Yesterday, I examined Hillary Clinton's claim that the Supreme Court's decision on race-based school assignments has "turned the clock back on history." I argued, among other things, that the race-based assignment systems the Court struck down were not systems without which the schools in question would be segregrated. I also noted that the Court's decision does not permit schools to re-impose segregration by discriminating against any group.

There is, however, a serious concern that I did not address -- the possibility that under the Court's decision school systems will drift towards de facto segregration. The concern here is not that any governmental body will re-impose discrimination, a policy that would plainly be illegal. Rather, it's that the races will continue to divide in terms of where they live and that, without governmental intervention, this will produce schools where one or more racial/ethnic group will be virtually absent.

Contrary to some press reports, the Supreme Court's latest decision does not say that the government can't act to prevent that sort of result. In fact, Justice Kennedy listed a number of measures the government can take to prevent it. Kennedy did say that out-and-out racial classifications should be used only as last resort, and that they must be "carefully tailored" to address the problem. But he did not rule race-based assignments out; in fact he ruled them in under these limited circumstances. Since four other Justices (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) seem to have little or no problem with race-based assignments in the name of racial balancing, the Court clearly has not ruled them out as a means of preventing true re-segregration.

And here's the part that almost no one gets -- Chief Justice Roberts' opinion (signed by Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito) doesn't rule out all race-based assignments either. During his confirmation hearings, Roberts testified that he believes in "judicial modesty" including the notion that courts should decide only the issues necessary to resolve the case before them. True to that philosophy, Roberts did not express an opinion as to whether carefully tailored race-based assignments can be used where the evidence shows that, without them, schools will become non-diverse to the point that education suffers. It was enough for Roberts to show (and Kennedy agreed) that such evidence did not exist in the cases at hand.

It's easy to understand why a politician like Hillary Clinton "cried wolf" in response to the Supreme Court's decisions; it's a little harder to understand why some in mainstream journalism have echoed that cry. The usual combination of laziness and liberal bias probably is at work.