We’ll probably never know what precise impact the Bush brief will have on the fate of racial preferences, because Supreme Court justices and their clerks don’t discuss such things–at least not until memoir-writing time. Yet Sandra Day O’Connor is generally viewed as the swing justice in these 5-4 votes, as the big and meaningful ones tend to be, and may be enough of a Republican loyalist to look with sympathy upon what the administration and its lawyers tell her through these formal channels. That’s why the stakes are so high in the opinions expressed in a brief. And consider what a disaster it will be if the Supreme Court allows that “diversity” is an educational necessity allowing the unequal treatment of individuals: So much of the hard work of Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Linda Chavez, Abigail Thernstrom, Roger Clegg, Tom Wood, Glynn Custred–I’d could go on, and on, and on–will have been overruled. But Alberto Gonzales’s little brief will have been accepted.