While everyone was going up about the Supreme Court’s block on President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief plan, the court passed another decision right under our noses. According to NBC News, the court refused to hear the appeal of a Black death row inmate who alleged his jury was picked based on race.
Tony Clark was convicted on murder charges and sentenced to death in the killing of a 13-year-old boy during the robbery of a convenience store back in 2014. His appeal claimed that during the jury selection for his trial, prosecutors unlawfully sought to strike Black jurors based solely on race. That would be in direct violation of the Court’s 1986 ruling that potential jurors can’t be excluded based on race. But alas, Clark’s trial was composed of 11 white people and one Black person.
But that’s using rose colored glasses. In the past if you said only look at people’s economic status guess what would have happened, there would be a few more poor whites going to college but still no minorities.
Institutional racism runs deep, it doesn’t go away because someone says to stop being racist, you have to physically take the wheel and correct the ship. Was it perfect? No. But is there a concerted effort by multiple bad actors including sitting Supreme Court justices to gut long standing protections that have shown that they work? Without any doubt. The most recent Supreme Court cases that have had the most devastating impact were knowingly fraudulent but allowed to advance anyways. That stinks like major shit to me.
You can debate the merits of affirmative action all day, in the end there are extremists gaming the system to overrule the will of the people to benefit a select few. That’s dogshit and unamerican, full stop.
Oh no doubt. Affirmative Action is the easiest (and therefore only viable) way to fix that problem, even if the “correct” way is to base it on economics. Society is complex and we need suboptimal solutions in order to even function correctly.
I agree if the hypothetical class-based AA law is being abused and allowing poor white kids going to college and no more minorites, that would be a huge step backwards, but I really doubt that would be the case unless the law was ridiculously vague.
If a class-based AA law was passed that was completely indiscrimate towards race, I think that would be much fairer.
Well at the end of the day it’s clear that all of these things need to stop being propped up by vague court decisions and should instead be passed as an act of congress. That requires a concentrated long term effort to vote out anyone standing in the way of progress to obtain the necessary majorities to enshrine these things into law. I think if there’s ever been a time where there needs to be a democratic supermajority it’s now. As long as we continue to keep operating in these thin margins individual extremists can hijack the collective.
Perhaps one day we can get there and pass laws that can’t be overruled by a corrupt court.
I believe judicial review could work if the entire point of being a justice was to interpret absolutely every word of the constitution literally. If that was the case, we would actually have a solid foundation to the law of the land. Instead, justices have time and time again made decisions off of words they think are implied even if not stated at all in the constitution.
I don’t think the Constitution’s literal interpretation is perfect, but the entire point is to amend the document as needed.