On the Originalist Case that Racial Preferences by Government are Constitutional

The case falls short on several grounds.

I am reprinting a post from 2012, again pertinent given that the Supreme Court is about to hear arguments in the Harvard and UNC affirmative action cases. (Harvard is a private university, but under precedent it's held to the same anti-discrimination standards as public universities via Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act).

The Constitutional Accountability Center has filed an interesting amicus brief in the Fisher affirmative action case on behalf of six prominent law professor amici. The brief tries to exploit a weakness in conservative Justices' affirmative action opinions, which is that these Justices have almost entirely ignored the question of whether an originalist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would allow for race-based legislation meant to advantage African Americans. The brief therefore concentrates on showing that the same Congress that enacted the Fourteenth Amendment passed several race-conscious measures intended to aid African Americans, that these measures were denounced by opponents as class legislation, and that the same Congress rejected versions of the Fourteenth Amendment that would have explicitly banned race-conscious legislation.

I have neither the time nor inclination to check the brief's citations. So let's assume that not just the brief's facts but also the interpretation of those facts (e.g., in terms of which laws count as race-conscious) are accurate. It nevertheless strikes me as only marginally helpful, at best, for at least two reasons.

First, unless I somehow missed it, every piece of race-conscious Reconstruction-era legislation mentioned in the brief is federal legislation. None of the legislation in question grants authority to states to engage in race-conscious legislation. In Fisher the underlying issue is whether a state university may engage in race-conscious admissions. The authors not only don't defend, but don't even raise, the claim that the Reconstruction Congress thought that the same standards of race-neutrality should apply to the federal as to state and local governments.

And indeed, we know that Congress didn't think that, because it passed a Fourteenth Amendment that applied only to the states, and did not deign to apply any sort of new equal protection standard to the federal government, which in turn was not covered by any explicit equal protection guarantee of the sort contained in the Fourteenth Amendment. So I think the brief makes a provocative case that perhaps the federal government should be subject to more lenient standards of race neutrality than the states, an argument that the Supreme Court itself has adopted at times, but abandoned in the Adarand case. And while it's true that the Court now holds that all levels of government are subject to the same equal protection standard, the black letter law is that the federal government is subject to the Fourteenth Amendment's standards, and not the states to whatever standard the federal government should theoretically be held too.

Second, it strikes me that if I were to find the brief persuasive on the Fourteenth Amendment issue, it would only persuade me that all levels of government may at times engage in race-conscious legislation on behalf of African Americans. But in a state like Texas, with a much larger Hispanic population than black population, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action preferences are Hispanics. The authors provide no evidence that the Framers would have allowed race-conscious preferences for groups other than blacks (and indeed, I believe that Mexican-Americans, the primary Hispanic group in Texas, were (a) in any event considered "white" under federal law and that (b) they were nevertheless subject to federal discrimination, not federal favoritism, at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was being enacted).

More generally, most "minorities" in the United States are not African Americans, with Hispanics outnumbering blacks, plus an additional six percent Asian Americans (who don't usually benefit from admissions preferences–quite the opposite–but who are eligible for many other affirmative action programs), plus another several million Native Americans. Even among African Americans, a significant percentage of the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs, especially on university campuses, are blacks who were never subject to American slavery because they or their ancestors immigrated from Africa or the Caribbean long after the Civil War.

So the CAC brief may provide originalist evidence that the U.S. government should be given more leeway in regard to race-conscious policies than the states get, and, more generously, may provide originalist evidence that even the states may engage in race-conscious programs that benefit the descendants of American slaves. But I'm not persuaded that it's at all helpful in showing that states may willy-nilly benefit any ethnic group it chooses at the expense of any other ethnic group, as, for example, University of Texas does in preferring Hispanic applicants (who are deemed "underrepresented") and disfavoring Asian-Americans (who are deemed "overrepresented").

UPDATE: It's also worth noting that many Hispanics are solely or primarily of European heritage, and about 50% identify themselves as 'white' on census bureau forms. UT's approach, in common with how preferences work in general, is that a state university can and should favor white descendants of Spanish conquistadors or Italian immigrants to Argentina or Jewish Mexicans of Eastern European descent, solely because the former have Spanish-speaking ancestors. (Indeed, the "diversity" rationale for affirmative action seems to demand such a policy. In Grutter, the district court found that Michigan Law School gave preferences only Mexican American and mainland Puerto Ricans, but Michigan vigorously denied this, assumedly because it conflicted with the diversity rationale and suggested an illicit social justice rationale for its policies. Grutter's attorneys didn't pursue this point.) So for the brief to be persuasive in defending UT's policies, it seems to me it would need to persuade readers that the fact that the the Reconstruction Congress allowed for race-conscious federal legislation benefiting slaves and descendants of slaves somehow means that the same Congress would have endorsed state preferences based on linguistic heritage, regardless of race and regardless of whether the individuals received the preference or their ancestors had even been subject to de jure discrimination in the United States. That seem like quite a stretch.