Supreme Court could finally fire racialist university bureaucrats
Fox News
The Supreme Court could help promote national unity and equal opportunity.
Ilya Shapiro is the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court," now out in an updated paperback edition. He also writes the Shapiro’s Gavel Substack newsletter.
A quarter-century after Bakke, a narrow Court majority in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) codified Powell’s understanding, although swing Justice Sandra Day O’Connor expressed the expectation "that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." Well, here we are nearly 20 years later, and race-conscious admissions programs have, if anything, become more ingrained and systemic.
This time, however, those challenging the higher-education establishment, a group called Students for Fair Admissions, are likely to get six votes. The typically most "gettable" vote for progressives, Chief Justice John Roberts, has shown no sign of squishiness in race cases. He was after all in dissent in the Court’s last affirmative-action case, Fisher v. UT-Austin II (2016), and in a 2007 school busing case famously wrote, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."