Michigan on the Merits

IN 2003, WHEN THE Supreme Court upheld the use of race and ethnicity in the admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated in her opinion for the Court that a core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was "to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race." Even "a lawful [race-based] policy . . . must have a logical end point." When might that be? "We expect," she said, "that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary."

Let's see . . . 2003 plus 25 is 2028. But this past Tuesday--22 years early, you might say--the people of Michigan went ahead and provided an "end point" to the very policy the O'Connor majority approved. They passed a ballot measure amending the state constitution to outlaw racial preferences in public education, employment, and contracting.
Voters favored the initiative by 58 to 42 percent. That's a landslide. Not even Jennifer Granholm, the incumbent Democratic governor reelected last week, did as well. Yet few predicted that Proposal 2, as it was called, would win big. Polls leading up to Election Day gave neither side a clear edge.

Michigan is now the third state where voters have used an initiative process to bar public authorities from granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. California was the first, in 1996, and Washington followed two years later.

California businessman Ward Connerly helped lead both those earlier efforts. And in 2003, shortly after the Supreme Court not only sustained race-based admissions at the University of Michigan Law School but also, in a companion case, overturned a more blatantly discriminatory policy at Michigan's undergraduate school, Connerly received a phone call from Jennifer Gratz, the lead plaintiff in the latter case.

Gratz recognized that the net effect of the two rulings was to leave substantial room for state authorities to continue taking race and sex into account in the allocation of limited opportunities, such as places in an entering class or jobs in the department of motor vehicles or contracts to build a highway. Only by adding the nondiscrimination principle to the Michigan constitution could the issue be resolved. Connerly and Gratz formed a group they called the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative to promote such an amendment, and Gratz became its executive director. It was "a full-time job," she told me, the culmination of "a ten-year battle." Connerly contributed $500,000 of his own money.

Connerly and Gratz didn't exactly have an easy time of it. When the longtime House Democrat John Dingell heard that Connerly had entered his state to help organize the no-preference effort, he wrote the businessman a letter advising, "The people of Michigan have a simple message to you: go home." Connerly, his smile evident, responded by thanking Dingell for "such a warm and hospitable welcome to Michigan."

The welcome continued--in the form of efforts to keep the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative from getting its measure on the ballot. There were lawsuits, and there was bureaucratic delay. The group was unable to get the initiative on the ballot in 2004, as originally planned.

Then, once the measure was finally destined for a vote, state election officials decided to describe Proposal 2 on the ballot as banning "affirmative action"--a term not found in the text of the initiative. Opponents hoped that voters would see the measure as outlawing seemingly benign "affirmative action" and vote no. Even so, the measure won, resoundingly.

And it won over the opposition of everyone who was anyone in Michigan. Only one prominent statewide officeholder, the attorney general (a Republican), endorsed it. The state GOP treated the measure like the plague, with Dick DeVos, the (losing) Republican candidate for governor, on the record against it. Naturally, the Democrats opposed it. So did major corporations, including the automakers, and so did the unions. So did higher education. So did well-known clergy.

Even basketball coaches at the most prominent state universities got into the game. "I know what it takes to build a team," said Tom Izzo, the coach at Michigan State, "and that is diversity. We need all kinds of players on our team, and we need all kinds of students on our campus if we are going to be successful in building the Michigan of tomorrow." You think Tom Izzo recruits and plays "all kinds of players"--point guards, shooting guards, forwards, centers--on any basis other than merit?