Court Opinion

ID: 9428918
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:25:08.635316+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:16.154303
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
with whom Justice Brennan joins,
concurring.
While I join the opinion of the Court, I write separately to address what I believe are the critical distinctions between this case and Washington v. Seattle School District No. 1, ante, p. 457.
*546The Court always has recognized that distortions of the political process have special implications for attempts to achieve equal protection of the laws. Thus the Court has found particularly pernicious those classifications that threaten the ability of minorities to involve themselves in the process of self-government, for if laws are not drawn within a “just framework,” Hunter v. Erickson, 393 U. S. 385, 393 (1969) (Harlan, J., concurring), it is unlikely that they will be drawn on just principles.
The Court’s conclusion in Seattle followed inexorably from these considerations. In that case the statewide electorate reallocated decisionmaking authority to “ ‘mak[e] it more difficult for certain racial and religious minorities [than for other members of the community] to achieve legislation that is in their interest.’” Washington v. Seattle School District No. 1, ante, at 470 (emphasis in original), quoting Hunter v. Erickson, 393 U. S., at 395 (Harlan, J., concurring). The Court found such a political structure impermissible, recognizing that if a class cannot participate effectively in the process by which those rights and remedies that order society are created, that class necessarily will be “relegated, by state fiat, in a most basic way to second-class status.” Plyler v. Doe, 457 U. S. 202, 233 (1982) (Blackmun, J., concurring).
In my view, something significantly different is involved in this case. State courts do not create the rights they enforce; those rights originate elsewhere — in the state legislature, in the State’s political subdivisions, or in the state constitution itself. When one of those rights is repealed, and therefore is rendered unenforceable in the courts, that action hardly can be said to restructure the State’s decisionmaking mechanism. While the California electorate may have made it more difficult to achieve desegregation when it enacted Proposition I, to my mind it did so not by working a structural change in the political process so much as by simply repealing the right to invoke a judicial busing remedy. Indeed, ruling for petition*547ers on a Hunter theory seemingly would mean that statutory affirmative-action or antidiscrimination programs never could be repealed, for a repeal of the enactment would mean that enforcement authority previously lodged in the state courts was being removed by another political entity.
In short, the people of California — the same “entity” that put in place the State Constitution, and created the enforceable obligation to desegregate — have made the desegregation obligation judicially unenforceable. The “political process or the decisionmaking mechanism used to address racially conscious legislation” has not been “singled out for peculiar and disadvantageous treatment,” Washington v. Seattle School District No. 1, ante, at 485 (emphasis in original), for those political mechanisms that create and repeal the rights ultimately enforced by the courts were left entirely unaffected by Proposition I. And I cannot conclude that the repeal of a state-created right — or, analogously, the removal of the judiciary’s ability to enforce that right — “ ‘curtailfs] the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities.’” Ante, at 486, quoting United States v. Carotene Products Co., 304 U. S. 144, 153, n. 4 (1938).
Because I find Seattle distinguishable from this case, I join the opinion and judgment of the Court.