The damage the Supreme Court inflicted on the country with its wrong-headed ruling in Citizens United should be evident enough even to its most ardent proponents, except for the columnist George Will, of course.  The justices, with the likes of Will pulling at the floodgates, enabled multi-billionaires to pour millions of dollars into a presidential campaign that demonstrates how unceremoniously and crudely Citizens usurps the constitutional intent that the vote of any one individual is no more equal than the next.

Now come the warning signs that the court is going to undo programs that seek to increase the number of minority students in institutions of higher education.  The court has accepted for review a case involving The University of Texas at Austin that five justices will use almost undoubtedly to roll back so-called affirmative action programs.

Like the court’s ruling in Citizens, its anticipated ruling in Fisher v. Texas will prove damaging in ways more profound than anticipated.  The impact of Citizens was immediately corrosive but its impact could yet be rectified if enough states amend the Constitution to control the influence of vast amounts of money coursing perversely through the nation’s politics.  Unlike the Citizens decision, the potential impact of Fisher will be permanently corrosive.  There is absolutely no chance that once the court rules negatively probably early next year against affirmative action through Fisher that any scenario could bring about action to correct it.

Not a person who lived through the painful struggle to gain the civil rights of minorities could have imagined their current rollback.  The nation is going backward constitutionally while it is moving in the opposite direction demographically.  The idea that the country is ready for wholly race-neutral policies that do not protect the interests of minorities is laughable.  If minorities had reached the nirvana of ethical, political conduct on the part of all Americans, then they would have no plaint.  But from the piles of anti-HispanicLatino legislative and other actions that have flowed from state legislatures and city councils alike throughout the nation in the past five years, it is evident – as the putrid after-affects of Citizens demonstrate – that all is not what it seems.

To the justices in Citizens, it seemed that all was well – and would be better still – with the country’s system of financing its elections.  It was not well before the justices ruled and it is worse now.  Likewise, all is not well with minority representation at almost any level of American society with the exception of entertainment and sports.  And what an achievement that is!  Could the country for its future depend on the National Football League or the winners of the Grammy Awards all would be well.  But as we all know, education is not the first requirement for success in either sports or entertainment.  It is, however, required for the rest of the citizens of a country that wants to survive in the future, and it will not survive when an emerging undereducated underclass eats away at the nation’s fiscal being.

You cannot run a country with poor people.

The country is on the verge of a historic demographic turnover that is already happening in the population that is below the age of 25 – the very generation that needs ever-greater levels of education to succeed and to maintain the country as a viable entity.

When public opinion surveys suggest that more than 70 percent of the nation thinks the country is on the wrong track, they are reflecting anxiety on a number of issues, the changing demography of the nation being among them.  They are not altogether wrong.  But they are worried on a racial-ethnic level when they should be worried on an economic level.

I would like Justice Anthony Kennedy to live long enough to see the wrought of his deciding vote on Fisher, especially on his grandchildren and their children.  Kennedy might think his jurisprudence is richer when the court announces its decision but his offspring will be all the poorer for it.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.