It’s time to stop pretending this U.S. Supreme Court cares about anything but protecting power and privilege.
If the Dobbs decision last year restricting women’s reproductive rights didn’t demonstrate that, then two new rulings overturning 40 years’ worth of affirmative action precedents certainly do so.
In Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito went all the way back to the 17th century in his desperate attempt to arrive at a decision supported more by religious conviction and ideological imperatives than history, law or logic. In doing so, he and his fellow justices overturned a half-century of precedents, restricted rather than expanded personal freedoms for the first time in U.S. history and further split an already divided nation.
The two affirmative action rulings are similar in nature to Dobbs.
They, too, ignore both reality and precedent. The litigation that produced the rulings sprang from a right-wing activist and disappointed office seeker who has sought, for years, to banish race-conscious admissions policies.
This time around, he sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina for admissions policies that took race into consideration. The schools did so to make their student bodies reflective of an increasingly diverse American population.
The plaintiffs in the suit contended that their animus was not racially motivated. They said they simply wanted to see college applicants judged solely on merit.
But they didn’t attack—nor did the court see fit to curtail—the favorable preferences offered to applicants for other, non-merit-based reasons.
They did not file suit, for example, to prevent Harvard from smiling more favorably on “legacy” students—those with parents who are alumni—than a poor Black kid trying to make it into the Ivy League.
Nor did they go to court to block schools from warmly embracing applicants whose families have made major donations to the college or university.
Ditto for showing preference to military veterans.
Giving consideration to some groups apparently is OK.
It’s only wrong when it comes to leveling the playing field for historically oppressed Americans and attempting to redress epic evils.
This is a new development.
For more than four decades, the court has supported the efforts of educational institutions to increase access to their schools for minority citizens.
In fact, just seven years ago, the court considered a suit filed by the same activist advancing similar arguments.
The court in that case upheld race-conscious admissions policies.
What changed between 2016 and 2023?
Well, then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, managed to pack the court by means that were as unscrupulous as they were effective. McConnell dispensed with longstanding rules and practices for selecting Supreme Court justices—rules and practices designed to make jurists given lifetime appointments more beholden to the U.S. Constitution and the entire nation than any one political party.
McConnell’s labors have paid off for right-wing extremists in big ways.
They now are securing victories through litigation that they couldn’t possibly win at the ballot box. Suddenly, many right-leaning self-styled strict constitutional constructionists don’t find the notion of legislating from the bench so abhorrent after all.
Along with Dobbs, these two latest rulings make at least a couple of things clear about America’s high bench.
The first is that the partisanship that afflicts the nation also taints the Supreme Court. These newly appointed supposedly conservative justices are only marginally less driven by nakedly political motives than the Republican caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The second is that it may be time to stop calling the majority members on the bench “conservative.”
True conservatives are loath to branch out onto unmapped paths. For that reason, they value both tradition and precedent.
But those are the very things this court is trashing.
And it is doing so with reckless abandon.
At one time, the U.S. Supreme Court was a bastion of American liberties.
Now, it is a threat to them.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
