Curtailing Affirmative Action by "Not Normal Court"

I’m work freelance in high school and university (in Indonesia) to pay tuition fee. I was losing at least 3 houses (1 in Bali; 2 in near Jakarta-Indonesia capital city), losing patent, losing at least 1 business, but, ya, that’s life. Also, although my mom “very white, I’m tanned, nearly same as Afro America. So I empathy about latest situation (suffered) by Gen Z - Afro America now. “Not Normal Court”, Biden says. VP Harris calls the big SCOTUS ruling "a step backward for our nation. It rolls back long-established precedent and will make it more difficult for students from underrepresented backgrounds to have access to opportunities that will help them fulfill their full potential."

Make no mistake, this SCOTUS decision is a critical first battle in a broader proxy war to come about whether systemic barriers to achievement for Black people in this country still matter at all. most important part of today's SCOTUS decision, which kills affirmative action in education without actually saying it does, is Justice Jackson's dissent, which is a barn burner from its opening sentences & well worth reading.

SCOTUS has made it harder for people of color to overcome their often criminally underfunded neighborhood schools to gain access to the sorely needed high education institutions that give them a chance improving their future. All watching today to see if SCOTUS sides w the American people who pursued an education to keep America competitive & healthy or maybe they will side w say Sofi , Navient, Mohela, Nelnet etc who have made a fortune off the backs of hardworking Americans.

Some Democratic strategists we spoke with suggested that the best strategy to remake the court would be to convince conservative Justices to go on submarine trips with their billionaire friends.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito overturned Roe, then traveled to Rome on the plaintiff's dime. None of our rights are safe as long as the Supreme Court can be legally bought. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — both of whom accepted luxury vacations from billionaires — could rule on an upcoming Supreme Court case that would ban a federal wealth tax. If they don’t recuse themselves, why would we expect Americans to ever trust SCOTUS again?

Alito is gets undisclosed free trip to Italy while laughing at the decisions he’s making that actually hurts the quality of life for the American people. Today, SCOTUS ruling to end Affirmative Action is driven by anti-Black racism. And the bizarre irony is that white women have benefitted more from affirmative action than every other racial demographic—Combined.

If SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous “colorblindness” claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged. 70% of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white. SCOTUS didn’t touch that - which would have impacted them and their patrons. SCOTUS says colleges can't take race into consideration during admission. But they can give preference to "legacies." Since non-white students were barred from most colleges for 200+ years, legacy students are by definition most likely white.

Yesterday is a good 6-3 (Moore v Harper), but today is very bad 6-3.

It has been a long goodbye. The Supreme Court declared race consciousness in college admissions, also known as affirmative action, unconstitutional today. The vote was predictable, 6-3, with all the justices appointed by Republican presidents standing together to revoke the policy. The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts himself, who ruled that affirmative action violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was, of course, written explicitly to revoke the racism practiced by whites against Blacks through their slaver’s Constitution, but Roberts doesn’t care about all that. His opinion attempts to capture the 14th Amendment and redeploy it to justify a white version of “color blindness” that just so happens to lock in a status quo that benefits whites.

“Education is the system that has the most powerful effect on reproducing race, class, and gender differences across generations,” Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, told me. Banning affirmative action will mean that “the people who govern us, the elites in American society, will increasingly not look like America.”

In the broadest sense, the Republican-appointed justices have moved to buttress the affluence and status that allow white people to wield the most influence in society, and to diminish the possibility that accelerating demographic change will force a renegotiation of that balance of power. In that way, the ruling is a judicial extension of the proliferating red-state laws meant to constrain the potential influence of younger generations through measures making it more difficult to vote, banning books, and censoring how teachers talk about race and gender inequities.

Like last year’s revocation of reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson, the decision today, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, achieves a long-standing conservative policy goal through the fiat of six unelected Supreme Court justices. Conservatives have been gunning for affirmative action since the policy was reintroduced in the 1960s (it had previously been used during Reconstruction, and conservatives killed it then too). Today is a victory for the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the entire conservative legal establishment that has correctly identified the courts as the way to reverse policies they don’t like.

But the death of affirmative action was not achieved merely through the machinations of Republican lawyers. While conservatives on the Supreme Court delivered the fatal blow, the policy has long been made vulnerable by the soft bigotry of parents, whose commitment to integration and equality turns cold the moment their little cherubs fail to get into their first choice of college or university. If you want to see a white liberal drop the pretense that they care about systemic racism and injustice, just tell them that their privately tutored kid didn’t get into whatever “elite” school they were hoping for. If you want to make an immigrant family adopt a Klansman’s view of the intelligence, culture, and work ethic of Black folks, tell them that their kid’s standardized test scores are not enough to guarantee entry into ivy-draped halls of power. Some of the most horribly racist claptrap folks have felt comfortable saying to my face has been said in the context of people telling me why they don’t like affirmative action, or why my credentials are somehow “unearned” because they were “given” to me by affirmative action.

That last bit is in some ways the most devastating: Black people are attacked and shamed simply because the policy exists, regardless of whether it benefited them or not. I’ve had white folks whom I could standardize-test into a goddamn coma tell me that I got into school only because of affirmative action. I once talked to a white guy—whose parents’ name was on one of the buildings on campus—who asked me how it felt to know I got “extra help” to get in. The sheer nerve of white folks is sometimes jaw-dropping.

Affirmative action is used by a certain kind of unwashed white mediocrity as an excuse to denigrate the credentials of anybody Black. Then, those same people use their own racial hang-ups as an argument to get rid of affirmative action, blaming the policy for their own racist inability to regard Black colleagues as equals. There are white people who will argue with a straight face that affirmative action makes them harbor the racist idea that Black people are undeserving of their accomplishments.

In recent months, officers on the subways have detained significantly more people for breaking the law. Police statistics show there were about 4,000 arrests in the transit system from January through April of this year, compared with nearly 3,000 arrests during the same period in 2022.

Related with Afro-America like the late Jordan Neely, Pew found that 51% of Americans say they strongly or somewhat support the Black Lives Matter movement. That’s down from nearly 70% of Americans who expressed support for the movement in the aftermath of the 2020 killing of George Floyd and 56% last year.

The study indicates the decrease is mostly a result of a declining share of White adults who say they support the movement. The overall number of Black and Hispanic adults who expressed support have stayed about the same in the past year, according to Pew.

Eighty-one percent of Black adults said they support the movement. Meanwhile, 63% of Asian adults and 61% of Hispanics said the same, compared with 42% of White adults, the study shows.

When asked which words they believed describe the movement, about a third of Americans said the terms “dangerous” and “divisive” describes it extremely or very well, the study shows.

But there were significant differences among race and ethnic groups. While White adults were more likely to say the words dangerous and divisive describe the Black Lives Matter movement extremely or very well than other groups, 50% of Black adults said the word “dangerous” doesn’t describe the movement too well or at all well, the study shows.

Black, Hispanic, and Asian adults are all more likely than White adults to say the word empowering describes the movement extremely or very well, according to Pew. But overall, about a third or 34% said the same about the word divisive.

Adults younger than 30 were more likely than those in all other age groups to support the movement. The study also indicates a significant division along political ideology.

Eighty-four percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners support the Black Lives Matter movement, compared with 82% of Republicans or Republican leaners who said they oppose it, the study shows.

The astute reader will note that I haven’t thus far mentioned the majority’s arguments against affirmative action, and that is because their legal arguments are embarrassing.

The actual cases decided today involve lawsuits brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group of AAPI students organized by white conservative legal gadfly Ed Blum. Blum has made it his life’s work to destroy affirmative action, and in this case, he found plaintiffs eager to argue that affirmative action policies discriminate against AAPI students who don’t get into elite schools despite competitive grades and standardized test scores.

On the facts, Blum and SFFA are simply wrong. The district court (the finder of fact in our federal system) found that the universities do not intentionally discriminate against AAPI students—and, more specifically, that there is no evidence that affirmative action is hurting them. (I have written that I think Harvard does discriminate against AAPI applicants, but that discrimination has nothing to do with affirmative action.) What this means is the entire argument against affirmative action is based on the feelings of some students (and their parents) that they would have gotten into these schools if the schools admitted fewer Black people, but that too is a thin argument. Getting rid of affirmative action will neither require schools to admit more AAPI students nor force them to weigh so-called “merit-based” factors more heavily. In California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities.

Of course, boosting white opportunities at the expense of Black and Latino students is what conservatives like Ed Blum want. They’ve just managed to convince a minority of AAPI parents that making the world easier for Varsity Blues wealthy white parents will also trickle down to their kids. The problem with this pro-white policy goal is that it’s nowhere near a constitutional argument.

To turn all of this helicopter-parent hysteria into a constitutional issue, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court argued that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause prevents the use of race-conscious admissions because it discriminates against AAPI students, who are a protected class under the clause. That is why bringing the case with AAPI student stand-ins is crucial to their argument. There’s no equal protection argument for being mediocre and white. There is one for being discriminated against because you’re of Asian descent. Even though the court is making up the cause of that discrimination, invoking the specter of illegal racial discrimination on behalf of the AAPI community is how the white organizers of this attack are able to turn their policy preference into a constitutional argument.

biggest news in citation style since (cleaned up): Chief Justice Roberts uses the "semble" as a signal. According to Wikipedia, it seems to mean that the Judge thinks the case is kinda sorta on point but hey don't hold him to it. Black's Law Dictionary suggests that semble can also mean that the point is in dicta, and this seems to be Roberts's intent, since he included (dictum) after the citation. Of course, if you include the parenthetical, why bother with the new signal? Is this the first time "semble" will appear in the U.S. Reports? No. "Semble" appeared as early as 1815, in a concurring (I think) opinion by Justice Catron, N.J. Steam Nav. Co. v. Merchant's Bank of Boston, 47 U.S. 344, 434.

A westlaw search returns 78 instances, with semble appearing every few years from the 1800s until about 1984. In many cases, "semble" begins a sentence rather than being used as a citation signal. Justice Blackmun appears to the the most recent Justice (before today) to use semble as a signal, which he did in McKeiver v. Pennsylvania, 408 U.S. 528, 548 (1971). After that, other Justices used (semble) as a parenthetical. The most recent such use was Justice Scalia in 1994. What should we make of this signal? I personally cannot say I have ever heard of semble before, and I consider myself fairly with it, citation-signal wise. It's not clear to me why one would use semble instead of or in addition to (dictum). Since semble doesn't seem to solve any particular citation problem that couldn't be accomplished with the normal tools, there are only two possible reasons why Chief Justice Roberts used it. The first possibility is he wants to appear extra erudite.

But that flies in the face of everything we know about John Roberts. He's not the snooty I-know-something-you-don't type. I highly doubt semble was just showing off. The only other reason that Roberts would revive a not-very-useful citation signal that hasn't in fact been used in 30 years is as a personal insult to me for pointing out that the Court keeps meeting without a quorum, and possibly for inventing (cleaned up). Weird right?

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-prada- (Adi Mulia Pradana) is a Helper. Former adviser (President Indonesia) Jokowi for mapping 2-times election. I used to get paid to catch all these blunders—now I do it for free. Trying to work out what's going on, what happens next. Arch enemies of the tobacco industry, (still) survive after getting doxed.

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