Fox analyst: Letting voters 'harm' minorities is the 'beauty' of affirmative action ban

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano on Tuesday praised the Supreme Court for upholding Michigan's ban on affirmative action, saying that it was an issue "the Civil War was supposed to have resolved."

In a 6-2 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld a voter-approved initiative banning affirmative action in Michigan, and essentially making similar bans safe in seven other states.

Justice Sonya Sotomayor pointed out in her 58-page dissent that minority enrollment had decreased at Michigan's public universities under the ban.

"It could spread to other states," Napolitano predicted after the ruling. "The elites that run university systems think they know better than the voters do. And often these university systems -- even in states that have a conservative electorate -- decide that they want to tinker with the law on their own."

"Now the electorate knows that once it puts a clause in the constitution forbidding the government from making a decision based on race -- you know, that thing that the Civil War was supposed to have resolved -- that even the elites in the public universities would have to comply with it."

Napolitano also addressed Sotomayor's concern that the decision would "harm minorities" because black and Latino enrollment was already dropping at the University of Michigan.

"That's the beauty of this decision today," the Fox News analyst opined. "It really lets the voters go either way. It doesn't say the voters must, it says the voters may. But if the voters do prohibit the government in their states from taking race into account for say, college and law school admissions, the government in that state must comply."

Earlier this year, Napolitano was mocked by The Daily Show -- and three history professors -- after he claimed that slavery would have ended by itself if President Abraham Lincoln had not started the Civil War.

"That of course spawned Jim Crow. That of course spawned the Ku Klux Klan," Napolitano said. "[T]he so called freedom that Lincoln thought he was bringing, wouldn’t come about for another hundred and twenty five years because of its birth in violence and its birth in government violence rather than its birth in the natural progress of human freedom."

Watch this video from Fox News, broadcast April 22, 2014.