Is the Supreme Court Going Wobbly on Affirmative Action?
A sign the injustice of court-sanctioned racial discrimination is poised to fester
Is the Supreme Court Going Wobbly on Affirmative Action?
At the Epoch Times, I write on the Supreme Court’s recent decision to deny cert in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board.
The case presented the very kind of challenge the court sought to preempt in its landmark Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision last summer, outlawing race-based admissions.
Then, writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts warned that schools thinking of skirting the ruling by engineering admissions processes to achieve desired racial mixes in schools without explicitly selecting students based on their race—that is, to pursue the ends of affirmative action by employing alternative means—better think twice.
“[D]espite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary,” the chief justice wrote, “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
Yet, in Coalition for TJ, one school — the highly selective Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology, a renowned magnet school — seems to have done just that.
By overhauling its admissions standards to replace primarily standardized tests with a series of criteria wholly unrelated to intellectual ability or academic achievement in pursuit of “equity,” the school board seemed to engage in a textbook case of racial discrimination by proxy.
The end result was a dramatic decline in Asian American students.
The District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said the admissions standards violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, as in the Harvard affirmative action case.
But a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel reversed the lower court based on a perverse approach, as the sole dissenting Judge Allison Jones Rushing noted, whereby:
[i]t would not matter ... if a new law cut a racial group’s success rate from 90% to 30% and the legislature was open about its discriminatory purpose, as long as no other racial group succeeded at a higher rate.
Only two of the nine justices stood ready to combat its efforts. Chief Justice Roberts was not among them.
You can read my op-ed on the case and its implications here.