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Levin Report
Politics


KETANJI BROWN JACKSON TORCHES CLARENCE THOMAS FOR BULLS--T TAKE ON AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION

“If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it
will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us,” Jackson
wrote in a scathing dissent.
Bess Levin
June 29, 2023 5:55 PMKent Nishimura/Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 22: Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson
answers questions during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on
Capitol Hill on Monday, Mar. 22, 2022 in Washington, DC. Judge Jackson was
picked by President Biden to be the first Black woman in United States history
to serve on the nation's highest court to succeed Supreme Court Associate
Justice Stephen Breyer who is retiring. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via
Getty Images) (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative
majority effectively ended affirmative action, a long-expected decision that
will nevertheless have a significant impact on millions of people, just like the
court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade. In making the case for why
“race conscious admissions” are unconstitutional, Chief Justice John Roberts
claimed that taking race into consideration violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal
Protection Clause, an ironic argument given that, as legal expert Elie Mystal
writes, the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 “was…written explicitly to revoke
the racism practiced by whites against Blacks through their slaver’s
Constitution.” Meanwhile, it’s important to note, as Mystal does, that the
court’s conservatives did not ban “gender consciousness in college admissions,”
or “legacy consciousness, wealth consciousness, geographic consciousness, or
athletic consciousness. Race, and only race, is the thing the conservatives
don’t want colleges and universities to look at.”

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Why might that be? Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is too much of a professional
to accuse her conservative colleagues—five of whom are white, and one of whom
has a well documented history of being anti-affirmative action—of straight up
being racist. But she did use her dissent to put them on blast for apparently
not having an earthly clue—or having one and just not giving a f--k—about the
history and impact of racism in this country, which persists today, and which
Thursday’s decision will only make worse.

Sayeth Jackson:

> With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord
> and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race
> irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself
> from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now
> been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other
> institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world
> problems. No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal
> barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all
> Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not
> better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it
> proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race
> will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain.
> If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters,
> it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And,
> ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.
> 
> UNC has thus built a review process that more accurately assesses merit than
> most of the admissions programs that have existed since this country’s
> founding. Moreover, in so doing, universities like UNC create pathways to
> upward mobility for long excluded and historically disempowered racial groups.
> Our Nation’s history more than justifies this course of action. And our
> present reality indisputably establishes that such programs are still
> needed—for the general public good—because after centuries of state-sanctioned
> (and enacted) race discrimination, the aforementioned intergenerational
> race-based gaps in health, wealth, and well-being stubbornly persist. Rather
> than leaving well enough alone, today, the majority is having none of it.
> Turning back the clock (to a time before the legal arguments and evidence
> establishing the soundness of UNC’s holistic admissions approach existed), the
> Court indulges those who either do not know our Nation’s history or long to
> repeat it. Simply put, the race-blind admissions stance the Court mandates
> from this day forward is unmoored from critical real-life circumstances. Thus,
> the Court’s meddling not only arrests the noble generational project that
> America’s universities are attempting, it also launches, in effect, a dismally
> misinformed sociological experiment.



Jackson also used her dissent to specifically torch Justice Clarence Thomas for
both putting words into her mouth and using his own personal hang-ups as an
excuse to gut affirmative action. In fact she dedicated a whole footnote to
roasting the guy for his concurring opinion, which she essentially said was
ahistorical, divorced from reality, and ignited “too many more straw men to
list.”

> https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1674431232762081286

Thomas has previously said he got into Yale Law School because of affirmative
action but that the alleged stigma made it difficult for him to get a job
afterward. That argument falls a little flat now given that he has one of the
most powerful jobs—legal or otherwise—in America, and going to the number one
ranked law school presumably played at least some small part in getting him
there. But apparently that’s not an option he’d like to afford other people.

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Surprise: Silver spoon asshole applauds the gutting of affirmative action

Look, it’s very important that people get into college the old-fashioned way: by
allegedly paying people to take the SATs for them,* and being so rich that they
are receiving $200,000 a year—by the age of three—from their parents’ real
estate empires.

Per The Hill:

> “People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success,
> including future greatness for our Country, are finally being rewarded,”
> Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “This is the ruling everyone was
> waiting and hoping for and the result was amazing. It will also keep us
> competitive with the rest of the world. Our greatest minds must be cherished
> and that’s what this wonderful day has brought. We’re going back to all
> merit-based—and that’s the way it should be!”

*Here’s where we have to tell you that Trump, through a spokesperson, has denied
this.

Surprise: This guy doesn’t think affirmative action is necessary either

> https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1674447133297065992



Report: The special counsel isn‘t done investigating Trump and those classified
documents

Far from it, it would seem, according to The New York Times:

> Three weeks after former President Donald J. Trump was indicted on charges of
> illegally retaining national security records and obstructing the government’s
> efforts to reclaim them, a federal grand jury in Miami is still investigating
> aspects of the case, according to people familiar with the matter.
> 
> In recent days, the grand jury has issued subpoenas to a handful of people who
> are connected to the inquiry, those familiar with it said. While it remains
> unclear who received the subpoenas and the kind of information prosecutors
> were seeking to obtain, it is clear that the grand jury has stayed active and
> that investigators are digging even after a 38-count indictment was issued
> this month against Mr. Trump and a codefendant, Walt Nauta, one of his
> personal aides.

As the Times notes, “Prosecutors often continue investigating strands of a
criminal case after charges have been brought, and sometimes their efforts go
nowhere. But post-indictment investigations can result in additional charges
against people who have already been accused of crimes in the case.”

A spokesman for Trump declined the Times’ request comment.



It definitely must have just been a happy coincidence that a wealthy Ron
DeSantis donor who reportedly lent the Florida governor his private plane on at
least 12 occasions received $92 million from the DeSantis administration for his
real estate project, right?

Right?? Per The Washington Post:

> The administration of Florida governor Ron DeSantis steered $92 million last
> year in leftover federal coronavirus stimulus money to a controversial highway
> interchange project that directly benefits a top political donor, according to
> state records. The decision by the Florida Department of Transportation to use
> money from the 2021 American Rescue Plan for the I-95 interchange at Pioneer
> Trail Road near Daytona Beach fulfilled a yearslong effort by Mori Hosseini, a
> politically connected housing developer who owns two large tracts of largely
> forested land abutting the planned interchange. The funding through the
> DeSantis administration, approved shortly after the governor’s reelection,
> expedited the project by more than a decade, according to state documents.
> 
> Hosseini plans to develop the land—which includes a sensitive watershed once
> targeted for conservation by the state—into approximately 1,300 dwelling units
> and 650,000 square feet of nonresidential use, including an outdoor village
> shopping district. He has called the Woodhaven development, which has already
> begun construction, his “best project yet” and promised to pull out all the
> stops for its success. “With or without the interchange, we would have built
> Woodhaven there, but it certainly helps,” he told The Daytona Beach News
> Journal in March 2019.



Before the Post story was published, a spokesman for DeSantis posted the
outlet’s request for comment on Twitter, later writing in an email to the
newspaper, “You are trying to make an accusation to play ‘gotcha’,” in response
to a question about whether DeSantis had discussed the project with Hosseini or
advocating for funding it.

Elsewhere!

Supreme Court decision a “travesty of justice” says UNC, Harvard litigator

The Hill • Read More

Court has “gone out of its way” to unravel basic rights, Biden says

NBC News • Read More

The End of Affirmative Action Is Only the Beginning

Intelligencer • Read More

Judge rejects Trump’s “presidential immunity” defense in second E. Jean Carroll
case

Politico • Read More

Consumers and retailers brace for student loans payment restart

Washington Post • Read More

Prosecutors charge three men with insider trading scheme related to Trump’s
media company

Politico • Read More

Trump, Who Has the Mind of a Child, Still Thinks the Classified Documents He Got
Indicted for Keeping Belong to Him: Report

Vanity Fair • Read More

Italian teacher sacked for 20 years of absence vows to defend herself

BBC • Read More

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative
majority effectively ended affirmative action, a long-expected decision that
will nevertheless have a significant impact on millions of people, just like the
court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade. In making the case for why
“race conscious admissions” are unconstitutional, Chief Justice John Roberts
claimed that taking race into consideration violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal
Protection Clause, an ironic argument given that, as legal expert Elie Mystal
writes, the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 “was…written explicitly to revoke
the racism practiced by whites against Blacks through their slaver’s
Constitution.” Meanwhile, it’s important to note, as Mystal does, that the
court’s conservatives did not ban “gender consciousness in college admissions,”
or “legacy consciousness, wealth consciousness, geographic consciousness, or
athletic consciousness. Race, and only race, is the thing the conservatives
don’t want colleges and universities to look at.”


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