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      Biden says supreme court ‘misinterpreted the constitution’ as he announces new student debt relief plan – live

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      From 2h agoJoe Biden said he will announce a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.“I’m announcing today a new path consistent with today’s ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act. That will allow (education secretary Miguel Cardona) … to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances,” the president said.Speaking from the White House briefing room, secretary of education Miguel Cardona said he “strongly disagreed” with the supreme court’s decision and vowed to “open up an alternative path to debt relief for as many borrowers as possible, as quickly as possible”.In ruling against the Biden administration’s landmark student debt forgiveness plan, the court had “ruled against more than 40 million working families”, Cardona said.
      We’re not talking about the millionaires who benefited from the billions in tax giveaway a few years ago. We’re talking about low and middle income families recovering from the worst pandemic in a century.
      He said it was “outrageous” that Republican members of Congress had “fought so hard against the program that would have helped millions of their own constituents”.Cardona added:
      Today, I want to assure our students, our borrowers and families across America – our fight is not over.
      Vice-president Kamala Harris has spoken out against the supreme court’s ruling today striking down a Colorado civil rights law which compels businesses and organizations to treat same-sex couples equally.The court’s decision “departs from decades of jurisprudence by creating an exception to protections against discrimination in public accommodations”, a statement from Harris reads.
      On the last day of Pride Month, the Supreme Court has paved the way for businesses across our nation to discriminate in the name of “free expression”—against the LGBTQI+ community, racial and religious minorities, the disability community, and women.
      At a time when we celebrate hard-won advancements in LGBTQI+ rights, this decision threatens future progress.
      She added that she and President Joe Biden would “continue to rigorously enforce federal anti-discrimination protections and fight for the right of all people to participate equally in our society”.We have a clip from Joe Biden’s speech where he announced a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today said his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.Once a person loses their right to vote in Mississippi it is essentially impossible to get it back.To do so, a disenfranchised person must get the legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by a supermajority in both chambers and then have the governor approve the bill. There are no online instructions or applications and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.Hardly anyone successfully makes it through the process. Between 1997 and 2022, an average of seven people successfully made it through the process each year, according to Blake Feldman, a criminal justice researcher in Mississippi.The supreme court did not say on Friday why it was rejecting the case (it takes four votes on the court to grant review) and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were the only two justices who noted their dissent from the denial. Jackson wrote an opinion saying the fifth circuit had committed “two egregious analytical errors that ought to be corrected”.First, she wrote, even though Mississippi voters removed a crime in 1950 and added two more in 1968, the substance of many of the original crimes from 1890 remained intact. That means that the list is still discriminatory, she wrote in a dissent that was joined by Sotomayor.“The “remaining crimes” from [the list of crimes] pernicious origin still work the very harm the 1890 Convention intended – denying Black Mississippians the vote,” she wrote.The US supreme court turned away a case on Friday challenging Mississippi’s rules around voting rights for people with felony convictions, leaving intact a policy implemented more than a century ago with the explicit goal of preventing Black people from voting.Those convicted of any one of 23 specific felonies in Mississippi permanently lose the right to vote. The list is rooted in the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, where delegates chose disenfranchising crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit.“We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,” the president of the convention said at the time. The crimes, which include bribery, theft, carjacking, bigamy and timber larceny, have remained largely the same since then; Mississippi voters amended it remove burglary in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968.It continued to have a staggering effect in Mississippi. Sixteen percent of the Black voting-age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.Read the full story by my colleague Sam Levine here.In his speech at the White House, Joe Biden repeated his criticism of the Republicans who led the successful effort to block his plan to cancel some federal student loan debt.Biden called out those Republican members who received “hundreds of thousands for themselves” in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans that were later forgiven, but who had strongly opposed his student debt plan.
      The hypocrisy is stunning.
      The new student debt relief plan will be implemented under the federal government’s rulemaking process, the White House said, and it seems like it will take months to get the program up and running.The education department today issued a notice announcing the plan, will hold a virtual public hearing on 18 July and “finalize the issues to be addressed through rulemaking and begin the negotiated rulemaking sessions this fall. The Department will complete this rulemaking as quickly as possible,” according to the White House.In addition, the White House said the education department will institute “a 12-month ‘on-ramp’ to repayment, running from 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024, so that financially vulnerable borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent, reported to credit bureaus, placed in default, or referred to debt collection agencies.”Federal student loan payments have been paused since Covid-19 broke out in March 2020, and were set to restart this October. The Biden administration said the “on-ramp” is intended to provide relief to financially struggling borrowers who can’t afford to start making payments again right away.The Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fong is taking the blog over now to keep you posted on this developing story.Joe Biden directed blame for the apparent demise of his student debt relief program both at the Republicans who sued over the plan, and at the supreme court justices who ruled against it.“I think the court misinterpreted the constitution,” Biden said. Asked whether he gave Americans “false hope” by promising $430bn in total debt relief only for it to be blocked in court, he replied, “I didn’t give any false hope. The question was whether or not I would do even more than was requested. What I did I felt was appropriate and was able to be done and would get done.”“But the Republican snatched away the hope that they were given,” Biden said.“This new path is legally sound,” Biden said in announcing his new attempt at student loan relief.“It’s going to take longer, but in my view it’s the best path that remains to providing for as many borrowers as possible. I’m directing my team to move as quickly as possible on law,” the president said.Joe Biden said he will announce a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.“I’m announcing today a new path consistent with today’s ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act. That will allow (education secretary Miguel Cardona) … to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances,” the president said.Joe Biden has started his speech by criticizing the Republicans who successfully sued to block his student loan forgiveness program.“The money was literally about to go out the door, and then Republican elected officials and special interests stepped in. They said no, no, literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars of student debt relief that was about to change their lives,” the president said.“You know, these Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working-class, middle-class Americans. Republican state officials sued my administration, attempting to block relief, including to millions of their own constituents.” More

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      The supreme court just threw millions of American student debtors under the bus | Eleni Schirmer

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      Last August, President Biden did something no president has done before. He announced a plan to mass cancel student debt, offering $10,000 to $20,000 of relief for borrowers who earn under $125,000 annually.The triumph of this policy was more than the sliver of debt that it potentially sliced off the second-largest type of household debt in the US. More fundamentally, Biden’s policy proposal put an ideological dent in the American doctrinal belief that a creditor’s right to repayment is the first-order business of any economy.On Friday, in a 6-3 vote on ideological lines, the US supreme court undid all that. The court ruled against Biden’s student-loan forgiveness policy and put millions of Americans’ financial futures in peril.Debt intensifies existing inequalities in society: those who have the least rely on debt the most, for everything from housing to healthcare to higher education. Debtors end up paying higher costs for the same goods than those who can pay cash upfront. Black people and women bear the highest student debt burdens; over time, they pay a higher sticker price for the same degrees as white people and men. For these reasons, Biden’s proposed plan was also a major attempt to chip away at the racial wealth gap.It was no wonder, then, that within weeks of Biden’s policy announcement, half a dozen rightwing lawsuits sued to stop the president’s program. Although most of the suits were thrown out, two stuck, and temporarily halted the program. Late last fall, Biden requested that the US supreme court intervene. Although there has been much handwringing about the student debt case in front of the court – its role as a bargaining chip in debt-ceiling negotiations, its prospects to drive voters to polls in 2024 – most of the discussion misses the point.That’s because the supreme court case in question was not actually about whether the president can cancel debt. It was about whether the plaintiffs in the case – six Republican attorneys general – could reasonably prove that cancelling millions of people’s student debt harms their state, and whether judges would believe their lies.The state of Missouri contended that it will be harmed because a quasi-public loan servicing company there, Mohela, may lose revenue from cancellation, making it more difficult for Mohela to repay an old debt owed to the state of Missouri. But that violates a basic legal principle: you can’t sue on behalf of somebody else. My roommate can’t sue my employer for laying me off and making it harder for me to pay my half of the rent, yet this case would set such a precedent.In fact, internal emails between Mohela employees revealed utter confusion about the case. One employee bluntly pointed out that Missouri has no standing; another worried: “Are we the bad guys?” Even conservative legal experts ideologically opposed to the concept of student debt cancellation acknowledged that the plaintiffs weren’t bringing a legitimate claim.But putting aside the fact that Missouri has no standing to sue, the state’s claim that Mohela’s revenue loss from cancellation would endanger its ability to repay a $105m debt owed from 2008 is patently wrong, as research I recently co-authored reveals. Even with Biden’s pledged cancellation, Mohela is poised to have a gangbuster year, raking in more revenue than at any other point in its history.Yet Trump-appointed judges in the eighth circuit, yielding to dubious conservative claims, issued a nationwide injunction on Biden’s relief policy. Within weeks, the case was whisked to the highest court in the land, skirting over basic fact-finding and discovery processes. In oral arguments, the plaintiffs offered little more than the phrase “it stands to reason” to justify their claim that Mohela would lose money.The plaintiffs rigged up such a convoluted suit in an attempt to avoid a legal reality: the president and the Department of Education have full authority to cancel debt under a provision, the Heroes Act, to cancel debt in national emergencies such as a pandemic. This is just one of many legal authorities that Biden has at his disposal to cancel student loans.Now that the court has struck down Biden’s first policy stab, Biden can, and must, swiftly exercise other legal authorities to automatically cancel debt. The court’s ruling is not the death of debt cancellation – it’s merely a blockade on one channel to get there.But the fact that we have found ourselves in this position – with a couple of frivolous lawsuits delaying relief for millions of struggling Americans – should not be misread as merely yet another failure of our increasingly conservative and out-of-touch court.Debt relief is on the precipice in part because Biden failed in his execution. Despite warnings and pleas from experts and advocates, Biden insisted on routing cancellation through an application, rather than automatically and universally discharging debt. This choice was costly, in more ways than one. It took the Biden administration 52 days between announcing the policy to ready the application program. Rightwing groups seized the opportunity and sued to block the whole program.When Biden takes another crack at his generation-defining policy, he should have a strategy that reflects the ambition of the goal, rather than wavers and offers half measures. The fate of the 2024 elections doesn’t just rest on the bold policies Biden announces, but the boldness of his strategy to actually get them done.
      Eleni Schirmer, a writer and postdoctoral fellow at the Concordia University Social Justice Centre in Montreal, is part of the Debt Collective More

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      Homophobic businesses in the US have a powerful ally: the US supreme court | Moira Donegan

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      On Friday the US supreme court expanded the right to free speech into a right of businesses to discriminate. In a 6-3 decision, with the majority opinion by Neil Gorsuch, the justices declared that a Colorado civil rights statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public businesses violates the first amendment’s freedom of speech. The ruling appears to formalize the right of homophobic business owners to not serve gay people in some situations.303 Creative v Elenis concerns a woman, Lorie Smith, who operates a website design service and wishes to be exempted from a Colorado civil rights law that requires her to treat all customers equally. Specifically, Smith, a conservative Christian, wants to be able to refuse service to same-sex couples seeking wedding websites, and to be able to place a banner on the home page of her business declaring that she will not make such sites. The court has in recent years dramatically expanded the free exercise of religion clause, often granting conservative Christian plaintiffs leeway to curtail their personal obligations to the law. But 303 Creative offers a different theory of the case: that the legal requirement not to discriminate against gay people is a violation of the plaintiff’s free speech.It’s an odd, and expansive, vision of “speech”. There’s nothing stopping the web designer from, say, buying a billboard to advertise her opposition to gay rights, or from speaking out against such rights in her own writing, electioneering, internet posts and personal life. But Smith didn’t just want to be able to avail herself of all the vast opportunities for speech, expression, debate and persuasion available to her. She wanted to express her bigotry in her business, via the conduct of her public-facing commercial enterprise. She wanted to be able to discriminate at work.The supreme court has now allowed her to. The justices’ decision pertains to the allegedly narrow question of “whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the first amendment”. But there is no real limiting principle in the 303 decision, no matter what the court says; no guarantee that the precedent this decision sets will confine itself to legalizing only discrimination against gay people, or only refusal of service for weddings.Indeed, the case threatens to unravel a whole matrix of anti-discrimination laws governing public accommodations, redefining public-facing commercial enterprises as speech and discrimination as personal expression. The label that Smith wants to put at the top of her business website – effectively declaring that only straight people can be served – evokes the darkest history of public discrimination in this country. The decision’s coming impact on America’s public sphere – where, now, businesses will claim an entitlement to discriminate against vast swaths of the public whom they don’t like – will unfold over the course of years, and it will be profound.If 303 Creative sounds familiar, that’s because it’s an almost beat-by-beat rerun of a similar challenge to the same Colorado law, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, where the court did not rule on the merits. In Masterpiece, a baker was asked to make a cake for two gay men’s wedding, and sued for the right to refuse them service.Masterpiece garnered a lot of media attention, and much of it focused on the gay couple themselves – two men, in love and looking to celebrate a joyous milestone in their lives, who were subjected to bigotry and indignity, because of a baker who declared he had a right to make hatred a plank of his business. The men looked innocent, victimized, sympathetic. The court looked mendacious, opportunistic and cruel. They blinked.The supreme court likes to pretend that it is not influenced by politics, but the court is in fact a profoundly political institution, tasked with calculating, just as any congressman does, how best to pursue unpopular Republican policy agendas with the least amount of popular pushback. The sympathetic gay couple in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case threatened to provoke pushback. That, as much as any putative legal concern, is why the court then punted.They did not punt in 303 Creative, in part because there is no couple. In fact Smith, the web designer, was never asked to make a website for a gay wedding. At the time she filed her lawsuit, she didn’t even have an actual web design business. (She has one now, and the quality of the work does not make me suspect that gay couples are lining up to have her make websites on their behalf.) It’s not clear that the designer even has standing to sue – she never experienced the event that she says would so injure her.But this means the case has a political virtue for the conservative justices: because there is no real injury in Smith’s case, there is also no gay couple who she has harmed, no one to give face to the impact of her now legally sanctioned bigotry. The decision will create such victims, but the court itself does not have to answer for them in its opinion.303 Creative, then, is not so much a lawsuit over an actual conflict as it is a fiction of the conservative legal movement. The anti-gay legal machine arguing the case, Alliance Defending Freedom, found a plaintiff and concocted a complaint out of thin air specifically to avoid the pitfalls they encountered in Masterpiece. Interestingly, the New Republic reported earlier this week that a gay man who allegedly contacted Smith asking for her services may not even exist – or rather, that there is a man by the same name, but that he is straight, has been married to a woman for many years, and was wholly unaware that his name was being used in the case.Oral arguments in December were conducted with roughly the same degree of bad faith, with Samuel Alito hijacking the proceedings at one point to pose hypotheticals involving children in Klan robes, a pointed and suggestive remark about dating websites addressed to Elena Kagan, and a convoluted scenario about a Black man playing Santa Claus at a mall.That was about the level of argument advanced by the conservative lawyers, too, who attacked civil rights law via a profoundly cynical rationale: that to eliminate the obligation to serve all comers equally, and to legally sanction bigotry as an operating feature of a public business, would be to advance the cause of pluralism.The argument in 303 Creative has the reasoning of an internet troll: that protecting the right to discriminate against gays in fact preserves diversity; that is, the kind of diversity that’s present when homophobes can discriminate and deny service in their businesses without sanction from the state. The diversity that is encouraged when all people, regardless of identity, can participate as equals in the public square is evidently not as meaningful.Conservative opposition to civil rights law has long argued that not discriminating hurts the dignity of bigots. But the majority opinion seems uninterested in the dignity of gay couples, who now must be subjected to rejection and patronizing lectures about religious freedom when they are only seeking to buy flowers or wedding invitations. Their dignity, their ability to move through the public square with safety and respect, does not matter as much to the court.And this is the baseline assumption of so much of this court’s jurisprudence: that there are some people whose dignity and freedom matters, and must be cognizable to the law – and some whose dignity and freedom do not matter, and can be ignored.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Biden condemns ruling against race-conscious admissions: ‘This is not a normal court’ – live

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      From 5h agoSpeaking at the White House, Joe Biden condemned the supreme court’s conservative justices for their decision released today against race-based admissions.“In case after case, including recently, just a few years ago in 2016, the court has affirmed and reaffirmed this view that colleges could use race, not as a determining factor for admission, but as one of the factors among many in deciding who to admit,” the president said, adding that “the court once again walked away from decades of precedent.”“The court has effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions and I strongly, strongly disagree with the court’s decision,” he said.There are “still a lot of really good Republicans” in the Senate, Joe Biden said during his interview on MSNBC.Biden said that six Republican senators have come to him since he was elected “to tell me, ‘Joe, I agree with you but if I’m seen doing it, I’ll lose a primary’”. He added:
      I’m an eternal optimist. I still think there’s going to come a moment when they’re going to be able to break.
      During his interview on MSNBC, Joe Biden admitted he knew his polling numbers “are not good” but argued that “they were the same way when I ran and won”.Biden said he had “great faith” in the American people and that it was “important that they know that my value set is very different than the new Maga Republican party”.He added:
      Everybody thought I was gonna get clobbered in the primary. I got 80 million votes in the last election.
      Here’s the clip:Joe Biden refused to say whether he knew ahead of time about Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to march on Moscow.“Every president is amazed that America is the lead in the world”, he told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.He said he had focused on holding Nato together and on expanding the alliance to make sure that “the most significant invasion since world war two does not succeed”.In an interview on MSNBC, Joe Biden was asked about a report that said senior officials at the justice department resisted investigating the possible involvement of Donald Trump and his associates in the January 6 Capitol attack.Biden said he had made a commitment that he would “not in any way interfere” with the justice department, adding that he had “not spoken one single time with the attorney general on any specific case”.He said he had “faith that the justice department will move in a direction that is consistent with the law”.Joe Biden has said the supreme court has “gone out of its way” to “unravel basic rights” following its ruling on Thursday to strike down affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard.In an interview on MSNBC, Biden was asked what he meant at a press conference earlier today when he said the supreme court was “not a normal court”. He said:
      What I meant by that is it has done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.
      He said he found this court “so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people”.
      Across the board, the vast majority of American people don’t agree with a lot of the decisions this court has made.
      Biden said that although he believes the conservative majority on the court “may do too much harm”, he opposes expanding the court because it will “politicize the court forever in a way that is not healthy”.Biden says he knows his polling numbers “are not good”, but argues that “they were the same way when I ran”.
      Everybody thought I was going to get clobbered in a primary.
      Biden says he’s “not spoken one single time” with the attorney general “on any specific case”.Biden says he thinks if we start the process of trying to expand the court “we’re going to politicize it in a way that’s not healthy”.Biden says he thinks it’s a “mistake” to expand the court. He says:
      What I’ve done is I have appointed 136 judges, and … I picked people who are from various backgrounds.
      We’ve appointed more women to the appellate courts, Black women to the appellate courts, than every other president in American history.
      Biden says the vast majority of American people don’t agree with the supreme court’s ruling.He says it “finds it so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people”.Biden is asked what he meant when he said earlier today that the supreme court is “not a normal court”.Biden says the court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court”, pointing to its ruling last year to overturn Roe v Wade.Joe Biden will in a few minutes appear from MSNBC’s New York City studios for a live interview with anchor Nicolle Wallace.While Biden often responds to questions from reporters as he comes and goes from the White House or at the tail end of his speeches, he has done few press conferences compared with his recent predecessors, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Follow along here as the Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fong covers the interview live. More

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      What was affirmative action designed to do – and what has it achieved?

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      The US supreme court banned the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions on Thursday. The court ruled that race-conscious admissions violate the equal-protection clause under the US constitution.Envisioned as a tool to help remedy historical discrimination and create more diverse student bodies, affirmative action policies have permitted hundreds of colleges and universities to factor in students’ racial backgrounds during the admissions process. That consideration is supplementary, and taken in tandem with other factors such as applicants’ test scores, grades and extracurricular activities.Even with race-conscious admissions, however, many selective public and private colleges and universities struggle to enroll diverse student populations that accurately reflect society. At the University of North Carolina, for example, in a state where 21% of people are Black, just 8% of the school’s undergraduates are Black.Opponents of affirmative action, such as the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, argue that considering race as a factor in the admissions process amounts to racial discrimination – particularly against Asian Americans. SFA has brought cases against Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and UNC, the nation’s first public university, to challenge their affirmative action policies, which the group contends favors Black and Latino students. Ultimately, it hopes that race considerations will be nixed from the admissions process entirely, and replaced by race-neutral or “color-blind” policies.What was affirmative action designed to do?The concept of affirmative action originated in 1961 when President John F Kennedy issued an executive order directing government agencies to ensure that all Americans get an equal opportunity in employment. President Lyndon Johnson took it one step further in 1965, barring public and private organizations that had a federal contract from discriminating based on race, color, religion and national origin. The prohibition was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s assistant labor secretary, Arthur Fletcher, who would eventually be known as the “father of affirmative action”, pushed for requiring employers to set “goals and timetables” to hire more Black workers. That effort, known as the Revised Philadelphia Plan, would later influence how many schools approached their own race-conscious admissions programs.The practice was challenged when Allan Bakke, a white man who was twice denied entry to the medical school at the University of California at Davis, sued the university, arguing that its policies, which included allocating seats for “qualified” students of color, discriminated against him. In 1978, the supreme court narrowly rejected the use of “racial quotas”, but noted that colleges and universities could use race as a factor in the admissions process. Justice Lewis Powell noted that achieving diversity represented a “compelling government interest”.What has affirmative action in college admissions actually achieved?After generations of near total exclusion of Black students and other students of color, colleges and universities began admitting more diverse groups in the 1960s and 70s, and soon thereafter incorporated race-consciousness into their admissions policies.Data shows that the rise of affirmative action policies in higher education has bolstered diversity on college campuses. In 1965, Black students accounted for roughly 5% of all undergraduates. And between 1965 and 2001, the percentage of Black undergraduates doubled. The number of Latino undergraduates also rose during that time. Still, the practice of factoring race into the admissions process faced repeated attacks. In 1998, during an era of conservatism, California voters approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in any state or government agency, including its university system. Since then, eight more states have eliminated such race-conscious policies.What could happen next?The end of affirmative action at those state levels shows just how impactful the consideration of race in admissions has been: a UC Berkeley study found that after the ban in California, the number of applicants of color in the UC system “sharply shifted away from UC’s most selective Berkeley and UCLA campuses, causing a cascade of students to enroll at lower-quality public institutions and some private universities”. Specifically, the number of Black freshmen admitted to UC Berkeley dropped to 3.6% between 2006 and 2010 – almost half of its population before the ban.In an amicus brief in the Harvard case, attorneys for the University of Michigan, which had to stop considering race in admissions in 2006, argued that despite “persistent, vigorous and varied efforts” to achieve diversity, it has struggled to do so without race-consciousness. The number of Black and Native American students has “dramatically” dropped since the end of affirmative action in the state.Though students of color remain underrepresented at selective colleges and universities today, institutions argue that their presence helps shape students’ on-campus experiences. The removal of race consideration from college admissions could set a precedent for a less diverse school system, which stands in stark contrast to an increasingly diverse world. More

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      The supreme court’s blow to US affirmative action is no coincidence | Eddie R Cole

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      On Thursday, in a 6-3 decision, the US supreme court ruled against affirmative action in American colleges and universities. The obvious concern now is whether the ruling will significantly reduce the number of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students enrolled at elite institutions. But a more dire reality undergirds the court’s decision: it reflects a decades-long drive to return higher education to white, elite control.That movement predates affirmative action by at least a century, because no entity impacts American life more than higher education. During the Reconstruction era following emancipation, Black people were allowed to advance in political and various other roles, but white powerbrokers drew a hard line at higher education. On 28 September 1870 the chancellor of the University of Mississippi, John Newton Waddel, declared: “The university will continue to be, what it always has been, an institution exclusively for the education of the white race.”Waddel was not alone in his appraisal. Following the civil war, many white academic leaders and faculty members believed higher education was designed solely to educate white people. Waddel and other white academics maintained that the University of Mississippi’s faculty “never, for a moment, conceived it possible or proper that a Negro should be admitted to its classes, graduated with its honors, or presented with its diplomas”.Over the past century, Black Americans’ struggles to secure equal educational opportunity have always been met with white resistance. The recent lawsuits filed by Students for Fair Admissions – an organization led by anti-affirmative-action activist Edward Blum – against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are not about academic merit or even the mistreatment of white or Asian American students; they are an extension of this movement to ensure American higher education can be used to maintain social norms.This is why, in defending affirmative action, the argument for campus diversity falls short. Rather than make wealthy, majority-white campuses more diverse, affirmative action was intended to acknowledge and address the nation’s history of racism and atone for past racial harms that disproportionately affected descendants of enslaved Black people.This was made plain in 1963 – one of the most racially tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. By summer, John F Kennedy – a Harvard University alumnus in his third year in the White House – was forced to take immediate action about racial segregation, in part because it had become a foreign policy embarrassment to the United States that belied the nation’s stated commitment to democracy.Kennedy sought assistance from many leading administrators in American higher education. “I write you personally to seek your help in solving the grave civil rights problems faced by this nation,” Kennedy wrote, on 12 July 1963, to select college presidents and chairs of trustee boards. “The leadership that you and your colleagues show in extending equal educational opportunity today will influence American life for decades to come.”Kennedy explained to academic leaders that the nation’s problems affected “both white and Negro students and their families”. He asked academic leaders to implement “special programs” to address said problems, but did not specify what the programs should be. He deferred to academic leaders to ensure initiatives were “carried out” toward that goal.Motivated by Kennedy’s appeal, Black and majority-white colleges and universities worked together to address racism. By October 1963, racial initiatives were discussed at meetings of the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. In April 1964, presidents and faculty from Black campuses met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which hosted a two-day conference on “Programs to Assist Predominately Negro Colleges and Universities”.The leaders of wealthy majority-white campuses committing to numerous programs, most of them focused on Black colleges and universities. The programs – supported by the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and other foundations – included new opportunities for Black college faculty to attend summer institutes and graduate schools and created exchange programs between faculty and students on Black and white campuses. Harlan H Hatcher, president of the University of Michigan, explained that his university’s partnership with the Tuskegee Institute “can help them in the development of a strong liberal arts program. They, in turn, will advise us on the [racial] programs.”For Michigan and its peer institutions, considering race in college admissions was part of a broad range of affirmative action practices launched in the 1960s. Affirmative action was a comprehensive set of programs that sought system-wide change to expand educational opportunity. The goal was not to ensure that some Black people could attend a few dozen of the nation’s wealthiest institutions, but instead that there be widespread investment in creating a more equitable higher education system – investing in the Black colleges and universities that long served the people most disenfranchised because of the nation’s history of racism.The blowback was immediate, however. By the 1970s, white academic leaders and foundation officers mostly abandoned their support of Black colleges and universities, and the lasting remnant of that era was racial consideration in admissions on select wealthy, majority-white campuses. That changed with the supreme court’s ruling this week.The ongoing racial backlash in this country extends beyond affirmative action. We’re witnessing a battle over ideology, and higher education is at the center. The efforts to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; dismantle the faculty tenure system; restrict how aspects of Black history are taught; and withhold billions from Black universities are also part of this sinister movement. The movement limits Black presence, Black thought, and even Black control of Black institutions to return all of academia to white, elitist control. Those seeking control have no desire for higher education – the environment most concerned with solving complex problems – to have any role in redressing the legacy of racism.The dismissal of race and racism dialogue in higher education should alarm all Americans, because the supreme court decision is not about restricting unfair racial advantage in college admissions – it is about maintaining the social inequality that has long restricted most Americans, regardless of their race, while a few are allowed to preserve and maintain their privileged status in society. The result is a weakened university that does not solve racial problems but instead upholds them.
      Eddie R Cole is an associate professor of education and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom More

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      The supreme court denied a wild election theory. But don’t relax yet | David Daley

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      Such is the dismal state of the US supreme court that it is genuinely surprising any time the court’s conservative supermajority turns down an opportunity to further distort American democracy to the benefit of their partisan benefactors and enhance the prospects of enduring one-party minority rule.Moore v Harper – the case from North Carolina involving the so-called “independent state legislature” (ISL) theory, the ludicrous notion that state legislatures have a free hand when it comes to election law and redistricting, unfettered by pesky state constitutions, state supreme courts or even gubernatorial vetos – was satisfyingly swatted away on Tuesday by a 6-3 majority.This theory, spawned from a footnote in the then Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s concurrence in Bush v Gore, and nurtured for two decades in the hothouse of conservative legal academia, lacks any grounding in American history, represents a terrifying threat to elections as we know them, and should never have made it this far in the courts.The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, makes it clear that the constitution’s elections clause does not carve out an exception to the fundamental principle of judicial review. “When state legislatures prescribe the rules concerning federal elections, they remain subject to the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” Roberts wrote, in a decision joined by the court’s three liberals and justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.It’s good news and a welcome sigh of relief. Taken to its extreme – as seems to be the practice in so many conservative state legislatures these days – the ISL theory could have handed state legislatures, many already deeply gerrymandered and beyond the control of state voters, dangerous unchecked powers with regard to election certification and presidential electors. And it could have removed state courts, constitutions, governors and potentially even independent redistricting commissions and ballot initiatives as any meaningful check on runaway legislatures.But while the headlines proclaim victory for American democracy, and supreme court reporters hoist the chief justice back on their shoulders as a great centrist hope, it’s far too soon to celebrate. Buried within the details of this decision, as well as a short concurrence by Kavanaugh, are the seeds of future cases to come. This decision is hardly the silver bullet antidote to take down this dangerous zombie notion once and for all.The court’s decision makes clear that the elections clause does not liberate state legislatures from state constitutions and state law, but also that federal courts must not abandon their duty to exercise judicial review. “This Court has an obligation to ensure that state court interpretations of state law do not evade federal law,” Roberts writes.Furthermore, state courts, according to the decision, must “not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections”.What does that mean? The court does not tell us. As the NYU law professor Rick Pildes points out, the decision does not adopt any standard at all, set any boundaries whatsoever, or even rule on whether the North Carolina state court exceeded its role. We head into the 2024 presidential election without any sense of what the federal courts believe to be an appropriate and non-transgressive role for state courts to play.That means that one of the most important lines from the decision might be this one from Kavanaugh’s short concurrence: “In other words, the Court has recognized and articulated a general principle for federal court review of state court decisions in federal election cases. In the future, the Court should and presumably will distill that general principle into a more specific standard such as the one advanced by Chief Justice Rehnquist.”The court’s decision invites future cases. (Kavanaugh issued a similar invitation for future cases in a short concurrence in the Alabama redistricting case this month that affirmed what remains of section two of the Voting Rights Act.) They may arrive in the days after the 2024 presidential election. And they could prove crucial in deeply gerrymandered Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona, three extraordinarily close states that provided President Biden’s electoral college victory in 2020 with the slenderest of margins, and where election deniers, some in the state legislature, made mischief with the results.A court that has already proven, time and again, its willingness to put the thumb on the scale for its own side in cases at the heart of American democracy may decide those future cases on a case-by-case basis, with no clear standard at all, based on how the individual justices feel about that state supreme court’s interpretation, and perhaps the consequence of that ruling. It’s an uncomfortable position to begin a presidential election, given the fact that, in many states, election deniers are in a stronger place today than they were on 6 January 2021.There are so few moments to breathe easier these days. Today’s surprising reasonableness from the court offers a respite. It may only be a brief one.
      David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote More