CNN
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The Conservatives, despite their limited federal elected power, scored another major victory in the great political battle of the early 21st century.
The Supreme Court’s elimination of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday toppled another pillar of America’s liberal social infrastructure. Democrats have had their share of successes over the past 20 years, including earlier this month with decisions ordering the redrawing of Alabama’s congressional map and rejecting an election law theory backed by Trump, but it often seems that the conservatives had the momentum.
Republicans only control one house of Congress, and by a narrow margin, while Democrats hold the White House and the Senate. And yet Thursday’s ruling further weakened a core tenet of Democratic politics that unites party presidents with Franklin Roosevelt: that government should use its power to alleviate social injustices and uplift the underprivileged. Civil rights advocates saw the decision as a re-erection of race-based barriers that their forefathers fought for decades to remove and a step back in tortured history.
Originalist conservatives, however, who argue that the text of the Constitution does not take into account prevailing social or racial realities, say the justices dealt a blow to the basic founding principle that all are created equal.
The decision, which says colleges can no longer consider race as a specific basis for admissions programs that advocates say has helped elevate underrepresented black and Latino students in higher education, sparked waves of shock throughout the country.
It was a generational decision comparable to another precedent-breaking move a year ago, when the court’s conservative majority took away the constitutional right to abortion by rejecting Roe v.
Both rulings and a host of other right-wing jurisprudence by the court’s bold new majority – often on religious freedom cases that appeal to conservative Christians – are the product of decades of activism by the conservative judicial movement. Unlike liberals, right-wing legal activists prioritized the high court’s ideological reconfiguration as a test of a return to federal elections at all levels and fast-tracked cases on key issues through the courts to take advantage of the new composition of the Supreme Court.
Now, America’s very nature is being remade with ample doses of conservative doctrine delivered each year on summer morning bombs.
The court’s activism is being complemented by increasingly radical conservative legislatures in many states. These bodies are reshaping laws in other areas (gun regulations, for example) often with the support of Republican presidential nominees. Any future Republican president who also has a GOP Congress is likely to try to use the court’s rightward march to pass laws on abortion and other issues that would further change the nature of American life. A Republican presidential candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is leading an assault on transgender rights and sexuality education in schools that he has vowed to replicate nationwide if he wins the White House.
Republicans, as seen in the reaction to Thursday’s decision, argue that the court is merely dismantling what they see as an aberrant set of laws and jurisprudence that contradicts everything they believe America stands for. They accept, for example, Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in the majority opinion in the affirmative action decision that argued that “racism simply cannot be overridden by a different or more racism” to benefit minorities, since it would contradict the constitutional principle that everyone is born equal.
“Today’s decision, in combination with Dobbs, will serve as a triumphant return to the restoration of our tattered Constitution,” Conservative Political Action Coalition President Matt Schlapp said in a statement.
Critics of the decision argue that Thomas’ position perversely ignores the reality of a nation where racial discrimination and inequality of opportunity still run deep.
Affirmative action and Dobbs’ decisions call to mind another time earlier in the summer of 2015 when the country seemed to be headed in the opposite direction. The Supreme Court ruled in June that same-sex couples could marry in all 50 states and upheld the Affordable Care Act.
At the time, it seemed that political and social conventions were being swept away in a validation of the grassroots change that then-President Barack Obama had championed.
“Sometimes, there are days like this, when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that comes like a lightning bolt,” Obama said, referring to the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Eight years later, lightning flies in a more reactionary direction. And President Joe Biden’s view of the conservative majority on the bench could hardly be darker.
“This is no ordinary court,” Biden said.
The comparison between two banner moments for the liberal and conservative movements helps explain an important theme in modern American politics: the clash between a more diverse, socially liberal, and sometimes more secular society embodied by Obama/Bidenism and the backlash of former President Donald. Trump and conservatives, who believe that this social progress represents an existential threat to their beliefs.
It plays with the idea that the country is increasingly divided between Democratic and Republican strongholds. The divide lives on a national map, but is also particularly pronounced within ideologically separated states between liberal urban areas and conservative rural regions. Recent clashes over race and gun policy between liberal lawmakers and conservative majorities in state legislatures like Tennessee, for example, have exemplified this divide.
Both sides of the political aisle raise the fear that America is in danger of being destroyed. But it is especially pronounced among the Republican base.
In recent years, the party’s blind allegiance to Trump’s radicalism, especially his election lies, has even challenged the very fabric of democracy. A sense of national crisis and impending political extinction, for example, ran through Trump’s rhetoric after the 2020 election, prompting some of his followers to use violence as a way to settle their political grievances in January 6, 2021.
The conservative Supreme Court decisions of the past two years have been particularly difficult for liberals to accept because they believe the current majority is badly off.
The right-wing dominance of the court came about in large part because then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even grant a confirmation hearing to Obama’s latest pick for the top bench, Merrick Garland, who now serves as attorney general in the Biden administration. That allowed Trump to nominate Judge Neil Gorsuch as his first Supreme Court nominee in 2017. But McConnell later turned his back on his own questionable principle that Supreme Court nominees should not rise in an election year adding to the confirmation of Trump’s final election. Amy Coney Barrett, in 2020, who established the current 6-3 conservative majority.
The move not only confirmed Trump’s status as a consequential president whose influence will be felt decades after he leaves office. It cemented McConnell among the ranks of the most important Republican Party figures in decades and ensured that conservative policies would endure even under Democratic presidencies and congressional majorities.
Recent revelations about questionable ethical practices by some of the conservative justices have further fueled fury about the court’s legitimacy among liberals.
But not all of the court’s recent decisions have angered the White House and Democrats. Earlier this week, for example, liberals were greatly relieved when the court rejected a dormant legal theory that held that state courts and other state entities have a limited role in reviewing established election rules by state legislatures when it comes to federal elections. The so-called Independent State Legislature Theory, a favorite of the Trump campaign, had raised fears that Republican state legislatures in some states could simply decide how to allocate electoral votes regardless of the results.
Still, the court’s broad track record, on issues like gun control, race, business, regulation, climate and many other issues, is firmly to the right.
