Almost a year to the day after its landmark anti-abortion ruling in “Dobbs”, the US supreme court has delivered rulings that turn back the clock dramatically on major cornerstones of the country’s social policy.
Last Thursday the deeply conservative court, three of whom are Donald Trump appointees, set aside precedents to rule six-three that the constitution’s equal protection guarantee means that colleges can no longer use “affirmative action”, race-conscious selection, in admissions programmes to rectify long-standing access barriers to the country’s black minority.
On Friday the court tore up a major programme of student debt forgiveness promised by the Biden administration to up to 40 million Americans, and undermined protection to the LGBTQ+ community by allowing a devout Christian web designer to turn away business from same-sex couples.
The many half-century-old affirmative action programmes to redress historic racial bias were seen by critics as “discrimination” against white students. They have been a bugbear for Republicans for years and they were delighted to see the court’s embedded conservative majority continuing apace with what some of the justices see as their explicit mission to roll back the liberal state.
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The decision is likely to see a significant decline in black college enrolment. After Michigan banned race-conscious admissions in 2006, they declined from seven to four per cent by 2021 at the University of Michigan. Lawyers also warn that businesses’ diversity programmes may now also face legal challenge.
“This is not a normal court,” a disappointed president Joe Biden responded, with understatement. But he has rejected calls to pack it with liberals, warning that that would only “politicise” a court that many already see, as Senate hopeful Adam Schiff complains, as “a political and partisan court with a reactionary social agenda”.
The court has not proved entirely pliable to the Republican cause. An earlier decision in favour of gay marriage and on the safeguarding of the Obamacare health legislation have demonstrated occasional flexibility, as did an important ruling last week. In the latter case the court rejected the “independent state legislature” doctrine, a controversial conservative theory which contends that the constitution grants state legislatures broad, unfettered powers to regulate elections, and effectively to gerrymander or allocate electoral votes. In doing so the court reaffirmed the soundness of the 2020 election and secured the integrity of elections to come.
The decisions last week, however, will do nothing to stop the gradual erosion of the legitimacy of a court so central to US politics and yet so determined to step away from the political mainstream.