Thomas will be celebrating with tonight. Or maybe at lunch.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE 10:08 am:
What was perhaps most remarkable in these largely predictable arguments was how much time the conservative justices devoted to pure policy arguments. These justices dislike affirmative action for a whole lot of deep emotional reasons that, it turns out, have nothing to do with the Constitution. They barely even considered the meaning of the 14th Amendment until Justice Elena Kagan finally brought it to their attention two and a half hours into the UNC arguments. Kagan, along with Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, was vastly more interested in the history of the Constitution’s equal protection clause than their ostensibly originalist colleagues. [...] [No one] should pretend the decision was remotely rooted in actual law.
[...]
Although these cases involve both public and private institutions, the Supreme Court has consistently held that federal law simply applies the equal protection clause to private universities that receive federal funds. So, in theory, the justices should’ve been debating the meaning of the Constitution. Instead, the conservative justices continually reverted to free-floating policy discussions about how affirmative action makes them feel. (Hint: They feel bad.)
[...]
When North Carolina Solicitor General Ryan Park explained that students benefit from having classmates with different backgrounds and viewpoints, offering peer-reviewed research on the topic, [Thomas] retorted: “I don’t put much stock in that because I’ve heard similar arguments in favor of segregation, too”—as though Southern states had once defended Jim Crow as necessary to expose students to the lived experiences of their classmates.
[...]
And, going back further, the 14th Amendment was not a breakthrough because it granted Black Americans equal citizenship, but because it made race irrelevant to the government. As Sotomayor and Jackson reminded their colleagues, this argument is ahistorical nonsense: The 14th Amendment was a color-conscious effort to give Black Americans all the rights and privileges enjoyed by white Americans. Even Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a self-proclaimed originalist, didn’t seriously try to contest this fact.
Instead, Barrett seized upon Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s famous prediction in Grutter that affirmative action would no longer be necessary in 2028, based on her own inchoate sense that racial progress was marching apace. Barrett framed O’Connor’s wish-casting as though it were the critical factor in these cases. She characterized O’Connor’s language as a “self-destruct mechanism” that expires in 2028, but also—in the view of the court’s conservatives—has already run out today. When defenders of affirmative action protested that this prediction was mere optimism, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that, in fact, it was a proper holding that bound the court. Why? Because Thomas called it that … in his Grutter dissent. Kavanaugh and Barrett also suggested that the much-mocked 2028 deadline cannot be extended unless its proponents set a new date by which race-conscious admissions would no longer be necessary. (Siri, set the timer for racial harmony.)
Slate
UPDATE 07/05/2023: Well, then.
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