All you have to do is read the name “U.S. Dist. Judge William Wayne Justice” in a news story. You know trouble is coming — big, expensive trouble.

Texas’ long experience with the Emperor Wayne I, in matters like school desegregation and prison oversight, permits — nay, dictates — queasy feelings about the judge’s intervention in bilingual education policy. (see Federal Court orders better English tutoring, p. 1)

A couple of considerations shoulder their way to the front at this inauspicious moment.

 1. Justice’s previously alluded-to track record for declaring himself an expert on every problem before his court and undertaking with Olympian grandeur to tell the defendants exactly how to get right with him.

 What fun it was when his imperial majesty made himself jailer-in-chief of Texas, specifying cell sizes, occupancy rates, inmate activities, and various other things formerly regarded as within the purview of the state.

 Even blind hogs find acorns. It isn’t possible, on the law of averages, that everything the emperor Wayne commanded was wrong-headed and deleterious to good order. The largest consideration is that federal judges, even federal judges enforcing civil rights laws and the like — matters within their jurisprudential competence — can’t know everything necessary to perfection of the task at hand. The Emperor Wayne likes to pretend otherwise. He knows everything, and don’t bother telling him otherwise.

 The U. S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has the power to slap even the wrist of a judge so confident in his own sagacity as Wayne Justice. And yet — sigh. After almost 40 years, these exercises waste time, cost money, and, more to the point, offer offense to any lingering notions as to the Tenth Amendment’s inherent meaning.

 2. Here’s an equally large point. Bilingual education — the sphere that Justice has invaded forcibly, ordering the state to overhaul its methods — is a tricky, ultra-politicized field of inquiry. The diktat of a federal judge — even one so self-assured and all-knowing as Wayne Justice — isn’t likely to do much but exacerbate matters. Naturally there’s the hope that, at 88, his highness will give retirement the just consideration it hasn’t received until now. But you can’t make book on the emperor’s doing what normal folk would do.

 Bilingual education wouldn’t be such a high fence to climb were it not clothed in the guise of civil rights asserted over against the Anglo once-majority, now-minority. The spirit of the gang-up-on-Western-values ‘60s roves among us, demanding cultural and ethnic parity even at the cost of social cohesion. In other words, to push for better absorbing foreign-born or non-English-speaking people living here is to disrespect such people — to say to them, we’re better, we English-speaking types, than you are.

 The diversity-pluralism play book calls for the native-born to step back from their insistence on the customs of the country, such as speaking the language of the country. Yet that insistence always worked before. It made Americans out of Lithuanians, Japanese, Poles, Samoans, and even Frenchmen. The schools didn’t horse around. They taught in English. It was up to you to learn what was taught. Moreover, the broader culture insisted. Foreign accents came in for mockery: You no spikka da English, huh? Well, pal...

 Nor does bilingual education even get the job done. As the Hoover Institution’s Peter Duignan notes, speaking of California (which abolished bilingual-ed by referendum, “Objective analysis shows that bilingual education is ineffective, keeps students too long in Spanish-only classes, and slows the learning of English and assimilation into American society. It has undermined the future of the Latino children it was meant to help and has created a sense of victimization among young Latino students...[T]he evidence is clear that Latinos taught in bilingual programs test behind peers taught in English-only classrooms and earn less money after they leave school.”

 Better — again, on objective evidence —is the immersion approach, a year or two of intensive instruction in English, then the perfection of additional skills in English-language classrooms. What used to be the American way, in other words.

 Certainly it was the common-sense way. Common sense, a commodity never closely identified with the jurisprudence of Wayne Justice, isn’t likely to shows its face during the bilingualism overhaul in store for us. And that’s una lástima, big-time.

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