With Sotomayor appointment, grievance politics steps to the door of the U.S. Supreme Court

If Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as a judge on the U.S. Supreme Court, grievance politics will have penetrated one of the nation's last refuges of even-handedness.

Liberal arts colleges were among the first institutions to declare defeat, back in the 1960s. That's when history, literature and political science fell by the wayside and students began migrating to the new enlightenment: women's studies, ethnic studies, black studies, queer studies and post-modern theory.

Those courses had one thing in common; they all portrayed white men as the powerful devils who must be defeated before the self-appointed victims could thrive.

Then the foundations, huge pools of money, began falling into line. The newspapers, a herd of independent minds, followed suit, as did much of television news.

Fearful that someone, somewhere, might escape the enlightenment, federal, state and local governments began enforcing affirmative action laws, designed to redress grievances.

Over time, conservatives became an endangered species in liberal arts faculties and on newspaper staffs. Some foundations became funders of the political left.

As grievance theater, featuring Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and many others, became a pervasive feature of American life, grievance politics crossed racial lines and seeped into the culture of America.

One man recognized the significance and seized the moment. That man was Barack Obama, who carefully closeted records of his radical past and failed to mention, during the campaign, that his mission was to remake America.

Now, President Obama has chosen Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, where she would become the first hispanic justice. Her sense of grievance, and her willingness to use the bench to redress it, was apparent in the case of New Haven fire fighters who had performed well on advancement examinations but failed to win promotion.

New Haven administered the tests in 2003 to 118 candidates, 27 of them black.

"None of the blacks did well enough to qualify for the 15 immediately available promotions," Reason Magazine reported. "After a rabble-rousing minister with close ties to the mayor disrupted meetings and warned of dire political consequences if the city promoted persons from the list generated by the exams, the city said: No one will be promoted."

The firefighters who had passed the exam appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, where Sotomayor was a judge.

Reason continued: "Sotomayor ruled against the firefighters, a decision that her colleague and fellow Clinton appointee Judge Jose Cabranes, writes The New Republic's Jeffery Rosen, denounced as containing "no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case."

The New Haven case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reason looks for a close decision in the Supreme Court, with Justice Anthony Kennedy possibly supplying the swing vote.

The question is, what will conservatives do? Things have started to go their way, with Michigan and several other states having repealed affirmative action laws in recent years.

Now, Obama has teed up the ball. Do his opponents dare to swing?