The White House did not have to intervene. Yet,the Bush administration has chosen to file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court regarding the Univ. of Michigan's admissions policy. This has been termed an "affirmative action" program, but there are no quotas. The admissions committee adds points to applications of students meeting certain criteria, including race.

Initially, it was reported that the brief was developed with the input of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The officials said Rice, in a series of lengthy one-on-one meetings with Bush, drew on her experience as provost at Stanford University to help convince him that favoring minorities was not an effective way of improving diversity on college campuses.

After this as reported in the Washington Post, Ms. Rice contradicted this assertion.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the highest-ranking black official in the White House, said Friday that race could be a factor in university admissions, publicly endorsing a key principle of affirmative action that President Bush did not embrace when he tackled the issue this week.

"I believe that while race-neutral means are preferable, it is appropriate to use race as one factor among others in achieving a diverse student body," Rice said.

It's yet another example of the Bush administration hypocrisy, cynically trying to have it both ways. They need not have intervened, yet they did, clearly as a signal to the Southern conservative Trent Lott wing of the party. Then they send Ms. Rice out to mollify the "soccer moms" and GOP moderates.

Read Sam Heldman on this topic:

I'll close for now by offering what I hope somebody is arguing in an amicus brief in this case: that in the specific context of university admissions, the old "compelling state interest? narrowly tailored?" constitutional inquiry should not be the sole inquiry. Instead, the court's consideration of the policies should go something like this: First, you've got to figure out why we admit people to public universities. It's not as a reward for making good grades in high school. It's so that we can improve our society -- spending public resources to expand the minds of a lucky relatively-few, so that they will go on to do things that will make the world better. Admission is not an entitlement that arises from being smart. It is a matter of being chosen to be the subject of a public investment. Second, we have decided that we ought to invest in just about as many minority kids, proportionately, as white kids. Why? Because it seems pretty obvious to us that this is the way to improve the world -- not by reserving this public good mostly for white folks, but by spreading it around. The world will be better more quickly, we think, if there are black lawyers as well as white lawyers, Hispanic engineers as well as Anglo engineers, etc. And it also appears to us that any fairly-designed system of assessing "merit" just would result in approximately proportionate representation among races and ethnicities -- that is definitional, we think, as to the words "fairly-designed" and "merit". Third, if we went solely on SATs, LSATs, and grades, we wouldn't achieve this goal -- so we make adjustments. It's not a perfect system, but no one has ever yet designed a perfect system for measuring or even defining human merit in any sphere. So get over it.

To my eye, the beauty of this argument - as contrasted with the often-heard "we think diversity is a great thing because it will foster a better learning environment" argument - is that it puts the opponent to the real test: What, are you saying that you don't take it as a fundamental agreed principle that we should be investing just as much in the smartest minority kids as we do in the smartest white kids? Are you saying that you don't take it as a fundamental agreed principle that the distribution of human merit, in terms of that specific sort of merit that deserves great educational opportunity, is equal across races and ethnicities? Well, I take those things as fundamental principles, and I would hope that my Supreme Court wouldn't declare the contrary as a command of the Constitution.