Obama: Affirmative action still allowed

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama said yesterday that the Supreme Court is "moving the ball" to limit affirmative action, but he stressed that its ruling in favor of white firefighters still allows employers and educators to take race into account in hiring, promotions and admissions.

The president avoided criticizing this week's 5-4 ruling even though it reversed a decision his own high-court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, had endorsed as an appeals court judge.

"This was a very narrow case, so it's hard to gauge where they will take it," Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press. The justices sidestepped a broad constitutional ruling on remedies for racial disparities as they told public and private employers they could not easily discard promotion exams just because the results left no African-Americans likely to be promoted.

As a senator, Obama voted against confirming two justices in the majority in the firefighters case: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the two nominees of President George W. Bush.

Obama was critical of the process that New Haven, Conn., used to administer promotion exams and then toss them aside because of the racially skewed results.

The president said the city might have prevailed if it "had thought through how it was going to approach the issue ahead of time and said, 'We think merit and highly qualified firefighters are absolutely important. That doesn't contradict our desire to make sure that there is diversity. . . . Let's design promotion approaches that reconcile those two things.'"

Instead, Obama said, "I think what people instinctively, probably, reacted to on that particular case had more to do with the fact that the people that studied for those tests already had a set of expectations that were thwarted."

Obama said, "The Supreme Court didn't close the door to affirmative action, if properly structured."

Other comments:

• Obama said he could see abandoning his own proposal to hold some terror detainees indefinitely --"it gives me great pause" -- and said he would not be comfortable ordering such a disposition for Guantanamo Bay prisoners without congressional action.

• With most experts in agreement that there's a good chance Iran could have a usable nuclear bomb sometime during his presidency, he said, "I'm not reconciled with that."

Obama is scheduled to depart Sunday for a trip to Russia. The main agenda item in Moscow is to advance talks on a new strategic arms reduction treaty to replace one that expires in December.