Last week, the Supreme Court handed down, as they usually do as the term comes to an end, a flurry of highly anticipated major decisions. Two of them made a lot of news: one effectively ended affirmative action in American higher education, and another ruled that a Colorado web designer could refuse to create a wedding website for a same-sex couple.
The mainstream media’s prevailing sentiment over the last week has been that these are the sorry consequences of a conservative majority court. This court overturned Roe v. Wade last year in a major setback to women’s rights; now they’ve undone decades of precedent that helped historically disadvantaged students have a chance at the American dream, and they’ve weakened gay rights.
When President Joe Biden was asked at a press conference last week whether or not this is a “rogue court,” Biden basically said yes. He muttered, “This isn’t a normal court.”
Is that true? Is this court “not normal”? Or do these decisions actually reflect a legitimate reading of the Constitution?
To help separate signal from noise and fact from hyperbole, today we have three legal experts from different sides of the political aisle to hash it out. Harry Litman is an attorney who has clerked for two Supreme Court justices, Thurgood Marshall and Anthony Kennedy. He is also a host of the podcast Talking Feds. Jeannie Suk Gersen is a professor at Harvard Law School and writer for The New Yorker. She clerked for David Souter. And Sarah Isgur is a columnist for The Dispatch and an ABC News contributor. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as the Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration.
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During the whole lead-in I was thinking, "please let Sarah be a guest here so she can shoot down all these silly opinions from these TV anchors." YAY!
This was a good episode. I think I'm continually disappointed by people that care nothing for process and only want their outcomes. Harry just sounds like he wants the power to tell people how to live, which is sadly unsurprising. When Bari asked "good or bad decision" and Sarah said, "it's the right decision" ... chef's kiss.
I think it's telling that one guest, when asked whether the Harvard/UNC decision was a "good decision or bad decision," replied essentially, "I don't agree with it. Bad decision."
And this person is supposedly an expert. Supreme Court decisions aren't about what we want or what makes us comfortable.
Also disappointed that so much of the discussion revolved around how to get more low-achieving students into college in the name of diversity. How about we start addressing why only a system that minimizing academic achievement in an academic endeavor is seen as the only way to get students of color into college? It seems to be that the real racism here is the racism of low expectation for certain groups.