I am pleased with the rulings from Scotus this year. I think they followed the law as written and made the correct decisions:
1. Student Loan Forgiveness- Correct decision. HEROES Act was never intended to be used for all students.
It's the obviously correct decision. This level of spending clearly ought to be at the direction of the legislature, and the scope of the act used to justify it is clearly reviewable by the courts.
I do have reservations about the standing issue that permitted the challenge at SCOTUS in the first place though. I'm not enough of an internet lawyer to pretend to understand all of the wrinkles of who can and can't bring a suit. The path to this getting to SCOTUS looks sketchy, even though I personally think it deserved to be reviewed and halted.
If Biden wants to forgive a bunch of student loans, he should ask Congress to appropriate the funds. If Congress won't do it, the remedy for Biden is to get re-elected in 2024 and convince voters to elect Senators and Representatives that'll do so.
2. Affirmative Action- The US constitution forbids discrimination based on race. We can't allow our schools, colleges and businesses to use race as a factor in hiring, promotions or admissions. Now, "the content of our character" becomes law.
Correct decision.
It doesn't really have to change any of the admissions results very much - universities can tilt their admissions to socioeconomic status or essays ranked in order of hardships encountered or other fuzzy "life challenges" they've overcome.
But - it's interesting to me that California, which ended AA in the 90s, has had limited success doing that.
NPR ran an article about it today that noted that diversity in the UC system decreased since prop 209 passed in 1996, despite trying very hard, and at great expense, to find other reasons to admit those students.
TFA said:
Starting in the early 2000s, the UC system implemented a couple of initiatives to increase diversity: The top-performing students graduating most high schools in the state were guaranteed admission to most of the eight UC undergraduate campuses. It also introduced a comprehensive review process to "evaluate students' academic achievements in light of the opportunities available to them" – using an array of criteria including a student's special skills and achievements, special circumstances and location of high school.
So - there's the blueprint for admitting some of the same people AA helped. But probably many fewer of them, because impoverished white people and immigrant Asian people now have equally compelling stories to write essays about. I don't think that's a bad thing.
Yet despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity.
It's never been entirely clear to me what the "educational benefits" of diversity actually are. It's one of those things that's stated as if it's a self-evident fact.
I understand of course, the personal benefit to the individuals who were admitted despite lower grades and test scores. That's obvious. Less obvious to me is how valuable it was for the rest of us. When I was memorizing biochem pathways or studying for the MCAT, the life experiences of my classmates weren't really helpful. Even in the art and literature classes that rounded out my education, I can't really point to any of my classmates whose diverse backgrounds helped me understand those works.
The cynic in me has to acknowledge that my undergrad gpa on my med school app was higher because of the students who wouldn't have been admitted to my UC campus if not for AA, because on the aggregate they held down the opposite tail of the curve. But I don't think that's what they mean by "educational benefits of diversity."
There may well be societal benefits to AA, in that some members of marginalized groups were given a boost at the expense of people who were probably going to be successful anyway. But that's a separate issue. Maybe that benefit even justifies AA in its entirety. But AA has always been sold to us as equal parts "fairness" and by touting the "educational benefits of diversity" and I do find it somewhat ironic those bits of ... let's just call them misdirection, because "lie" is maybe too strong a word ... those bits of misdirection turned out to be the reason SCOTUS finally killed it.
If they'd just argued that marginalized groups deserved some level of compensation to help them catch up, that might've withstood strict scrutiny better.
3. Religion- We should allow religious accommodations whenever possible.
Meh. Whatever. So long as tax-exempt churches are overtly engaging in political activities, which is pretty much every single evangelical Christian congregation between Mexico and Canada, I'm relatively unsympathetic to their claims of "oppression" ...
But regardless, the question at hand shouldn't be a religious one. It should be: is a person discriminating against a person in a protected class?
The reason shouldn't matter. If you refuse service to a _____ person because that person is _____, and _____ is a legally protected class, it shouldn't matter if you're doing so because of religious beliefs or because you're just a jerk. Fill in the blank with any protected class: black, female, Christian, gay ... you know the list.
