Didn’t go down well with the folks at CNN.
Back to work.
This new regime began in the 1960s with high ideals about bringing minorities into the mainstream of American life but, according to many critics, has evolved over the decades into a “racial spoils system” in which claims of racial underrepresentation are pervasive in public and private life. That regime has at length polarized the nation by race and party, and invited federal courts to intervene in all manner of public and private and state and local disputes, but has done so without any constructive end or resolution in view. While many still proclaim the original ideals about a colorblind society or one in which individuals are judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, those ideals are nowhere evident in today’s controversies over legislative districting, government contracts, college admissions, hiring and promotions, and the like.
The Supreme Court has played different roles in establishing or dismantling the racial regimes of the past. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Court sought to resolve the issues arising from slavery in the territories but instead helped ignite the Civil War. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) accepted a constitutional basis for the Southern caste system. In the opposite way, the Brown decision paved the way for the civil-rights revolution. Gingles and its progeny, along with other decisions of the Court, have contributed to today’s racial and partisan polarization. The Gingles standards encourage blacks to vote as a bloc and discourage those voters from forming coalitions with whites that might create new and different majorities. That is an unfortunate consequence of the modern regime that sees racial identity as a cardinal feature of American citizenship.
The harmful dynamic now in place dividing the races and the parties will not be redirected absent intervention from the Supreme Court. The Alabama case, combined with the Louisiana case and others now before the Court or likely to arrive soon, provides opportunities to set the country on a more constructive course, one in which the high ideals of the civil-rights revolution are more honored in practice than in political rhetoric.
That’s an awfully optimistic take given the Rucho ruling. This article can play cute with what’s vote dilution?, but everybody and their mother (and scotus) knows what it is.
I see little happening.
There will be a shit ton more gerrymandering if SCOTUS overturns the district court ruling in Merrill.
Who’s ready for post racial America?
This is a big one.
The Supreme Court on Monday announced it will hear a case that could significantly scale back federal agencies’ authority, with major implications for the future of environmental and other regulations.
The justices next term will consider whether to overturn a decades-old precedent that grants agencies deference when Congress left ambiguity in a statute.
Now, the justices will take up a case that explicitly asks them to overturn it. The high court announced the move on Monday in a brief, unsigned order — as is typical — indicating at least four justices agreed to take up the case.
Herring fishing company Loper Bright Enterprises is appealing a ruling that left in place a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regulation based on the doctrine.
The regulation requires herring fishing boats to allow a federal observer aboard to oversee operations and compensate them for their time. The company argues the regulation significantly decreases their profit margin, and the agency had no authorization to impose it.
The feds need to take a step back.
big news
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The shift back to rule of law and not what we think is right is still underway.
The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in, said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”
“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Roberts wrote.
The majority said that the universities’ policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Justice Clarence Thomas, a Black conservative who wrote a concurring opinion, said that the schools’ affirmative action admissions policies “fly In the face of our colorblind constitution.
“Two discriminatory wrongs can not make a right,” wrote Thomas.
Thanks CNBC, didn’t know CT was BLACK!
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You hear me by a minute. 
Here’s the whole thing.
ABC/ABTers are rejoicing
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You the spokesperson? ;D
“Affirmative action” is a euphemism for two wrongs make a right. “Affirmative discrimination” would have been a more accurate term.
Even today, affirmative action programs that offer an admissions boost to black and Hispanic students discriminate against those who identify themselves as members of other races that do not receive such preferential treatment. Must others in the future make sacrifices to re-level the playing field for this new phase of racial subordination? And then, out of whose lives should the debt owed to those further victims be repaid? This vision of meeting social racism with government-imposed racism is thus selfdefeating, resulting in a never-ending cycle of victimization. There is no reason to continue down that path. In the wake of the Civil War, the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment charted a way out: a colorblind Constitution that requires the government to, at long last, put aside its citizens’ skin color and focus on their individual achievements.
And Jackson’s piece:
And grandpa needs to scold the system again.
Reading through the fallout articles. The ones that made the cut:
Instead of wrestling with this reality, Jackson creates two hypothetical strawstudents — John and James, one white and one black. Never once does she imagine that a white kid from, say, rural West Virginia might have overcome more societal barriers than a black kid from a middle-class suburb in Los Angeles. In her worldview, a black kid can’t overcome barriers without a lowering of standards. That is an extraordinarily corrosive and demeaning position to take. And it also has nothing to do with the law.
From the ACLU chief:
Students deserve equal access to high quality education, safe learning environments and diverse student bodies. The court had a responsibility to follow precedent and keep the proverbial umbrella open. And in failing to do so, we must continue to fight to protect the historic gains our country has made in promoting and preserving opportunity.
I guess the kids will have to be a bit more than the color of their skin now. I guess. I mean, they always were anyway.
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I’m glad with the ruling. You don’t fix a historical wrong by implementing another wrong. You don’t in parenting, why would you in college admissions? Just as using Griswold and a privacy case as a pillar for judicial activism back in the early 70s for RvW–piss poor jurisprudence regardless of one’s views on abortion (leave it to the politicians, not the courts). I am ultra liberal on abortion but favored RvW beig overturned because I think the stare decisis was poor. Of course, trying to explain such nuance to most people–goes right over their fucking heads!
But I do now feel sorry for Long Dong Silver. He’ll have trouble getting into Yale Drama School now. (64) Cold Opening: Joe Biden - Saturday Night Live - YouTube
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This a very good roundup of what happened and who said what.
Only time will tell where future decisions, by college administrators and courts alike, will take us. For now, the Supreme Court has made it clear that university admissions departments are not allowed to discriminate by race on the vague basis that diversity is good.
The death of the “ah-ha! Moment” has arrived. Thank goodness.
I like Ryan Grim’s take on this (as I usually do):
But if you want to have hope in this moment, there is possibly (we don’t know, but we’ll find out) some solace in an argument long made by Richard Kahlenberg, that ending legal affirmative action will actually force elite institutions, which do value diversity outside of government mandates, to produce racially diverse classes using different, race-neutral metrics. And because race corresponds so tightly to class in America, that will nudge institutions to use class as a metric, which will benefit poor and working class Black and brown people, as well as poor whites. The current affirmative action regime often benefits minority groups such as recent immigrants from Nigeria, which has drawn criticism from those who argue that the top beneficiaries of the program ought to be Black descendants of slavery and Jim Crow. Kahlenberg argues that a class-first approach is paradoxically more likely to reach that cohort that a purely race-focused approach. More on Kahlenberg’s argument here from the Times. (If you run into a paywall, you can put the link into 12 Foot Ladder, which is a great resource, but don’t tell anybody else about it.)
Fix class inequality, you mostly fix racial inequality too.
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Yeah it doesn’t seem like rocket science. Just base it on socio-economic status, all is well. But it’s not racist that way so they won’t want to.
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