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Young v. American Mini Theatres
SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR
Reagan's 1981 appointee, usually found with the conservatives
U.S. authority to regulate state employees' wages was endorsed last year. O'Connor chided the majority.
Because virtually every state activity, like virtually every activity of a private individual, arguably "affects" interstate commerce, Congress can now supplant the States from the significant sphere of activities envisioned for them by the Framers . . . All that stands between the remaining essentials of state sovereignty and Congress is the latter's underdeveloped capacity for self-restraint . . . Our federal system requires something more than a unitary, centralized government.
Garcia v. San Antonio M.T.A.
ANTONIN SCALIA
A conservative 1986 Reagan appointee
Last March the court turned down Paul Johnson, a white male who was passed over for a promotion because of an affirmative-action plan that favored women and minorities. Scalia dissented.
It is unlikely that today's result will be displeasing to politically elected officials, to whom it provides the means of quickly accommodating the demands of organized groups to achieve concrete, numerical improvement in the economic status of particular constituencies. Nor will it displease the world of corporate and governmental employers . . . for whom the cost of hiring less qualified workers is often substantially less -- and infinitely more predictable -- than the cost of ((fighting discrimination charges)). In fact, the only losers in the process are the Johnsons of the country, for whom ((a civil rights law)) has been not merely repealed but actually inverted. The irony is that these individuals -- predominantly unknown, unaffluent, unorganized -- suffer this injustice at the hands of a Court fond of thinking itself the champion of the politically impotent.
Johnson v. Santa Clara County T.A.