After several years of attempting to keep the fact that they're a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party under wraps, the American Bar Association has decided to cast off its non-partisan cloak and reveal themselves as just another bunch of loony leftists.

Most recently is the ABA's House of Delegate's "Diversity" accreditation standard that requires law schools to break federal law if they want the ABA's imprimatur.

Most important, I think the ABA may have just cost pro-affirmative action forces their victory in Grutter. Grutter, of course, was a 5-4 ruling in favor of allowing "diversity" admissions higher education. Justice O'Connor's deciding vote was based on the view, first articulated by Justice Powell in Bakke, that courts should give leeway to academic institutions to engage in affirmative action when those institutions believe it to be essential for educational reasons. The reaction of the establishment institutions, such as the ABA (among others), to Grutter has not been to allow, or even encourage universities, in their exercise of academic freedom, to use racial preferences to admit a diverse class. Rather, it's been to try to force all academic (and other) institutions to use preferences, regardless of whether any particular institution thinks it's valuable, irrelevant, or, as in the case of many law schools that see most of their minority students never passing the bar, completely counterproductive.

OK, so maybe the ABA has been bewitched by White House adviser Karl Rove.

The ABA has also been slapped down by that famous conservative [sarcasm alert] law professor Laurence Tribe and conservative [again] Clinton administration counsel Walter Dellinger and others over their lame report decrying presidential signing statements. There's plenty of conservative criticism of the ABA report, but when you've got serious people on your own side saying you're out of line, then maybe you ought to reconsider.

From Dellinger and friends:

First, and most importantly, some objections to recent signing statements appear to be premised on the notion that the President is categorically prohibited from refusing to enforce a statute that he determines to be unconstitutional. But such a categorical prohibition is belied by a long history of Presidents declining, in certain limited circumstances, to enforce statutes that they deem unconstitutional. As the Task Force Report notes, constitutional nonenforcement has been occurring since at least the Grant Administration. Indeed, the practice began no later than the Buchanan Administration, if not earlier still—in 1801, President Jefferson ordered the cessation of prosecutions under the Sedition Act, a statute that he viewed as unconstitutional (a judgment that the Supreme Court would not confirm until 163 years later).

Thomas Jefferson, Democrat Party founder and imperialist tyrant! If you're interested, you can read the Dellinger and Tribe commentaries, but beware, it isn't light bedtime reading.

Finally, there's the ABA's treatment of Bush judicial nominee Michael Wallace. You can find a lengthy analysis of the ABA's Wallace report here. In short, the ABA broke its own rules regarding use of anonymous sources in judicial evaluations in order to settle old scores and give Wallace a "not qualified" rating -- a rating even a cursory glance at his bona fides shows is outrageous.