Dear Weekend Jolter,
It wouldn’t be Fourth of July weekend without everyone fired up over the Supreme Court’s end-of-session bombshells.
The Court’s concluding rulings on affirmative action and President Biden’s student-debt amnesty might not have the immediate electoral impact of last session’s midterm-season Dobbs decision (though the extent of that ruling’s political fallout is debatable), but their consequences will be long-lasting and significant.
NR has got the cases, and you, covered (of course).
“The one sector in American society that had been exempt from legal rules banning the use of race — higher education — will be forced to transform itself,” write Robert Delahunty and John Yoo of the former decision.
In ruling against race-based college admissions, the Court was clear on the policy’s injurious impact on Asian-American students and the rationale for ending it, despite the rhetoric that fairness itself fell on Thursday: “Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.” NR’s editorial notes that the litigation helped expose just how systematic was the discrimination against Asian Americans, thereby bolstering the case for a different approach:
Roberts noted that Harvard considers race at every stage from the initial rating of an application to a list of categories to consider before dropping a marginal applicant at the last cut, and that this results in a system where “an African American student in the fourth lowest academic decile has a higher chance of admission . . . than an Asian American in the top decile” and “black applicants in the top four academic deciles are between four and ten times more likely to be admitted to Harvard than Asian applicants in those deciles.” . . . The chief justice summed up the law’s great promise to the American people: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
Noah Rothman also notes that progressives face a political challenge in their response here, given that, unlike with Dobbs, the Court just struck down an unpopular status quo.
As for Friday’s finale on Biden’s student-debt cancellation, well: As Charles C. W. Cooke puts it, “Article I Survives.” It turns out the Biden administration can’t warp the very limited powers granted in a 20-year-old statute in order to extend loan relief to virtually every borrower. This is a choice line from the opinion: “The Secretary’s plan has ‘modified’ the cited provisions only in the same sense that ‘the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility’—it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.”
The case was always going to end up this way, provided the Court determined some party had standing. That was hardly a given. As Charlie writes, absent that determination, “the judiciary would have signaled that it was powerless in the face of executive overreach.”
That the Court was able to reaffirm the authority of Congress to specify what the law is, is an apt Independence Day tribute indeed.
By the way, NR had cautioned from the program’s very inception that Biden’s scheme was patently unlawful. Way back in September 2022, Charlie made note that Biden himself admitted it was patently unlawful, even if he didn’t realize what he had just admitted, when he declared “the pandemic is over”:
Among the specific problems with Biden’s argument was that the 2003 HEROES Act does not cover debt cancelation (i.e., transference to taxpayers); that its “direct economic hardship” language does not allow for mass relief; that the application of its “or national emergency” language clearly violates the major questions doctrine; and that the administration’s insistence that the act was designed to allow the executive branch “to act quickly should a situation arise that has not been considered” was flatly contradicted by the fact that the president waited until two-and-a-half years into the pandemic before acting, and then gave relief to the most privileged people in America. But, even if one were to ignore all that, one could still not get past the fact that the powers to which Biden laid claim can be applied only when there is an active emergency, and that the active emergency Biden is citing has now passed.
As a wise leader once said, C’mon, man.
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In related news, don’t forget: We’re still running our plucky webathon, pushing to get to our $100,000 goal. If you have a chance to contribute to the cause, perhaps in between the scorching of burgers and brats, please consider doing so. And a robust thank you to everyone who has contributed already.
Read on.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the Court’s affirmative-action decision: Race Discrimination Loses Its Legal Protection
Be prepared for rocky months ahead, after last weekend’s power struggle in Russia: Be Wary of a Wounded Putin
How is this mandate going to work, exactly? California Should Leave Its Truckers Alone
ARTICLES
Charles C. W. Cooke: A Victory for Clarence Thomas
Dominic Pino: Gorsuch Highlights the Absurdities of Racial Classification
Noah Rothman: Don’t Put Too Much Stock in the Prigozhin Conspiracy Theories
Noah Rothman: Exposing Politicians’ Ancestral Ties to Slavery Serves a Sordid Purpose
Abigail Anthony: ‘We’re Going After Amazon’: The Rise of a Conservative Online Shopping Alternative
Haley Strack: Hundreds of Parents Gather outside Maryland School-Board Meeting to Protest Mandatory LGBT Curricula
Rich Lowry: The Most Hilarious Russia-Hoax Failure of All
Jay Nordlinger: A ‘Tribe’ of Freedom Fighters
Brittany Bernstein: ‘Everything about This Case Is Wrong’: Former U.S. Attorney Digs Into Hunter Biden’s ‘Sweetheart’ Plea Deal
Mailee Smith: Five Years after Janus, Government Unions Are Weaker — and More Desperate
Jeffrey Blehar: The Trump Audiotape Explains Why He Had to Be Stopped
Elliott Abrams: Kerry Loves London and Paris More Than Climate
Christian Schneider: Gen Z Is the ‘Surveillance Generation’
CAPITAL MATTERS
Congress is missing opportunities to save money. Dan Lips suggests taking advantage of them instead: Congress Should Follow Its Watchdog to Cut Government Spending
Douglas Carr brings the charts to prove it: The Hidden Recession
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White’s don’t-call-it-a-listicle: The Ten Best Political Movies of All Time
Brian Allen visits — his words — “one of the most electrifying art spaces in America.” See for yourself: Sorolla’s Vision of Spain Opus Returns in Glory to the Hispanic Society
STICK THESE EXPLOSIVE EXCERPTS IN YOUR FIREWORKS STASH
Charles C. W. Cooke, on what the Court’s affirmative-action ruling signifies for Clarence Thomas:
I will confess that, as a historical matter, I do not know whether Thomas’s long-held interpretation of the 14th Amendment as a bluntly “colorblind” measure is correct. I do know, however, that Thomas believes quite sincerely that he is right, and that he has believed it for years. Had he so wished, Thomas could have signed onto John Roberts’s opinion and left it there. That, I daresay, is what a mere “movement” pawn would have done. Instead, Thomas felt moved to “write separately to offer an originalist defense of the colorblind Constitution” to which only he, among his colleagues, put his name.
In Thomas’s telling, the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment was that of a tool “affirming that equality and racial discrimination cannot coexist.” “I do not contend,” Thomas concedes, “that all of the individuals who put forth and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment universally believed this to be true.” Nevertheless, he believes that enough of them did that, since it passed in 1868, “all forms of discrimination based on race—including so-called affirmative action” have been “prohibited under the Constitution.” Alas, at various points in American history, this has been massaged, subverted, or even completely ignored. Indeed, the backsliding began pretty quickly. Despite the flurry of legislation passed by the so-called radical Republicans — first, the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, then the 1866 Civil Rights Act, and eventually the 14th Amendment — “the promise of the second founding took time to materialize,” and, “seeking to perpetuate a segregationist system in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, proponents urged a ‘separate but equal’ regime” that, to disastrous effect, “met with initial success.” “The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny,” Thomas writes, “and, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments” — a misinterpretation that began as early as the mid 1870s. The latter failure, he laments, “stood in sharp contrast to the Court’s earlier embrace of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equality ideal,” which, though unrealized, was most poignantly outlined by Justice Harlan in his lonely dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.
In Thomas’s view, this mistake has continued, in one form or another, to the present day, including in the courts’ tolerance of ostensibly benign racial discrimination within America’s government-run and government-funded colleges. Some people, Thomas notes, seem to believe that affirmative action is substantially different from earlier forms of injustice, because, in practice, the “[14th] Amendment forbids only laws that hurt, but not help, blacks.” But, he avers, “such a theory lacks any basis in the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” which declared that “the color of a person’s skin is irrelevant to that individual’s equal status as a citizen of this Nation” and that “to treat him differently on the basis of such a legally irrelevant trait is therefore a deviation from the equality principle and a constitutional injury.” . . .
That, at long last, Thomas has been able to make his case as part of a successful majority must thrill him to the core. Whether it will catch on more broadly now that the underlying controversy has been resolved remains to be seen.
More from NR’s editorial on Russia’s roulette:
The damage inflicted by this episode to Putin’s public image as the capable strongman who restored order and pride to Russia after the chaos in the 1990s, already dented by a seeming endless war in Ukraine, is considerable, as is the sheer humiliation. However, for all that, and despite the fault lines beneath the surface, Russia remains a largely effective authoritarian state: The country is not on the edge of popular revolution (it’s worth noting that many of those who might have participated in, say, street protests — including many men of military age — left the country after the invasion of Ukraine), let alone break-up.
At the same time, there is another constituency that Putin will have to watch very carefully indeed: that formed by the different power groupings at the top of the Russian hierarchy. The way that Russia is run at its upper levels is, as has been the case for most of its history, opaque. Any predictions about how those at the top will behave towards each other and to Putin in the wake of the mutiny is inevitably a matter of guesswork. But it is no great stretch of the imagination to assume that some of them will need reassuring that Putin is still capable of defending their interests, and that the more ambitious among them will need reminding that Putin is still capable of defending his.
Should Putin fail in these respects, he will be in trouble, and while, for obvious reasons, that could be something for the West to welcome, there is not a small possibility that any successor could come from the ranks of the ultra-nationalists in the so-called “patriotic” camp. It is also worth noting that the Wagner Group is not the only paramilitary force to have emerged in Russia in recent years. The Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who was quick to declare his support for Putin, has his notorious Kadyrovtsy. Even Gazprom, Russia’s oil giant, has a militia.
Under the circumstances, it will not be surprising if Putin takes steps to secure his position at the top (watch for some unexplained absences) and to further tighten his control over the country as a whole. At the same time, he can be expected to ratchet up the Russian war effort in Ukraine. . . . From a U.S. perspective, therefore, the situation is, if anything, more dangerous than it was before the tanks started rolling towards Rostov.
Haley Strack was on the ground in Rockville, Md., this past week for a parental show of force over a gender and sexuality curriculum, quite a sight in the very blue county:
Maryland families will take the fight for parental rights to the Supreme Court if that’s what it takes, parents protesting against the Montgomery County Board of Education said on Tuesday.
Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) announced last month that it would not allow students to opt out of the gender and sexuality curriculum, which parents say violates their religious beliefs. Although MCPS limited attendance at Tuesday’s public Board of Education meeting for unspecified “safety reasons,” hundreds of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and Muslims rallied outside, calling on the board to reinstate the district’s opt-out policy.
“We’re here to demand our rights.” said Mark Haile, a father of three children who attend public school in the county. “We’re not here to hate anybody, or to demand anybody else’s rights. We are here to regain our rights.”
MCPS currently has no plans to alter its policy. Parents said they will apply pressure on the board until that changes.
Rich Lowry observes a presidential plot twist that anybody paying attention might have anticipated:
We’ve gone from a president falsely accused of being entangled with a hostile foreign power to a president whose family has been financially entangled with a hostile foreign power.
The same people who assured us, constantly, that the walls were about to close in on Donald Trump in the Russia investigation have endorsed, promoted, and defended Joe Biden, a man whose family business involves taking money from shady foreign actors.
The latest revelation is a shocking alleged WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to one Henry Zhao, an employee with the Chinese firm CEFC Infrastructure Investment, threatening him to pay up or face the music because Hunter was “sitting here with my father.” Hunter helpfully explained, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.” . . . Within days of the call, CEFC sent $100,000 to Hunter Biden’s firm, Owasco PC, and shortly thereafter $5 million to another Hunter entity, Hudson West III, which he had set up with Chinese associates.
Not bad work if you can get it.
In keeping with Biden family practice, Hunter then spread the wealth around. Owasco transferred $1.4 million to the consulting firm of Joe Biden’s brother, James, in nearly two dozen wire transactions over the course of about a year.
The latest revelation brings home how the Russia-collusion obsessives have been wrong twice: wrong to believe that Trump’s campaign was coordinating with Russian taskmasters, and wrong to dismiss the concerns about the Biden influence-peddling business.
Shout-Outs
Aris Roussinos, at UnHerd: The Prigozhin roadshow isn’t over
Eric Boehm, at Reason: Atlanta Plans To Blow $230 Million on 2-Mile Extension of Useless Streetcar
Evan Bleier, at InsideHook: After Saudi Arabia Buys Into PGA, Qatar Takes Stake in NBA, NHL, WNBA
CODA
Have a happy Fourth, everyone. We’ll close with a dose of American spirit, and I’ll resist the urge to include the Emerson, Lake & Palmer version. Cheers.
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