WASHINGTON Vote reveals divided court

Justice Thomas, an opponent of affirmative action, quoted an abolitionist.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Justice Clarence Thomas quoted a famous abolitionist. Justice John Paul Stevens said one of the cases should have been dismissed. Justice Antonin Scalia talked of lessons learned in kindergarten.
The Supreme Court's split decision Monday in a pair of challenges to affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan produced opinions that dissented from the majority for a variety of reasons.
By a vote of 6-3, the high court struck down an undergraduate school policy that automatically gave a 20-point boost to minority applicants.
It upheld a more general policy at the university's law school by a 5-4 vote.
Abolitionist quoted
Justice Thomas, the only black member of the court and an opponent of affirmative action, said the school's policy in the law school case violated the Constitution's equal protection clause. He quoted from a speech by Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist, to deliver what he called "a message lost on today's majority."
In the 1865 speech to a group of abolitionists, Douglass said Americans had always been anxious about what to do with black people.
"I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us!" he said. "Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!
"If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!" Douglass said.
Justice Thomas wrote that he, like Douglass, believes blacks can achieve in "every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators."
"Because I wish to see all students succeed whatever their color, I share, in some respect, the sympathies of those who sponsor the type of discrimination advanced by the University of Michigan Law School," he said.
"The Constitution does not, however, tolerate institutional devotion to the status quo in admissions policies when such devotion ripens into racial discrimination," Justice Thomas said.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, author of the main dissenting opinion in the same case, said he didn't believe the law school's process was "narrowly tailored to the interest it asserts," that is, achieving a "critical mass" of minorities.
"Stripped of its 'critical mass' veil, the law school's program is revealed as a naked effort to achieve racial balancing," Justice Rehnquist said. His opinion was seconded by Justices Scalia, Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy.
Reason for dissent
Justice Stevens dissented in the undergraduate case, saying it should have been dismissed because plaintiffs Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher were enrolled elsewhere before filing their class-action lawsuit against Michigan.
He also noted that neither Gratz nor Hamacher was in the process of reapplying to the university at the time they filed the lawsuit.
"There is a total absence of evidence that either petitioner would receive any benefit from the prospective relief sought by their lawyer," Justice Stevens wrote.
Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg also dissented in that case.
Justice Scalia, who partly disagreed with elements of the majority's ruling in the law school case, said the "Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race, and state-provided education is no exception."
He also mocked the "educational benefit" -- cross-racial understanding and better preparation of students for an increasingly diverse work force and society -- that the majority said Michigan seeks to achieve through its policy.
"This is not, of course, an 'educational benefit' on which students will be graded on their law school transcript (Works and Plays Well with Others: B+) or tested by the bar examiners (Q: Describe in 500 words or less your cross-racial understanding)," Justice Scalia wrote.
Rather, he said it is a "lesson of life rather than law" that is learned by people "three feet shorter and 20 years younger than the full-grown adults at the University of Michigan Law School, in institutions ranging from Boy Scout troops to public school kindergartens."
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