportionately impact voters of color.

The problems of the 1960s and 1970s remain concentrated [28] in the areas covered by Section 5: six of the nine states fully covered by the provision have passed new voting restrictions since 2010, but only one-third of the rest of the country passed similar restrictions during the same period. Justice Elena Kagan noted during Wednesday's oral argument that while covered jurisdictions hold less than 25% of the U.S. population, they account for 56% of successful voting-rights lawsuits.

Although each case currently before the court asks a separate constitutional question -- for Fisher, whether considering race in university admissions violates the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection guarantees, and for Shelby County, whether requiring federal approval for changes in state voting procedures violates the 10th Amendment's protections for "state's rights" -- if the Court sides with the plaintiffs, the cases will represent major victories for the right-wing movement's effort to roll-back civil rights gains.

But, as today's Republican Party tries to lose its image as the party of white people, these potential legal wins may instead be pyrrhic victories that reinforce it.

• ALEC Exposed [29]
• Democracy [30]
• Politics [31]

• News [32]

PR Watch is published by the Center for Media and Democracy. © Center for Media and Democracy 2013.

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703 • Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

---

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/03/11999/racial-entitlements-long-term-effort-end-voting-rights-act-and-affirmative-action

Links: