The Rachel Maddow Show   |  March 06, 2013

What did Scalia mean by 'racial entitlement'?

Rachel Maddow explains one suggestion that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was referencing his own writing on Affirmative Action when he talked about "perpetuating racial entitlement" during oral arguments about the Voting Rights Act.

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This content comes from a Full-Text Transcript of the program.

MADDOW: In 2006 , the Republican-controlled Congress studied 15,000 pages of evidence and held 21 hearings over ten months to debate whether the Voting Rights Act should be renewed. Congress decided resoundingly that the answer was yes. They voted in favor of it by a huge bipartisan margin. You can see the House vote, 390-33. The vote in the Senate was unanimous. It was 98-0. Last week, conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said he did not believe that for a second.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA , U.S. SUPREME COURT : This last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don't think that's attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributed -- very likely attributable to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It's been written about.

MADDOW: Perpetuation of racial entitlement. It's been written about. A search by Saint Louis University law professor Chad Flanders reveals one prominent piece of writing on the subject of the perpetuation of racial entitlement. This permanent piece of writing was written by a young lawyer in 1979 , a fellow named Antonin Scalia . Oh, I get it. You say racial entitlement has been written about? It turns out it has been written about by you, very clever. We posted Justice Scalia 's 1970s musings on racial entitlement at MaddowBlog.com today in case you want to prove to yourself it exists. It's amazing. Was he right, though? Was he right that senators didn't really mean it when they voted to re-up the Voting Rights Act ? Was he right when he says they were brainwashed with racial entitlement, or whatever, and that they didn't really mean to cast those votes? There is a way to answer that question, it turns out, which is so creepy, you won't believe it. That's coming up.