Discrimination in the name of “diversity” is permissible, the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered.

Likewise, sampling your breath without a warrant passes constitutional muster in determining whether you’re a drunken driver but taking your blood without one to gauge intoxication is unconstitutional, the high court has ruled.

And the court has delivered a de facto slap to King Barack for, yet again, end-running Congress.

A 4-3 court majority, led by swing Justice Anthony Kennedy disemboweling his own precedent, upheld a University of Texas “affirmative action” admissions plan that racially discriminates in promotion of “diversity.” In what is supposed to be a color-blind society, the color of one’s skin still matters. Merit, though still part of the mix, is affirmed to matter a bit less. And discrimination to end discrimination is further ensconced in the law.

A court majority, led by conservative Sam Alito (and with a mishmash of in-part concurrences and dissents), ruled that state laws making it a crime to refuse to submit to a blood test in suspected drunken driving cases violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.

But, and in a line of gobbledygook reasoning — blowing into a breath-testing machine is as common as using a straw to drink beverages and “one to which few object,” Mr. Justice Alito wrote — it left in place warrantless breath tests. Your blood belongs to you but your very breath belongs to “The State.”

The Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 on President Obama’s decree that millions of illegal aliens could not be deported. Thus, an appellate court ruling that found Mr. Obama’s fit of fiat had no congressional warrant and, therefore, is unconstitutional will stand for now.

That’s a victory for the rule of law. But it most assuredly will be up to another iteration of the court to rule definitively when back to its full nine-member complement.

Cicero once offered that “The fundamentals of justice are that no one shall suffer wrong and that the public good be served.” By that standard, the Supreme Court went, in reverse order, one-for-three.

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(c)2016 The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (Greensburg, Pa.)

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