Pundit Broder vs. Justice Scalia

In 1990, when he ran for re-election, North Carolina’s Sen. Jesse Helms’ campaign put out a memorable TV ad: “You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of racial quotas.”

That ad, which the majority of North Carolina voters approved in re-electing Jesse, was, according to Washington Post columnist David Broder: “Infamous … a naked appeal to racial antagonism.”

Mr. Broder, an exceedingly pompous pundit, has apparently never had to suffer the racial discrimination of those non-priority minority people who, because of the lightness of the skin with which they were born, have suffered exactly the same kind of treatment so accurately described in the Jesse Helms ad.

And so he has attacked one of the most brilliant minds on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia, for what Broder decries as a “scare tactic scenario.”

Broder states that Justice Scalia said that the opinion of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor “opens the way to ‘racial discrimination’ in public and private employment; adding sarcastically that he was sure that the ‘non-minority individuals who are deprived of a legal education, a civil service job, or any job at all by reason of their skin color will surely understand.'”

Truth apparently upsets pundit Broder.

He denounced Scalia’s superb dissent as: “Sarcastic, dismissive, polemical and smug,” yet David Broder is, without rival, the smuggest journalist I have ever met or read in the three decades I have been reporting from Washington.

During oral arguments, notes Broder, Justice Scalia “told Michigan’s counsel that if the law school was so hell bent on including more minorities, it should simply lower its admissions standards, a stunningly patronizing and insulting comment.”

While this may have stunned Mr. Broder, most Americans would strongly disagree with Broder’s claim that this Scalia logic was either patronizing or insulting.

And further, Scalia noted that the lessons of “mutual understanding and tolerance Michigan was seeking to provide by building a diverse student body were more appropriately 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.”

That, ruled Broder, was “said scornfully” and was “a ridiculous contention.”

So, Mr. Broder decided to warn President Bush about this allegedly awful man on the Supreme Court: “During the last presidential campaign, whenever George W. Bush was asked what he would seek in a Supreme Court appointee, the first name he brought up as his ideal was Justice Antonin Scalia. Last week’s historic rulings in the University of Michigan’s affirmative-action cases show why Bush needs to find another model.”

Most Americans, I believe, hope that when Chief Justice Rhenquist retires, the president should nominate Scalia as his replacement – among many other reasons because his approval by the Senate would move columnist Broder to write an even more extremist column damning Justice Scalia.