Back To The Future- The Supremes Roll America Back To The 19th Century

Who needs precedent when the Roberts Court will tell us what matters and what rights we get to keep?

“Wonkette photoshop; Supreme Court photo by Jarek Tuszynski, Creative Commons License 3.0)

[T]he student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

• Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert

As much as I’ve tried to understand the rationale behind the Supreme ash-canning affirmative action in college admissions decisions, it still makes no sense. The idea that racism should no longer exist in the law doesn’t reflect the reality that racism still very much exists in life…and shouldn’t the law reflect life- or at least the reality of life?

Yet here we have a Conservative majority court, which in no way reflects the views of America, imposing its view of the law on that majority. And we’re left to understand why the Supreme Court is hellbent on rolling back the 20th century. Or, as I heard former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) say on MSNBC, she’s never seen a Supreme Court so concerned with taking things away from Americans.

Did we do something wrong? Have we had it too good for too long? Or did the Conservative justices feel it was time to get America back to the 18th century where it belongs?

Did the urge to turn America into Gilead become too strong for the six Conservative justices to resist?

The six rightwing justices on the US Supreme Court today ruled that affirmative action in college admissions violates the US Constitution, because they also want to believe the Constitution is magically "color blind," despite its being written for and governing over a nation that has always been anything but.

The Court's decision specifically struck down affirmative action policies at Harvard and at the University of North Carolina that had been challenged by a rightwing legal group, but the ruling will apply to virtually all public and private universities and colleges, except for the weird ones like Hillsdale that reject all federal funding so they can discriminate all they want. The vote was 6-3 in the North Carolina case and 6-2 in the Harvard case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who unlike some of her esteemed colleagues understands basic ethics rules, recused herself in the latter because she served on a board at Harvard.

Right; just like American society, American colleges and universities must now somehow be magically “color blind.” Except that, of course, they will be nothing of the sort. Nothing in this country has ever been color blind because no matter how much we deny it, skin color determines pretty much everything.

Even when racism isn’t overt, it’s invariably systemic and ingrained into the processes leading to decisions that impact the lives and futures of minority children.

Would that weren’t true, of course, but no honest American will deny the truth of it. Racism is here, there, and everywhere. Whether overt, covert, or systemic, White Conservative Christian heterosexuals still occupy the top section of the socioeconomic food chain- something unlikely to change.

Of course, Conservatives love to pretend that racism is but a relic of our unsavory past and that our enlightened present and future have no place for racial conflict.

And I have an ice-fishing hut in Phoenix that I’d LOVE to sell you….

As with last year's decision nullifying Roe v. Wade, the Court's decision today erases decades of previous Supreme Court precedents going back to the 1970s, holding that the interests of having a diverse student body allows selective institutions of higher learning to make at least some consideration of race in admissions. In essence, the Supremes now agree with Tucker Carlson, who in 2018 just wanted to know why the hell diversity is even worth bothering with.

While universities — and, as we say, previous Court decisions — believe having a diverse student body is key to education in a multiracial republic, Roberts said that Harvard and UNC's admissions processes

lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.

Obviously, the only way to be fair is to go by students' test scores and grades, which are completely objective and unbiased, although of course it remains perfectly fine to give special treatment to children of alumni and big donors, because that's how you guarantee a new Economics building gets funded. That's not discrimination, it's just a way of filling the Endowment's quid pro quota.

But just to show that the Civil Whites Agenda isn't utterly heartless, Robert generously added that

nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.

Hey, that’s mighty White of Chief Justice Roberts, right? A school can’t make an admissions decision based on race. But that’s not to say a student can’t discuss how race may have impacted their life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. So, race can’t be considered, but racism can?

Got it.

One of the stranger parts of the decision was the carve-out the Conservative justices made for the service academies. Because having a “diverse officer corps…in the military is valuable in ways that eradicating white supremacy in medicine, law, science, and the liberal arts is not.” And that’s a big “WTF??”

There’s no reason minorities can’t die for America in disproportionate numbers, right?

So how can racial diversity be important in the military but not civilian life? If Conservative justices recognize the importance of restricting racism in the military, why not do the same in civilian life? Is there a double standard when it comes to the military? Are our armed forces somehow more deserving of protection from racism?

In a furious 69-page dissent that she read from the bench — something justices only do when they're well and truly pissed off at a majority's terrible decision — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan, castigated the majority, saying that it's a "disturbing feature of today’s decision that the Court does not even attempt to make the extraordinary showing required" to overturn well-established precedent. But hey, that's what Sam Alito did in the Dobbs decision, so obviously the rightwing majority can do what it wants.

Getting right at the false premise at the heart of the majority decision — and at the center of pretty much every conservative fiction about race in America — Sotomayor wrote,

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.

Consider that last sentence for a moment: “The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.“

What’s the difference between then and now? Only the ideological makeup of the Court. This, of course, can be accounted for by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and The Former Guy conspiring to steal one seat on the Supreme Court. And have the great good fortune to have two others fall into their laps.

This is not a normal court.

• President Joe Biden

As I’ve mentioned, no Supreme Court has ever been so focused on taking things away from Americans. It used to be that precedent meant something; it established a building block from which future law and legal precedents could be constructed. Now it seems as if those precedents only matter until a more Conservative court comes along and decides that what came before no longer applies.

So how about we blow it up and create our own precedent based on…well, who knows what rationale, precedent, or case law Conservatives will use to justify their decisions. If they can create a precedent based on a fake case, the sky’s the limit, no?

So, whether it’s racism, LGBTQ rights (yes, in a phony case), abortion rights, or who knows what’s to come down the road, it appears no precedent is sacred, and nothing that came before can be counted upon as a bedrock of settled law. After all, we have the examples of Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neal Gorsuch, all of whom lied about their belief that Roe v. Wade was settled law.

Then, once they were presented with the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade, they jumped at the chance…which means that they lied to the Senate during their confirmation hearings. Don’t believe me? It’s on video and probably easily located somewhere on YouTube.

They perjured themselves. Period. End of story. Not that anything will come of it, of course. Conservatives can lie and get away with it in ways that Liberals can’t. I don’t know why that’s the case, but dishonesty and hypocrisy don’t stick to Conservatives as they do to Liberals.

I know, right? What hypocrisy?

Former President Barack Obama once said that elections have consequences. This is what he was referring to. If not for The Former Guy having one stolen Supreme Court nomination and two that fell into his lap, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But, because he won in 2016, we continue paying the price today- because Supreme Court Justices have lifetime sinecures.

The Former Guy won because too many Americans couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. And many of the ones who were listening were brainwashed and brain-dead. A large number of those same maroons are firmly committed to The Former Guy today.

This is why we can’t have nice things….