What happens, asked then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she served on the Supreme Court, to laws designed to defend minority rights when minorities become majorities?  At issue was the Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision in 2003 on using some racial preferences in college admissions – a tool that would be unnecessary if we lived in a truly equal society.

The former justice since then has made sure that her observation that these laws might be unnecessary in 25 years was meant to suggest that some progress might have to be made in order to make these kinds of laws unnecessary.

Observers found the comment curious at the time, given that the right of women to make their own reproductive choices was – and is – a vote or two away from being overturned by the Court.  Achieving demographic majority status does not protect any group from anti-constitutional attacks on its rights.  Women are, have been and will be the majority population of the country. Nature seems to have designed it so.  But women continue to fight for equal pay, status and recognition in society.

The question O’Connor posed might have merit in the broadest sense one day. But that day is long in coming.  Events in O’Connor’s home state of Arizona and in others states – Alabama, Indiana and Texas – suggest that current, and perhaps expanded, laws might be necessary for years to come. HispanicLatinos are in the bull’s eye of local and state legislators who want to limit HispanicLatino social and political advancement. This is precisely why federal court decisions like Grutter were, are and will be necessary.

During the heyday of the civil rights movements, the federal courts did for HispanicLatinos what they could not do for themselves.  Handicapped by the small size of their population, anemic leadership at all levels and a history of social and political exclusion, HispanicLatinos had to depend on the one branch of government that could secure their standing in civil society with legal force.  HispanicLatino organizations became legal rungs upon which lawyers could hang their winning constitutional arguments that Congress could then support with complementary legislation.

Today those courtroom victories – on civil and voting rights; measures that benefit business interests and economic development programs; expansion of educational opportunities and others – will have to be re-litigated as city councils and state legislatures enact anti-HispanicLatino laws like in the bad old days.

How the courts decide cases making their way through the judicial process will determine in large part the direction of the HispanicLatino population in the future.  The beachheads that the federal courts established and upon which HispanicLatinos expanded their participation in society must be protected now that the economic success of the nation’s growing HispanicLatino population is crucial for the country’s long-term survival.

The courts do no live in a cocoon.  Since she left the Court, O’Connor has seen it continue to devolve the power of the federal government in favor of the states – unless it suits conservative principles. The devolution of federal power in the context of the nation’s changing demographics is dangerous – although federal power in the wrong hands could be just as pernicious.

Nonetheless, we have to depend on the courts and the Constitution to protect the rights of minorities, and hope that those laws are not necessary to protect Anglos in the future.

Feel free to forward these blogs that are published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.