John Roberts finally bags his white elephant

We all knew this was coming, but the Supreme Court has ruled that affirmative action in higher education ipso facto violates the Constitution (with the possible exception of service academies.). “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” now has five votes.

Justice Sotomayor:

Particularly worth emphasizing is Sotomayor’s point that the Court’s alleged “color-blindness” is a sham even on its own terms:

Justice Jackson, no longer needing to be bound by Powell’s idiosyncratic holding in Bakke that diversity is the only defense for affirmative action, explains the more compelling reasons for why affirmative action programs should not be considered inherently unconstitutional:

This decision will not create the same backlash against the Court as Dobbs — majority opinion will probably be with the Court here — but Roberts’s bait-and-switch vision of “color-blindness” has always been pernicious and incompatible with the actual purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act,