The inevitable end of affirmative action in public higher education [except for connected rich people] has arrived
By 
Somebody asked for a thread about the oral arguments in the affirmative action cases. Given that the auteur of Parents Involved — speaking of requests to pull one’s finger — has to turn to his right to see the median vote of the Court, its ruling that these programs are the precise equivalent of laws establishing caste systems was inevitable:
Conservative Supreme Court justices on Monday seemed open to ending decades of precedent allowing race-conscious admission decisions at colleges and universities, repeatedly expressing doubt that the institutions would ever concede an “endpoint” in their use of race to build diverse student bodies.
After nearly five hours of oral argument, the programs at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seemed endangered. The question is how broad such a decision might be, and what it would mean for other institutions of higher education.
Overturning the court’s precedents that race can be one factor of many in making admission decisions would have “profound consequences” for “the nation that we are and the nation that we aspire to be,” Solicitor General Elizabeth. B. Prelogar told the justices during arguments in the Harvard case. She said educating a diverse group of national leaders had consequences for the military, medical and scientific communities and corporate America.
But the court’s conservatives took the two cases to revisit decades of Supreme Court decisions that tolerated a limited use of racial classifications, and seemed unsatisfied with assertions from lawyers representing the schools that the end was near for the use of race-conscious policies. Under repeated questioning, those lawyers conceded they could not provide a date-specific answer to the question: “When will it end?”
I mean, if we can’t simply declare racism to be over, how could we justify fully nullifying the Voting Rights Act?
The end of affirmative should at least be a long, long overdue hint to the few remaining true believers that as practiced by the Court “originalism” is not a meaningful theory of constitutional interpretation but a pretext that can be discarded altogether if a result is beyond the reach of even law office history.
…yes:
I feel sad for Justice Jackson having to sit on the court with assorted nepotism/legacy hires (Gorsuch), jock admits (Kavanaugh—got his clerkship w/a rec from a prof he played basketball with), geographic diversity admit (Barrett from ND)… https://t.co/QNxpLdUN9C— soy boy (@AnthropObscene) October 31, 2022