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Democrats must stop Supreme Court stripping Americans’ rights [1]
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Date: 2023-07
I used to love the month of June. The days are at their longest, and all the possibilities for summer fun are laid out before you as unrealized potential and delicious anticipation. As a schoolchild, summer meant freedom to me, and I’ve never fully shaken the association as an adult, which I suppose makes particular sense given how much of my adult life I spent in academia. On top of all that, I have a summer birthday. But these days, June brings me more dread than anticipation, and for that I have the Republican Party and its transformation of the US Supreme Court into a radical partisan institution to thank.
The Supreme Court’s annual term begins on the first Monday in October and ends in late June or early July. In fall and winter, the court hears oral arguments for the cases it will rule on by the end of its term. Most of its decisions are handed down in June. And over the past few years, many of those decisions have been antidemocratic bombshells, undermining the (at this point largely fictional) separation of church and state in this country and dealing painful blows to civil rights for people who aren’t straight white Christian men.
Last year, of course, the extreme right-wing court overturned Roe vs Wade, ending the federal right to abortion in the United States, and explicitly left open the possibility of abolishing the rights to same-sex marriage and even contraception in the future.
In a certain sense, sad as it is to say so, we’re lucky that neither happened this year. But that doesn’t make last month’s rulings any less devastating, with losses including affirmative action in university admissions. The court’s 6-3 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard, handed down on 29 June, dictates to both public and private American colleges and universities that they may no longer consider race when deciding which students to admit. The aim of considering race, of course, was to achieve a more diverse student body – one that better reflects the racial makeup of the US – and to help level the educational and professional playing fields that remain heavily skewed by racial bias and the consequences of centuries of direct policies aimed at keeping BIPOC Americans down. Students may still write about how race has shaped their lives in their admissions essays, but direct consideration of race by admissions officials is no longer allowed.
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We don’t have to guess about how this will play out because in 1996, right-wing activists succeeded in ending affirmative action in California’s state universities via the ballot initiative known as Proposition 209. As the president and chancellors of the University of California system wrote in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court regarding Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard, “After Proposition 209 barred consideration of race in admissions decisions at public universities in California, freshmen enrollees from underrepresented minority groups dropped precipitously at UC, and dropped by 50% or more at UC’s most selective campuses.”
According to the brief, the UC system has since spent more than half a billion dollars on race-neutral outreach programs (for example to communities where children are unlikely to attend university) designed to increase diversity, including racial diversity. Despite those efforts, the president and chancellors were compelled to conclude that:
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/supreme-court-democrats-media-must-confront-right-wing-strip-rights-race-university/
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