This Dumb, Dishonest Attack On Justice Scalia Takes The Cake

A lot of arguments and attacks in politics are not totally fair, honest, or logical. But sometimes, the combination of unfairness, idiocy, and brazen hypocrisy still has the capacity to surprise. So it is with the past 24 hours’ apparently coordinated Two Minutes’ Hate against Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia over questions he asked at oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas, the Court’s latest case on racial preferences in college admissions.

Fisher is on its second trip to the Supreme Court after two decades of lawsuits over the University of Texas’ various efforts to incorporate race as a factor in admissions. In an effort to ensure racial, geographic, and economic diversity in its in-state admissions after the Supreme Court started taking a more skeptical view of racial preferences, Texas passed a law (signed by then-Gov. George W. Bush) admitting the top 10 percent of every high school class in the state into the University of Texas.

But UT still uses race as a factor in admissions for the rest of its student body. Fisher is yet another in a line of cases challenging that policy, which the Supreme Court has never explicitly approved or banned, but rather has subjected to a series of balancing tests, with recent decisions tightening the level of scrutiny to be applied. While the Court’s conservatives would plainly prefer to do away with making race a factor in college admissions, the need to persuade Justice Kennedy to that position (or away from it) has led to a lot of briefs and arguments focused on the practical impact of doing so.

Enter Gregory Garre, the lawyer defending the university, who was in the midst of making the following argument in response to questions by Justice Kennedy:

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