I’ve bitched about this before, but I find few things as tedious as legal analysis that reduces Supreme Court decisions to some hackneyed “people versus the powerful” cartoon. Especially when it yields what ought to be guffaw-inducing laments that a recent ruling interprets “the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause — which was adopted for the express purpose of integrating blacks more fully into society — as a tool for protecting white students from integration.” That is, after all, what makes it equal protection: It’s not suspended when a disadvantaged or sympathetic group is the intended beneficiary of state action. Ditto the campaign finance ruling: Whether a particular rule cuts for or against wealthy groups is just spectacularly irrelevant to the question of whether it conflicts with the First Amendment. Sometimes people have these things called “principles” that they care about independent of whose bread is getting buttered or whose ox is getting gored. What would be telling is an examination of whether particular justices are demonstrably inconsistent in their application of those principles depending on the identities of the plaintiffs and defendants.