The left’s drive to intimidate the Supreme Court is working: Just witness the justices’ decision to blink on an open-and-shut racial-discrimination case.
On Tuesday, the court declined to take on the question of race-based admissions at specialized high schools, effectively OK’ing policies that discriminate against Asian-American students.
Parents brought the case, Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, after Fairfax County, Va., rewrote the rules for entry to elite Thomas Jefferson HS for Science and Technology — ditching a process that relied mainly on race-blind standardized testing for one that auto-admitted students from each of the local middle schools and also considered factors like socioeconomic status.
The school claimed the new policies were “race neutral,” but communication between school officials and board members made it clear that increasing racial diversity (by decreasing the number of Asian-American students) was a primary goal of the change.
And, in fact, the change dropped Asian-American admissions from 70% to about 54% of the freshman class.
This cuts straight against the high court’s ruling in two college-admission cases (centered on Harvard and the University of North Carolina) last year, which ordered a complete end to race-based quotas, with strong language about not making up excuses for continued discrimination.
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, issued a scathing dissent to the court’s decision to not to take up the Virginia case, saying that the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in the school’s favor “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.”
Correct. So why did Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett take a dive?
Maybe they didn’t want to risk another controversial decision in a federal election year, after the Supremes’ strikedown of Roe v. Wade became a huge Democratic rallying cry in the 2022 midterms.
And never mind that while elites fumed over the college-admissions rulings, the majority of Americans, 68%, said the decision was “mostly a good thing.”
But perhaps the left’s long-term drive to delegitimize the court has the justices worried.
That includes physical intimidations like the protests outside justices’ homes in the runup to the Roe reversal, as well hysterical smears — of Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh during their confirmations, and bogus ethics complaints against Justice Thomas.
Not to mention the 2021 drive to pack the court with new liberal members.
The left’s message: If SCOTUS won’t give us what we want, there will be hell to pay.
Alito and Thomas deserve kudos for standing up to the bullies; too bad they seem to be standing alone.