Affirmative action
July 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Of course not. The Supreme Court has held that race discrimination in university admissions violates the 14th Amendment and, where it applies, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It isn’t a leap to apply the same principle to faculty hiring and promotion. But that won’t bring an end to racist practices by universities, any more than Brown v. Board of Education automatically ended racist practices in the
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July 16, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Those were the topics for my appearance last night on Sky News Australia’s excellent Outsiders program, as I continued my effort to explain the inexplicable to Aussies. Note the frequent Power Line plugs:
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July 12, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Black “leaders” and their white liberal allies masters are outraged by the Supreme Court’s Harvard and UNC decisions, but this Economist/YouGov poll indicates that more blacks support the decisions than not: Do you approve or disapprove of Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action? White: 65% approve, 23% disapproveHispanics: 45%-30%Blacks: 43%-36% Both sexes, all races, every age group, every level of income. All reject race-based governance. https://t.co/a74PiCnGBh pic.twitter.com/VF2qDVBZ0p — Richard Hanania
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July 10, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Many members of the Biden administration are overmatched in their jobs, beginning with Slow Joe himself. But perhaps no member of the administration is as out of her depth as Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Poor Ms. Jean-Pierre thinks the Constitution guarantees some ethnic groups the right to discrimination in their favor: This is really, really important and I know the American people are really tracking this, as they should be.
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July 9, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the UNC race discrimination case. Her dissent was a political screed, not a legal argument, and it contained at least one howler that we and many others pointed out. Jackson argued that universities need to discriminate in favor of blacks so that there will be more black doctors. Why? Jackson wrote: For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood
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July 3, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Democrats should take action so they can get back to getting Supreme Court decisions they approve of. How might they do that? Investigate justices (conservative only) for bogus “conflicts of interest,” for one. Impeachment for another: “There also must be impeachment on the table.” Not sure how that is going to happen with Republicans controlling the House, but practicality has never been a concern for AOC. The
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July 1, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
Liberal reactions to the high profile decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court this week read like a parody account. On Thursday, the Court dealt a blow to affirmative action by invalidating race-based college admissions programs in favor of a merit-based system and the responses from many on the left were downright racist. Rev. Al Sharpton said the decision was “tantamount to sticking a dagger in our back.” He’s saying that blacks
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June 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Scott and Steve have already commented on today’s historic Supreme Court decision, finding that both Harvard and the University of North Carolina have engaged in illegal race discrimination through their affirmative action policies. I will add a few observations, which perhaps will be supplemented when I have had time to read all of the opinions. * The Grutter decision has always been an anomaly. It expressed considerable distaste for affirmative
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June 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The Supreme Court’s long expected ruling on the Harvard and University of North Carolina race-based admissions practices was just released. A 6-3 vote, along predictable lines, backs up Chief Justice John Roberts’s very strong opinion, which relies on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. I’m still making my way through the concurrences (Thomas decided to write a long concurrence giving the originalist ground for the ruling, as well
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June 11, 2023 — Steven Hayward
After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ended segregation in public schools, many jurisdictions in the south engaged in what they openly called “massive resistance” to the Court’s decree, and enforcing the decision required both legislation and many follow-up lawsuits at every level of the federal judiciary for many years after. It appears colleges and universities are already preparing their own “massive resistance” to a prospective Supreme
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May 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The old saying, “There are liars, damn liars, and statisticians,” should be amended to include pollsters. The latest exhibit in polling as a “pseudo-event” (an artificial event created by advocates solely to generate a news headline, pace Daniel Boorstin) is an AP-NORC poll just out which the AP advertises with this headline: Most in US say don’t ban race in college admissions but its role should be small: AP-NORC poll
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March 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
You seldom look to The New Yorker for support for a conservative cause, but today the storied magazine published a devastating article by Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen on the Harvard affirmative action case now pending at the Supreme Court. The article, “The Secret Joke at the Heart of the Harvard Affirmative-Action Case,” is devastating not only on the merits, but also for the conduct and rulings of District Court
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November 2, 2022 — Steven Hayward
If you thought the primal screams from the left after the Dobbs decision were deafening, just wait until after next Tuesday’s election result, and especially next year if the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action at the end of this term. I expect the left is going to go hoarse from all their primal screaming. The New Republic is especially alarmed that, as they put it in a headline today,
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November 1, 2022 — John Hinderaker
It is sad that 161 years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, and 154 years after the adoption of the 14th Amendment, we are still debating whether public institutions like the University of North Carolina should be able to engage in race discrimination. One might have thought that by now, that issue would have been settled. Liberals seem resigned to the fact that that they now will have to pretend,
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October 31, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I listened to all five hours of the Supreme Court oral argument today while on a long car drive home, and am hoping to post a special podcast tomorrow going over the whole scene, but for me, one single moment especially stands out. Seth Waxman, the primary attorney defending Harvard (a former solicitor general under President Clinton), was going head-to-head with Chief Justice John Roberts about whether race is a
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October 2, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Linda Brown was the young girl who gave her name to the four cases consolidated for consideration in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that effectively invalidated the regime of public school segregation. She died in 2018 at the age of 75 or 76. Neil Genzlinger’s New York Times obituary recounted her story. Genzlinger dealt inadequately with the Brown case. “In its ruling,” he wrote, “the
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August 10, 2022 — Steven Hayward
With Supreme Court oral arguments now scheduled for the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases, I’ve started reading through some of the amicus briefs filed in the case, and will comment on some of them in due course. Meanwhile, an exchange of letters between Macklin Fleming, a Justice of the Court of Appeals, State of California at Los Angeles, and Louis Pollak, Dean of the Yale Law School, that was
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