Looking for lunch-hour reading? I'd recommend Justice Samuel Alito's concurring opinion in Ricci v. DeStefano. Alito's devastating narrative argues that the real reason the city of New Haven threw out the results of its fire-fighter exam was "the desire to placate a politically important racial constituency." The chief culprit is the Reverend Boise Kimber, a political fixer straight out of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Court's negation of Judge Sotomayor's Appeals Court holding in Ricci won't affect her confirmation. Probably! But the parts of her confirmation hearings dealing with Ricci certainly will make the most news, and may harm her favorability ratings. In a recent column for Time, Christopher Caldwell noted that:

Affirmative action has been a revolution in American rights and in our ideas of citizenship. To judge from almost all polls and referendums over the past few decades, it is reliably unpopular. Judges prop it up. Since the election of the first black President, it has been a shoe waiting to drop. The rationale it rests on — that minorities are cut off from fair access to positions of influence in society — has been undermined, to put it mildly. Elevating a hard-line defender of affirmative action is thus a provocation in a way that it would not have been in years past.

And the debate over affirmative action that the Ricci decision provokes will not redound to the Democrats' advantage.