![]() ![]() Over the past 45 years, Republican presidents have appointed nine of the 14 justices appointed during the period, all with the hope of weakening the Court’s progressive precedents in a range of areas, including affirmative action. To begin with, Thursday’s decisions reinforced the importance of presidential elections. ![]() The legal ramifications of this decision will be felt for years. No one doubted Trump was correct about how his appointees would rule: Justice Neil Gorsuch’s praise for Scalia’s “great project” in a tribute in 2016, Justice Amy Coney Barrett clerking for Justice Scalia and vow to the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearings that Justice Scalia’s “judicial philosophy is mine, too” and Justice Brett Kavanaugh was, like the other two, vetted by the Federalist Society, which had recommended his nomination to Trump as someone who would fulfill its objectives to overrule both Roe and affirmative action in university admissions. Just as Trump took credit for the overruling of Roe, he can take credit for the three appointments that helped guarantee the end of affirmative action in higher education. Trump promised to appoint justices “very much in the mold of Justice Scalia,” who consistently urged the overturning Roe and all affirmative action measures. Affirmative action was largely overshadowed in their hearings by concern over Roe’s fate, but there never was any doubt about where the three came down on the issue. Bush, belonged to a group at his alma mater, Princeton University, that opposed admitting women in the 1970s and has been opposed to affirmative action ever since joining the Court in 2005.Īs for the remaining three justices in the majority, appointed by President Donald Trump, I had the privilege of working as special counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats in each of their confirmation hearings. ![]() Justice Samuel Alito, also appointed by President George W. Bush, declared, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” On Thursday, he used nearly the same language in striking down affirmative action once and for all in university admissions: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it… For ‘he guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color … If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.” In a 2007 school desegregation case, Roberts, appointed by President George W. “Racialism,” he wrote, “simply cannot be undone by different or more radical racialism… Far from advancing the cause of improved racial relations in our Nation, affirmative action highlights our racial differences with pernicious effect: In fact, recent history reveals a disturbing pattern: Affirmative action policies appear to have prolonged the asserted need for racial discrimination.” Justice Clarence Thomas’ 10-page concurrence in Students for Fair Admissions recirculated arguments he has made since joining the Court in 1991 on the damaging effects affirmative action has had on its supposed beneficiaries. Wade was.īeginning with President Ronald Reagan, Republican presidents appointed justices whom they picked to overturn not just Roe but the practice of affirmative action. For nearly five decades, affirmative action in university admissions has been as much of a target as Roe v. Neither the decision nor the vote surprised anyone. She participated only in the parts of the case addressing the constitutionality of the admissions policy at the University of North Carolina but not her undergraduate alma mater, Harvard College, where she was a member of the Board of Overseers. The only differences were Chief Justice John Roberts, who-though he wrote his own concurrence in the abortion case, did not join in striking down Roe -wrote Thursday’s majority opinion on affirmative action, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. President and Fellows of Harvard College on lined up almost identically to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision a year ago, overturning federal protection for abortion rights. The vote in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. ![]()
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