June 29, 2023 Supreme Court affirmative action decision

The Supreme Court says colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, a landmark decision overturning long-standing precedent that has benefited Black and Latino students in higher education.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the conservative majority, saying the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race.

He said the programs involve racial stereotyping and had no specific endpoint.

The opinion claims the court was not expressly overturning prior cases authorizing race-based affirmative action, and suggested that how race has affected an applicant’s life can still be part of how their application is considered. 

Here’s what else you should know:

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision to bar colleges and universities from considering race as a specific basis for admission will make it more difficult for schools to achieve a diverse student population, civil rights leaders and education advocates say.

The gutting of affirmative action upends a long-standing precedent that has benefited disadvantaged Black and Latino students in higher education.

The practice has been in place since the 1960s as a tool to prevent discrimination at selective institutions, many of which historically only admitted White students.

Now universities across the country seeking diversity will be charged with finding other ways to reach Black and Latino students. The task, researchers and education officials say, will not be easy.

Wisdom Cole, national director of the NAACP Youth & College Division, called the rollback of affirmative action a “dark day in America.”

“Affirmative action has been a beacon of hope for generations of Black students,” Cole said in a statement Thursday. “It stood as a powerful force against the insidious poison of racism and sexism, aiming to level the playing field and provide a fair shot at a high-quality education for all. Students across the country are wide-awake to the clear and present danger encroaching on their classrooms.”

The Supreme Court case was sparked by conservative activist Edward Blum, who filed lawsuits in 2014 against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill challenging their use of race-conscious admissions. Blum and other critics of affirmative action have said college admissions should be based on equal standards and merit.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion on affirmative action for the conservative majority, saying the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race. He said the programs involve racial stereotyping and had no specific endpoint.

The playing field is “not leveled”: Civil rights leaders and experts say the Supreme Court ruling is a setback for equality in education.

Racial diversity at colleges and universities – particularly at competitive and Ivy League schools – may suffer, they say. A study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that colleges and universities are less likely to meet or exceed their current levels of racial diversity in the absence of race-conscious admissions. They are also less likely to reflect the racial makeup of the population graduating from the nation’s high schools.

Zack Mabel, a researcher for Georgetown’s Center for Education and the Workforce, said he expects the number of Black and brown students attending selective colleges nationwide will drop from the current 20% to about 16% without affirmative action in place. Mabel said race-neutral practices have not driven the diversity many colleges hoped for and some students are simply not applying.

Read more here.

In the majority opinion on the affirmative action cases, Chief Justice John Roberts never goes as far as saying that he is explicitly overruling decades-old precedent.  

That could be because, during the Supreme Court’s last term, the justices faced harsh criticism when they reversed Roe v. Wade.  

Roberts may have been seeking a way to avoid criticism that for the second year in a row, on an issue that will change how Americans live their lives, the newly constituted court dominated by conservatives has taken another step to wipe away long-established precedent.  

In dissent, the liberals make clear that the new opinion “rolls back precedent,” including Grutter v. Bollinger that was decided in 2003. That landmark decision upheld affirmative action in admissions. 

Even conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, writing a separate concurrence, said that the majority “rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.”  

Here’s how the justices ruled:

Members of Congress continue to react to the news that the Supreme Court has gutted affirmative action at the college level, with Republicans praising the decision and Democrats lamenting it.

GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell: “Today’s rulings make clear that colleges may not continue discriminating against bright and ambitious students based on the color of their skin.”

GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, called the decision, “a welcome victory for countless students across the country.”

“Academia’s ivory towers should not divide and promote preferences based on the color of one’s skin. In America, fairness is the key to educational opportunity, where one’s success is judged by merit rather than arbitrary quotas,” she added. 

GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Thursday was a “great day for all Americans,” in a statement.

“Today, the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment rights of Asian-Americans and ruled that Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s explicit and egregious policies of racially discriminating against Asian-Americans and other students are unconstitutional,” he said.

Democratic Sen. Peter Welch, meanwhile, lamented the decision, telling CNN’s Manu Raju it is a “great disappointment.”

“This is a real blow to affirmative action. And it’s another indication of the Supreme Court with an extraordinarily conservative orientation. But the impetus for diversification is very powerful and I don’t think will be entirely stopped because the Supreme Court has invalidated its use in an explicit way.”

Democratic House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries slammed “right-wing ideologues” on the the Supreme Court for overturning Roe. v. Wade last year, and this year, now going after affirmative action.

“The very same extremists just obliterated consideration of racial diversity in college admissions. They clearly want to turn back the clock. We will NEVER let that happen,” Jeffries said.

The Congressional Black Caucus said: “By delivering a decision on affirmative action so radical as to deny young people seeking an education equal opportunity in our education system, the Supreme Court has thrown into question its own legitimacy.”

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “If SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous ‘colorblindness’ claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged. 70% of Harvard’s legacy applicants are White. SCOTUS didn’t touch that - which would have impacted them and their patrons.”

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus: “Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court dismantles more than 40 years of precedent to increase representation for marginalized groups in university and college campuses, erasing decades of progress,” Rep. Nanette Barragán, who chairs the caucus, said in a statement.

The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus said in a tweet that today’s affirmative action decision “deals a needless blow to America’s promise of equal and fair opportunity. It should not be viewed as a win for the Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community.”

Some context: Asian Americans have taken a central role in the debate over affirmative action in higher education, with opponents arguing the policies favor Black and Latino students over students of Asian descent, and hold Asian Americans to a higher standard for admission. 

CNN’s Morgan Rimmer and the Hill Team contributed reporting to this post.

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling Thursday on affirmative action pitted its two Black justices against each other, with the ideologically opposed jurists employing unusually sharp language attacking each other by name.

The majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts said colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission. Justice Clarence Thomas and the court’s other four conservatives joined Roberts’ opinion.

Thomas, who in 1991 became the second Black person to ascend to the nation’s highest court, issued a lengthy concurrence that attacked such admissions programs and tore into arguments posited by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to join the court, who penned her own fiery dissent in the case.

Thomas spoke in personal terms as he laid out an argument against the use of the policies, which he described as “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”

As he read his concurrence from the bench on Thursday, Jackson, who joined the court last year, stared blankly ahead. Though Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, Jackson did not read her own dissent, in which she went after Thomas’ concurrence and accused the majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

A footnote near the end of Jackson’s dissent went after the concurrence by Thomas, with the liberal justice accusing her colleague of demonstrating “an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.”

“Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here,” Jackson wrote. “The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room – the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

In her broader dissent, Jackson said that the argument made by the challengers that affirmative action programs are unfair “blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.”

You can read more here.

The Supreme Court is yet to release a ruling on another crucial education-related case. Millions of borrowers will soon learn whether they could receive up to $20,000 in debt relief under President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

The fate of the unprecedented debt cancellation program lies with the Supreme Court, which is expected to decide by the end of this term to either uphold or strike down the proposal.

The student loan forgiveness program, which Biden announced last August, has been on hold due to legal challenges. No student loan debt has been canceled, despite the fact that the government approved 16 million applications eligible for relief last year.

A group of Republican-led states and other conservative groups took the Biden administration to court over the program, claiming that the executive branch does not have the power to so broadly cancel student debt in the proposed manner.

Critics also point out that the one-time student loan forgiveness program does nothing to address the cost of college for future students and could even lead to an increase in tuition. Some Democrats joined Republicans in voting for a bill to block the program. Both the Senate and the House passed the measure, but Biden vetoed the bill in early June.

The forgiveness program, which is estimated to cost about $400 billion, would fulfill Biden’s campaign promise to cancel some student loan debt and would delight progressives, as well as put some borrowers in a better financial position when the pause on payments and interest accrual expires later this year.

Most federal student loans have been frozen since March 2020 when a pause meant to protect borrowers struggling financially due to the Covid-19 pandemic went into place. Payments will be due starting in October no matter how the Supreme Court rules on the one-time forgiveness program.

Who would be eligible for student loan forgiveness? The Biden administration has estimated that more than 40 million federal student loan borrowers would qualify for some level of debt cancellation, with roughly 20 million who would have their balance forgiven entirely, if the forgiveness program is allowed to move forward.

But not everyone with a federally held student loan would qualify. Individual borrowers who made less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 and married couples or heads of households who made less than $250,000 a year could see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven. If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual could be eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness.

Federal student loans that are guaranteed by the government but held by private lenders are not eligible unless the borrower applied to consolidate those loans into a Direct Loan by September 29, 2022.

Read more about Biden’s student loan program here.

Vice President Kamala Harris slammed the Supreme Court’s gutting of affirmative action as “a step backward for our nation,” arguing that the ruling will make college campuses less diverse and impact the country for decades.

“Today’s Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina is a step backward for our nation,” Harris said in a statement Thursday. “It rolls back long-established precedent and will make it more difficult for students from underrepresented backgrounds to have access to opportunities that will help them fulfill their full potential.” 

“In the wake of this decision, we must work with ever more urgency to make sure that all of our young people have an opportunity to thrive,” Harris continued. 

Harris reaffirmed the importance of diversity on college campuses, arguing that “it is well established that all students benefit when classrooms and campuses reflect the incredible diversity of our Nation.”

“By making our schools less diverse, this ruling will harm the educational experience for all students,” Harris said.

Earlier Thursday, the Biden administration outlined a series of steps it will take through the Department of Education and other relevant agencies to support diversity in higher education.

The Biden administration has vowed to take “swift action” to support diversity in higher education in the face of the Supreme Court’s ruling gutting affirmative action, laying out a series of steps it will take through the Department of Education and other relevant agencies.

Here’s a look at the steps, according to an administration news release:

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona vowed his department would find ways to mitigate the ruling.

“Today’s Supreme Court decision takes our country decades backward, sharply limiting a vital tool that colleges have used to create vibrant, diverse campus communities,” Cardona said in a statement.

“As we consider today’s decision, our commitment to educational opportunity for all Americans is unshaken, and our efforts to promote diversity in higher education are undeterred. The Department of Education is a civil rights agency, committed to equal access and educational opportunity for all students,” he added.

Challengers in the affirmative action case targeted Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that their programs violate equal protection principles, dashed the promise of a colorblind society and discriminated against Asian Americans. They asked the court to overturn precedent and insist that higher education should explore and further develop race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity. 

A conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions was behind both challenges.

SSFA argued the UNC and Harvard policies violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits schools receiving federal funds from discriminating based on race as well. The lawyers also argued that the UNC violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, which covers state universities. 

Lower US courts had ruled in favor of the schools, finding that that the programs used race in a sufficiently limited way to fulfill a compelling interest in diversity. 

After an eight-day trial in 2020, District Court Judge Loretta C. Biggs of the US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina ruled in favor of the school, making special mention of its history steeped in racism. 

“The University continues to face challenges admitting and enrolling underrepresented minorities particularly African American males, Hispanics, and Native Americans,” Biggs said, adding that in 2013 enrollment of Black men in the first-year class fell below 100 students. 

The Supreme Court stepped in to consider the case before it was heard by a federal appeals court. 

Harvard’s program is like that of University of North Carolina, but the challenge focused particularly on the treatment of Asian American students and a charge that the school intentionally discriminates against them by setting higher standards for their admission. While Harvard is a private university, it is still subject to Title VI because it receives public funds. 

Its freshman class in 2019 had 1,600 students out of 35,000 applicants. Of the 35,000, 2,700 had perfect verbal SAT scores, 3,400 had perfect math SAT scores and more than 8,000 had perfect grade point averages. After a 15-day bench trial that featured thirty witnesses the district court ruled in favor of Harvard, finding that the school did not discriminate against Asian Americans in violation of Title VI.

The 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court holding that it did “not clearly err in finding that Harvard did not intentionally discriminate against Asian Americans. ”

Keep reading here.

Yukong Zhao of the of the Asian American Coalition lauded today’s landmark Supreme Court decision to bar colleges and universities from considering race as a specific basis for admission.

“Today is a historic victory for Asians and all Americans. After fighting against the anti-Asian discrimination in college admission for 35 years, today we finally see the justice of the US Supreme court provide equal protection of the law to all communities,” Zhao said.

The organization says its advocacy focuses on campaigns and legal actions against education institutions that it believes discriminate against the Asian American community.

Zhao told CNN: “Our children will no longer be treated as second-class citizens in college admissions. This is a victory for all Americans because they should preserve American democracy, which is the bedrock of the American dream.”

“We want all children to be judged by their merit and the content of their character,” he said.

The White House has been preparing for months for a potential Supreme Court ruling gutting affirmative action, even as President Joe Biden expressed optimism late last year that the Supreme Court would not do so. 

White House officials have met with a slew of civil rights groups, universities and legal organizations to prepare for today’s eventuality, gathering information on how the administration should handle the fallout, officials said. 

Leaders from the Domestic Policy Council, the Office of Public Engagement and the White House Counsel’s office worked with the Department of Justice and Department of Education to develop contingency plans and potential executive actions, the officials said.

Those preparations took on more urgency over the last month as Biden met several times with his team to prepare for the Supreme Court’s ruling and develop a plan that would encourage higher education institutions to continue to work to build diverse classes and consider systemic barriers and inequities that applicants have faced.

Biden has now directed his team to finalize those plans in light of the ruling, the officials said.

CNN reported earlier Thursday that the White House’s contingency plans involved potential executive actions, though officials have been clear that no step Biden could take would reverse the court’s ruling.

The Supreme Court ruling that says colleges and universities cannot rely on race in admissions is expected to lead to a range of response from higher education, according to Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. 

It will have two distinct sets of effects, depending on the state where the school is located:

President Joe Biden, speaking shortly after the Supreme Court ruled to gut affirmative action in higher education, said the US cannot abandon its pursuit of a more equal higher education system.

“We cannot let this decision be the last word,” Biden said.

“America is an idea, an idea, unique in the world, an idea of hope and opportunity, of possibilities, of giving everyone a fair shot, of leaving no one behind. We’ve never fully lived up to it, but we have never walked away from it, either,” he added. “We will not walk away from it now.”

The president then laid out a “new path forward,” one that he said was consistent with the nation’s values but also consistent with the court’s ruling.

Biden said schools should not abandon their commitment to creating diverse student bodies, continuing to take into account “the adversity a student has overcome when selecting among qualified applicants.”

The president emphasized that, as they did before today’s ruling, schools should first ensure that students have the requisite grades and test scores to qualify. Then their background should be considered, he said.

Biden said the kinds of adversity worth considering could include things like whether the student lacks financial means or whether they’re the first in their family to attend college.

That kind of student “has demonstrated more grit, more determination, and that should be a factor that colleges should take into account in admissions,” Biden said.

“It also means examining where the student grew up and went to high school. It means understanding the particular hardships that each individual student has faced in life, including racial discrimination,” the president said.

Moments after Biden’s remarks, the White House unveiled a series of executive actions meant to continue boosting diversity on college campuses, including providing guidance to schools on admissions practices. 

Biden said he would direct the Department of Education “to analyze what practices helped build a more inclusive and diverse student body and what practices hold that back. Practices like legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity.”

He added: “We can’t go backwards. You know, I know today’s court decision is a severe disappointment to so many people, including me, but we cannot let the decision be a permanent setback for the country. We need to keep an open door of opportunities.”

Some context: The court’s conservative majority said in its opinion that students will still be allowed to discuss race through a personal lens in their admissions essays, if it is specific to the character and abilities they can contribute to the school. The court’s liberal justices have said that exception falls far short of the mission of affirmative action.

CNN’s Kevin Liptak contributed reporting to this post.

President Joe Biden criticized the Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions and said the decision goes against US values.

“I also believe that while talent, creativity and hard work are everywhere across this country, not equal opportunity — it is not everywhere across this country. We cannot let the decision be the last word,” he added.

President Joe Biden said the Supreme Court has reserved precedent in its decision to gut affirmative action in college admissions.

The court has “once again walked away from decades of precedent,” Biden said in remarks at the White House.

Biden said he “strongly” disagrees with the court’s decision and its impacts.

“This is not a normal court,” Biden said after his remarks when asked by CNN’s Arlette Saenz whether he believed it was a “rogue” court.

CNN’s Sam Fossum contributed reporting to this post.

President Joe Biden is speaking now from the White House’s Roosevelt Room.

His comments come just hours after the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark decision that colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis in admissions.

Members of the Biden administration have been discussing contingency plans involving executive action in the event the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, a person familiar with the plans said. Biden convened a meeting today with senior staff who have been closely working on the issue after being briefed about the decision, a White House official said.

Earlier today, an administration official said the White House and the Department of Education were reviewing the affirmative action decision. Biden last spoke about the pending case in November, when he said he urged the Justice Department to “defend the present policy before the Supreme Court” and voiced muted optimism that the Supreme Court would rule in a different way than today’s decision. 

CNN’s Arlette Saenz and Kevin Liptak contributed reporting to this post.

Members of the Biden administration had already been discussing contingency plans involving executive action in the event the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, a person familiar with the plans said.

President Joe Biden was briefed by White House Counsel on Thursday after he saw the breaking news reports that the court had gutted the policy, a White House official said. He then convened a meeting with senior staff who have been closely working on the issue.

It’s not immediately clear what steps are currently under discussion, and officials have been clear that no step Biden could take would reverse the court’s ruling. 

Still, officials inside the administration have been exploring what options exist, including through the Department of Education and by executive action.

Biden last spoke at length about affirmative action at a news conference last November, holding out hope the Supreme Court would uphold it. He is scheduled to deliver remarks from the White House’s Roosevelt Room any minute.

The White House has previously declined to say what steps Biden might take should affirmative action be struck down.

“The President supports making higher education accessible to all Americans,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier this year. “As the Department of Justice argued in court, it is important that our colleagues and universities produce graduates who are from all segments of society, who are prepared to succeed and lead an increasingly diverse nation.”

Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the universities at the heart of the Supreme Court’s ruling that were challenged by students, responded to Thursday’s decision by vowing to figure out a way forward.

Harvard: “We write today to reaffirm the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences. That principle is as true and important today as it was yesterday. So too are the abiding values that have enabled us—and every great educational institution—to pursue the high calling of educating creative thinkers and bold leaders, of deepening human knowledge, and of promoting progress, justice, and human flourishing.”

The Ivy League school said that for almost a decade it had “vigorously defended an admissions system that, as two federal courts ruled, fully complied with longstanding precedent.” In the coming weeks and months, Harvard said it would work to “determine how to preserve, consistent with the Court’s new precedent, our essential values.”

UNC: “On behalf of the people of our state, we will work with the administration to ensure that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill complies fully with today’s ruling from the nation’s highest court. We intend for America’s oldest public university to keep leading,” said David L. Boliek Jr., the chair of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees speaking on behalf of the board.

An advocate against affirmative action, who is on the board of for Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the lawsuit against Harvard and University of North Carolina, says that colleges and universities should eliminate legacy admissions if they want true diversity.

“I’ve always maintained that if colleges and universities truly wanted diversity, they should eliminate legacy admissions. Harvard refused to do that. They will not eliminate legacy admission. Instead, they discriminate against Asians to make room for more Black Americans,” said Kenny Xu, president of Color Us United, an organization that opposes race-based college admissions which, it says, disproportionately discriminates against Asian Americans. 

“If you are an Asian American, you have to score 273 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a Black person at Harvard. Is that fair? I understand that people’s lives are improved by getting into an Ivy League university, but that opportunity should be made available to people of every race, not just one,” he added.

Claiming that a large percentage of Harvard University’s Black students are immigrants and come from an upper middle class or higher economic background, he said, “at that point, a Black American admitted to Harvard is more likely to have [more in common] with the standard White upper class applicant than they are to have with a truly poor and disadvantaged person.”

More on today’s ruling: The Supreme Court conservative majority opinion claims that the court was not expressly overturning prior cases authorizing race-based affirmative action and suggested that how race has affected an applicant’s life can still be part of how their application is considered.

But even if the court did not formally end race-based affirmative action in higher education, its analysis will make it practically impossible for colleges and universities to take race into account – as the three Democratic appointees stressed in dissent.

Republican presidential candidates were quick to praise the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling. Here’s a look at some of their reactions:

Former President Donald Trump: “This is a great day for America. People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our country, are finally being rewarded. This is the ruling everyone was waiting and hoping for and the result was amazing. It will also keep us competitive with the rest of the world. Our greatest minds must be cherished and that’s what this wonderful day has brought. We’re going back to all merit-based—and that’s the way it should be!”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: “College admissions should be based on merit and applicants should not be judged on their race or ethnicity. The Supreme Court has correctly upheld the Constitution and ended discrimination by colleges and universities.”

Nikki Haley: “The world admires America because we value freedom & opportunity. SCOTUS re-affirmed those values today. Picking winners & losers based on race is fundamentally wrong. This decision will help every student—no matter their background—have a better opportunity to achieve the American dream,” she said in a statement.

Former Vice President Mike Pence: “There is no place for discrimination based on race in the United States, and I am pleased that the Supreme Court has put an end to this egregious violation of civil and constitutional rights in admissions processes, which only served to perpetuate racism. I am honored to have played a role in appointing three of the Justices that ensured today’s welcomed decision, and as President I will continue to appoint judges who will strictly apply the law rather than twisting it to serve woke and progressive ends,” he said in a statement.

Vivek Ramaswamy: “I’m glad the U.S. Supreme Court finally laid to rest one of the worst failed experiments in American history: affirmative action,” he said in a statement.

Larry Elder: “I oppose race based admissions to colleges and universities. When California banned the use of race based college admissions, graduation rates for black students actually went up because they went to universities that matched their skill levels. Affirmative action also discriminates against Asian Americans who have the temerity to work hard, make good grades and perform well on standardized tests, only to find themselves penalized when it comes to admission into the college or university of their choice,” he said in a statement.

Perry Johnson: “I applaud today’s #SCOTUS ruling on affirmative action. Discrimination based on the color of one’s skin is wrong, period. Leftists in America continue to drive wedges amongst us with inflammatory rhetoric and practices in dealing with race. It is time we stand up against it.”

Sen. Tim Scott: “This is a good day for America. Honestly, this is the day where we understand that being judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin is what our constitution wants. We are continuing to work on forming this more perfect union. Today is better than yesterday. This year better than last year. This decade better than last decade. The progress that we’re seeing in this nation is palpable. That’s good news for every single corridor of this nation, and one that we should celebrate,” Scott told Fox News.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson: said the Supreme Court’s decision “reinforces the fundamental American principle of equality for all.” He added that “it ends with finality the system of racial preferences and box-checking that unfairly categorized students based on their race, rather than their individual merits.”

CNN’s Kit Maher and Veronica Stracqualarsi contributed to this report.

A footnote in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s affirmative action dissent notes that her commentary is aimed at the issues raised by the challenge to University of North Carolina’s admission program — and not to the Harvard affirmative action case that was also before the court.

Jackson had recused herself from the challenge to Harvard’s use of race in admissions. She is one of four justices who graduated from Harvard, having attended both its undergraduate and law schools. But for years, she has sat on the university’s board of overseers. She announced during her Senate confirmation proceedings last year that she would not participate in the case against Harvard.

It was unclear in the lead-up to Thursday’s ruling whether the Supreme Court would issue separate opinions in the North Carolina and Harvard case. There was much overlap in the two lawsuits, but also some distinctions.

The Supreme Court ultimately combined its rulings into one majority opinion. Jackson’s dissent, however focused on the specifics of UNC’s admissions program.

In her dissent, she accused the conservative majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the court’s affirmative action ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

The Supreme Court said US military service academies can continue to take race into consideration as a factor in admissions, despite a ruling effectively ending affirmative action in admissions to colleges and universities.  

In a footnote in the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said the cases before the court did “not address the issue” and left open the possibility that there are “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present” in a future case. 

During oral arguments, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar stressed the unique interests of the military and argued that race-based admissions programs further the nation’s compelling interest of diversity.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called out the caveat in her dissent. 

“The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority opts to ignore),” she wrote.

Analysis: Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said the majority’s refusal to address military academies is a “strange punt in an opinion that otherwise goes a long way toward closing the door on all considerations of race in higher education.”

“As Justice Jackson’s dissent makes clear, this creates an awkward — and undefended — distinction between why it might be permissible for the federal government to consider race in military admissions, but not for state governments to do so in their civilian universities,” he added.

CNN’s Joan Biskupic had a firsthand view of the reading of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action Thursday.

Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t waste any time in announcing the decision to gut affirmation action in college admissions, Biskupic said.

“You could have heard a pin drop, and he announces right off of the bat that they are rolling back all affirmative action. And I have to say, there was a little bit of defiance in his voice, even though … this is something that John Roberts has been working on for himself many, many years, back to his time as a young Ronald Reagan administration lawyer. He does not believe in any kind of race conscious remedies,” she said.

He also “kind of warned that he did not want universities and colleges to set up programs that might work in the shadows that might somehow take into consideration applicants’ racial backgrounds. It was one of his most robust, strongest statements ever,” Biskupic reported.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina justice on the court, “talked about the profound mistake that the majority was making here. She said it would close the doors of opportunity to people across the nation — for schools, for business, for the military; it would have such reverberations,” according to Biskupic.

“At the very end, she said, ‘We shall overcome.’ And it was a mournful robust dissent,” Biskupic said. “… The weight of history was so evident in the room.”

Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson sat “stone-faced,” according to Biskupic.

“Even though they were all trying to hold it in check, you could tell by the tension nonetheless on Justice Jackson’s face as she looked out,” she said.

The justices spoke for such a long time that they had to take breaks to drink water, Biskupic said.

Howard University President Wayne A. I. Frederick called the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action an “unfortunate decision.”

“Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are carrying an outsized burden to diversify so many industries in America. We represent only 3% of the higher [education] institutions, but we are responsible for 25% of the bachelor’s degrees,” he said on CNN Thursday. “By not allowing race to be considered in admissions elsewhere, you can put an even more outsized burden on historically Black colleges and universities who don’t have the capacity to carry that type of a burden.”

The ruling will make admissions decisions very complicated for HBCUs, he argued.

“Obviously, we all are going to be kind of avoiding lawsuits, and so trying to have a very sterile process. It is going to be almost impossible, and trying to create one is going to be far more difficult today given this ruling. So I think that we are all going to have to look at the rules very carefully,” he told CNN.

“So it is going to be a road that is going to require a lot more resources. I think that for institutions that don’t have as many resources could be blindsided by lawsuits about this,” Frederick said.

In her own dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the conservative majority of having a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” in how the court’s affirmative action ruling announced “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

“But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” she said, joined by the court’s two other liberals.

Justice Jackson wrote that the majority had “detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences.”

“No one benefits from ignorance,” she added.

A footnote in her dissent went after the majority concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas, the only other Black justice on the court. 

“(His) opinion also demonstrates an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences,” Jackson said, adding that his concurrence “ignites many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here.” 

“The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room — the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential,” the footnote said. 

In her broader dissent, Jackson said that the argument made by the challengers that affirmative action programs are unfair “blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.” 

Read her opinion here.

While the Supreme Court ruled colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, the majority opinion suggested that applicants will still be able to discuss race through a personal lens in their admission essays.

“Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university,” the majority states.

The applicant’s writing could include discussion of how race affected their life, “be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote at the very end of the opinion.

Liberal justices unconvinced: The three liberal justices stressed in their dissent that even if the court did not formally end race-based affirmative action in higher education, its analysis will make it practically impossible for colleges and universities to take race into account.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Roberts’ reasoning fell far short of what was necessary to achieve diversity on campus.

“This supposed recognition that universities can, in some situations, consider race in application essays is nothing but an attempt to put lipstick on a pig,” Sotomayor wrote in her fiery dissent.

“Because the Court cannot escape the inevitable truth that race matters in students’ lives, it announces a false promise to save face and appear attuned to reality. No one is fooled,” she wrote.

The Supreme Court says colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission, a landmark decision that upends long-standing precedent that has benefitted Black and Latino students in higher education.

In her fiery dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the decision will result in a less equal education system in the US.

“The result of today’s decision is that a person’s skin color may play a role in assessing individualized suspicion, but it cannot play a role in assessing that person’s individualized contributions to a diverse learning environment. That indefensible reading of the Constitution is not grounded in law and subverts the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection,” Sotomayor wrote, in part.

The decision “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter,” the justice wrote.

While the majority contended that an applicant could mention race in a college essays, Sotomayor said that would fall well short of achieving the goal of diversity.  

In one section of her dissent, she said that the “supposed recognition that universities can, in some situations, consider race in application essays is nothing but an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.” 

“Because the Court cannot escape the inevitable truth that race matters in students’ lives, it announces a false promise to save face and appear attuned to reality. No one is fooled,” she wrote. 

Sotomayor said the majority employed an “unjustified exercise of power” that will only serve “to highlight the Court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound.” 

“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said while reading a synopsis from the bench on Thursday.  

In ending her dissent, Sotomayor quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“As has been the case before in the history of American democracy, ‘the arc of the moral universe’ will bend toward racial justice despite the Court’s effort to impede its progress,” she said. 

She pointedly did not use the customary language of “I respectfully dissent.” 

Read her opinion here.

Former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama expressed disappointment at the Supreme Court’s decision to gut affirmative action from college admissions.

“Like any policy, affirmative action wasn’t perfect. But it allowed generations of students like Michelle and me to prove we belonged. Now it’s up to all of us to give young people the opportunities they deserve — and help students everywhere benefit from new perspectives,” the former president said in a succinct statement, also providing links to various organizations focused on equality in education.

In a lengthier statement, the former first lady took a more personal tone.

“Back in college, I was one of the few Black students on my campus, and I was proud of getting into such a respected school. I knew I’d worked hard for it. But still, I sometimes wondered if people thought I got there because of affirmative action. It was a shadow that students like me couldn’t shake, whether those doubts came from the outside or inside our own minds,” she said.

“But the fact is this: I belonged. And semester after semester, decade after decade, for more than half a century, countless students like me showed they belonged, too. It wasn’t just the kids of color who benefitted, either. Every student who heard a perspective they might not have encountered, who had an assumption challenged, who had their minds and their hearts opened gained a lot as well. It wasn’t perfect, but there’s no doubt that it helped offer new ladders of opportunity for those who, throughout our history, have too often been denied a chance to show how fast they can climb,” she continued.

Michelle Obama said that those students who get accepted into universities due to legacy, athletics and resources are not questioned in the same way.

“So often, we just accept that money, power, and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level,” she said.

“So today, my heart breaks for any young person out there who’s wondering what their future holds — and what kinds of chances will be open to them. And while I know the strength and grit that lies inside kids who have always had to sweat a little more to climb the same ladders, I hope and I pray that the rest of us are willing to sweat a little, too. Today is a reminder that we’ve got to do the work not just to enact policies that reflect our values of equity and fairness, but to truly make those values real in all of our schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods,” she concluded.

In a lengthy concurrence, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, one of two Black justices on the Supreme Court, spoke in unusually personal terms as he criticized the use of affirmative action policies by colleges and universities.

Thomas described the policies as “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.” 

“While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law,” Thomas wrote.

Liberal justices including Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, have slammed the decision in dissent, saying it is willfully ignorant about inequality in the US.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion on affirmative action for the conservative majority, saying the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race. He said the programs involve racial stereotyping, and had no specific end point.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a fiery dissent, saying the opinion “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

Here’s how the nine justices ruled in the case:

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said the Harvard and University of North Carolina programs violated the Equal Protection Clause because they failed to offer “measurable” objectives to justify the use of race. He said the programs involve racial stereotyping and had no specific end point. 

“University programs must comply with strict scrutiny, they may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and — at some point — they must end,” he wrote. 

CNN Chief Legal Analyst Laura Coates said the Supreme Court’s decision to gut affirmative action in college admissions will have sweeping changes to education in the US.

“This opinion, make no mistake about it, it is going to change the landscape of education, and this is what the majority has asked for,” she said. 

Coates said she sees more confusion in the admissions process.

“I’m still scratching my head, as many admissions officers will be — so ‘I can take into consideration race as part of the student’s experience, but their actual racial group or category cannot be contemplated or taken into account?’” she said.

“While the actual language of the Supreme Court will come across as very intellectualized and esoteric as if in a classroom, in reality, how will this work? How will you be able to have certain color blindedness, but then at the same time allowed to take into account one’s experiences when race has been a part of that?” Coates said.

Coates commented on the scathing dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, which said the opinion “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” 

Sotomayor speaks about “the inconsistency of when race can be used as a factor in some aspects of our constitutional scholarship, and in others it is treated quite differently and now, even subordinated to things like one’s legacy status of a child of a alumni or one’s athleticism and beyond. But I think she speaks to a much greater issue that many people who have been proponents of affirmative action have spoken to for years, and that is the role of race as evident in the course of our history and our present,” Coates said.

CNN Supreme Court analyst Steve Vladeck noted that even if the court did not formally end race-based affirmative action in higher education, its analysis in the ruling will make it practically impossible for colleges and universities to take race into account — as the three liberal justices stressed in dissent.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hailed the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, saying that the justices “just ruled that no American should be denied educational opportunities because of race.”

“Now students will be able to compete based on equal standards and individual merit. This will make the college admissions process fairer and uphold equality under the law,” the Republican from California tweeted.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling “a giant roadblock in our country’s march toward racial justice.”

“The consequences of this decision will be felt immediately and across the country, as students of color will face an admission cycle next year with fewer opportunities to attend the same colleges and universities than their parents and older siblings,” the Democrat from New York said.

“These negative consequences could continue for generations, as the historic harms of exclusion and discrimination in education and society are exacerbated,” he added.

The Biden administration – from the White House to the Department of Education – is reviewing the affirmative action decision from the Supreme Court, an administration official said.

President Joe Biden last spoke about the pending case in November, when he said he urged his Justice Department to “defend the present policy before the Supreme Court” and voiced muted optimism that the Supreme Court would rule in a different way than today’s decision. 

About the ruling: The high court said colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as an express factor in admissions, a landmark decision that overturns long-standing precedent that has benefitted Black and Latino students in higher education.

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, here’s some of the latest polling on affirmative action and the consideration of race in college admissions.

Most of the surveys find public support for banning the consideration of race in college admissions, but the results suggest that Americans’ opinions around this issue can be highly sensitive to the way the question is framed.

In a Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month, half (50%) of US adults say they disapprove of selective colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions in order to increase the racial and ethnic diversity at the school. One-third (33%) approve, with the remaining 16% unsure. Support for colleges giving consideration to race and ethnicity is higher among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (54% approve, 29% disapprove) and Black Americans (47% approve, 29% disapprove) than it is among White Americans (29% approve, 57% disapprove) or Republicans and Republican leaners (14% approve, 74% disapprove).

Roughly half (49%) of all US adults in the Pew poll say that the consideration of race and ethnicity makes the overall admissions process of these colleges less fair, with just 20% saying it makes the process more fair. But 36% say that considering race and ethnicity in admissions is good for ensuring equal opportunity for Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, higher than the 31% who say it’s bad for that purpose.

A CBS News/YouGov survey highlights the extent to which framing matters on this topic. In the poll, taken in mid-June, a 70% majority of Americans say the Supreme Court should rule that colleges are not allowed to consider race in admissions, with just 30% saying that the court should rule that colleges are allowed to continue considering race. At the same time, the poll finds a much closer split on affirmative action more generally: Just over half of the public (53%) says that affirmative action programs in hiring, promoting and college admissions should be continued, with 47% saying such programs should be abolished.

Few Americans have been playing close attention to SCOTUS’ consideration of affirmative action. A May poll from Marquette Law School found that a 55% majority of Americans said they hadn’t heard enough about the case to have an opinion, with 34% of the public favoring a SCOTUS decision that would ban the use of race as a factor in college admissions and only 12% opposed to such a ruling.

The Supreme Court says colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as an express factor in admissions.

Read the opinion here:

The Supreme Court says colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as an express factor in admissions, a landmark decision that overturns long-standing precedent that has benefitted Black and Latino students in higher education.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the conservative majority.

All eyes are on the Supreme Court for its final days of the term, as the justices will release cases on issues such as affirmative action, student loan payments and LGBTQ rights.

Of the cases remaining, several that most capture the public’s attention are likely to lead to fiery opinions and dissents read from the bench.

Here are some of the remaining cases to be decided:

Affirmative action in college admissions: The court is considering whether colleges and universities can continue to take race into consideration as a factor in admissions, a decision that could overturn long-standing precedent that has benefited Black and Latino students. At issue are programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that the schools say help them to achieve diversity on campus.

During oral arguments, the right side of the bench appeared ready to rule against the schools. Such an opinion would deliver a long-sought victory for opponents of affirmative action in higher education who have argued for decades that taking race into consideration – even in a limited manner – thwarts the goal of achieving a color-blind society.

Biden’s student loan program: The Supreme Court is also considering two challenges to President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, an initiative aimed at providing targeted debt relief to millions of student-loan borrowers that has so far been stalled by legal challenges.

Republican-led states and conservatives challenging the program say it amounts to an unlawful attempt to erase an estimated $430 billion of federal student loan debt under the guise of the pandemic. At the heart of the case is the Department of Education’s authority to forgive the loans. Several of the conservative justices have signaled in recent years that agencies – with no direct accountability to the public – have become too powerful, upsetting the separation of powers.

Religious accommodation for postal worker: A former mail carrier, an evangelical Christian, seeks to sue the US Postal Service because it failed to accommodate his request not to work on Sundays. A lower court had ruled against the worker, Gerald Groff, holding that his request would cause an “undue burden” on the USPS and lead to low morale at the workplace when other employees had to pick up his shifts. There appeared to be consensus, after almost two hours of oral arguments, that the appeals court had been too quick to rule against Groff.

Can businesses deny services to LGBTQ customers? At the center of another case is a graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who seeks to expand her business and create custom websites to celebrate weddings – but does not want to work with gay couples out of religious objections to same-sex marriage. Smith has not yet moved forward with her new business venture because of Colorado’s public accommodations law. Under the law, a business may not refuse to serve individuals because of their sexual orientation. Smith, whose company is called 303 Creative LLC, said that she is willing to work with all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, but she draws the line at creating websites that celebrate same-sex marriage because expressing such a message would be inconsistent with her beliefs.

The Supreme Court is set to rule on a headline-grabbing case concerning President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program that will affect the finances of millions of Americans.

Critics, including the Republican-led states that have sued, say the initiative amounts to an unlawful attempt to erase an estimated $430 billion of federal student-loan debt under the guise of the pandemic.

But the legal impact could go well beyond the fate of the program.

The US Supreme Court is expected to hand down its opinion on the program after hearing oral arguments in the state-led case plus another brought by individual borrowers backed by a conservative group in February.

While most of the attention so far is focused on whether the Department of Education exceeded its authority in implementing the program, some court watchers are focused on an equally important procedural issue that is a major part of the case: whether the red states behind the challenge have the legal right, or “standing” to bring the dispute in the first place.

The court could rule to dismiss the challenges if they decide the plaintiffs do not have the “standing.”

The concept of standing is one that requires a party to establish an actual or imminent injury to get into court. Simply disagreeing with a policy is not enough. In recent years, states from one party have felt increasingly emboldened to come to court to sue an administration from a different party over a controversial policy. For the Biden administration, the issue is of critical importance now, especially as Republican-led states feel they have an advantage with the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.

Professor Samuel Bray of Notre Dame Law School said it’s a problem for both Democratic and Republican administrations and he worries about states using the judicial branch to bring federal policymaking to a standstill.

Judges are meant to decide concrete disputes between parties, the thinking goes, and they should not engage in political or policy debates better left to the other branches of government.

Keep reading here.

The conservative Supreme Court held oral arguments on October 31, 2022, to consider whether colleges and universities can continue to take race into consideration as a factor in admissions, a case that could diminish the number of Black and Hispanic students in higher education. The justices are expected to rule on the cases soon.

What’s at stake: Hanging in the balance was the future of admissions plans at hundreds of schools that have relied on court precedent for decades in order to achieve the educational benefits they say flow from student body diversity on campus.

Challengers in the case targeted Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that their programs violate equal protection principles, dash the promise of a colorblind society, and discriminate against Asian Americans. They urged the court to overturn precedent and they say the schools should explore and further develop race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity.

At least nine states had already chosen to end consideration of race in university admissions at the time of the oral arguments, including Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Supreme Court precedent allows the consideration of race, but the court’s new composition of conservative justices did not hesitate last term to overturn decades old precedent in a case that curtailed a federal right to abortion.

A conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), was behind both challenges.

Edward Blum, the president of SFFA, hired a conservative boutique law firm, Consovoy McCarthy, to challenge the policies at the country’s oldest private university, Harvard and the country’s first public university, University of North Carolina. The firm is composed of several former clerks of Justice Clarence Thomas who has been a critic of affirmative action.

SSFA argued that the Harvard policy violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits schools receiving federal funds from discriminating based on race. He said the UNC policy is subject to Title VI, as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, which covers state universities.

Lower US courts have ruled in favor of the schools finding that the programs used race in a sufficiently limited way to fulfill a compelling interest in diversity.

The two disputes were initially consolidated, but after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson announced she would recuse herself from the Harvard case because she had served on the school’s board of overseers, they were decoupled, so the nation’s first Black female justice could weigh in on the issue in at least one case.

Read more about the cases here.

Concerns about ethics and transparency at the Supreme Court were reignited last week after Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged attending a luxury fishing trip on the private jet of a conservative hedge fund manager.

ProPublica detailed the 2008 trip with Paul Singer. Alito, the report said, did not report the trip or the flight he took on the private jet to Alaska on his annual financial disclosure, and also did not recuse himself from cases before the court involving Singer’s hedge fund. Alito denied any wrongdoing.

While much of the recent criticism about Supreme Court ethics and activities of justices has been leveled at Justice Clarence Thomas – for failing to disclose luxury travel and gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, a 2014 real estate deal he made with the billionaire real estate magnate, or Crow’s reported tuition payments for Thomas’ grandnephew – other justices have also come under scrutiny.

Last July, Alito was feted in Rome by Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative, which has in recent years joined the growing ranks of conservative legal activists who are finding new favor at the Supreme Court – and forging ties with the justices. The group’s legal clinic has filed a series of “friend-of-the-court” briefs in religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020.

After the high court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome to deliver a keynote address at a gala hosted at a palace in the heart of the city. It was his first known public appearance after the decision.

At the start of his speech, he thanked the group for the “warm hospitality” it provided to him and his wife, which, he later said, included a stay at a hotel that “looks out over the Roman Forum.”

During various parts of the address, he gleefully mocked critics of his ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What really “wounded” him, the conservative justice said, was when Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, “addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare ‘the decision whose name may not be spoken’ with the Russian attack on the Ukraine.”

Justices are often known for usually maintaining a low profile, and the court’s public information office in recent years has been less forthcoming about their public appearances. But the court’s ruling last year in the abortion case propelled the nine jurists and their rulings to new heights and fueled new questions about the justices’ behavior both on and off the bench.

Millions of borrowers may learn soon whether they could receive up to $20,000 in debt relief under President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

The fate of the unprecedented debt cancellation program lies with the Supreme Court, which is expected to soon decide to either uphold or strike down the proposal.

The student loan forgiveness program, which Biden announced last August, has been on hold due to legal challenges. No student loan debt has been canceled, despite the fact that the government approved 16 million applications eligible for relief last year.

Here are key things to know:

Who would be eligible for student loan forgiveness? The Biden administration has estimated that more than 40 million federal student loan borrowers would qualify for some level of debt cancellation, with roughly 20 million who would have their balance forgiven entirely, if the forgiveness program is allowed to move forward.

But not everyone with a federally held student loan would qualify. Individual borrowers who made less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 and married couples or heads of households who made less than $250,000 a year could see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven.

If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual could be eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness. But federal student loans that are guaranteed by the government but held by private lenders are not eligible unless the borrower applied to consolidate those loans into a Direct Loan by September 29, 2022.

How fast could borrowers see debt relief? If Biden’s program gets the green light, some borrowers won’t have to do anything to receive debt relief. An estimated 8 million people will receive debt relief automatically because the Department of Education already has their income on file, likely because of financial aid forms or a previously submitted income-driven repayment plan application.

And the Department of Education has kept the 26 million applications it received last fall on file. Those borrowers won’t have to apply again, and the government could begin issuing some debt cancellations fairly quickly.

For borrowers who have not applied but think they might be eligible, the application should be available again on the Federal Student Aid website if the Supreme Court allows the program to move forward.

Keep reading here.

Several conservative members of the Supreme Court seemed sympathetic in December of last year to arguments from a graphic designer who seeks to start a website business to celebrate weddings but does not want to work with same-sex couples.

The conservative justices viewed the case through the lens of free speech and suggested that an artist or someone creating a customized product could not be forced by the government to express a message that violates her religious beliefs.

Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that a businessperson’s objection would not be based on the status of the same-sex couple, but instead, the message the businessperson did not want to send. The question isn’t the “who” Gorsuch said, but the “what.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a lawyer for the designer that her “strongest ground” is that the designer’s work is “custom.”

Justice Clarence Thomas spoke about the history of public accommodation laws intersecting with the First Amendment. “This is not a restaurant, this is not a riverboat or a train,” he said.

On one side of the dispute is the designer, Lorie Smith, whose business is called 303 Creative. She said she has not yet moved forward with an expansion into wedding websites because she is worried about violating a Colorado public accommodations law. She said the law compels her to express messages that are inconsistent with her beliefs. The state and supporters of LGBTQ rights responded that Smith is simply seeking a license to discriminate in the marketplace. They said the law covers a businessperson’s conduct, not their speech.

The case comes as supporters of LGBTQ rights fear the 6-3 conservative majority – which last year decided to reverse a near 50-year-old abortion precedent – may be setting its sights on ultimately reversing a landmark 2015 opinion called Obergefell v. Hodges that cleared the way for same-sex marriage nationwide.

The Supreme Court said Tuesday that the North Carolina Supreme Court did not violate the elections clause of the US Constitution when it invalidated the state’s 2022 congressional map, rejecting a broad version of a controversial legal Independent State Legislature theory pushed by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 6-3 opinion.

The case had captured the nation’s attention because Republican lawmakers in North Carolina were asking the justices to adopt a long-dormant legal theory and hold that state courts and other state entities have a limited role in reviewing election rules established by state legislatures when it comes to federal elections.

“State courts retain the authority to apply state constitutional restraints when legislatures act under the power conferred upon them by the Elections Clause,” Roberts wrote.

The court allowed that federal courts can have some role supervising state courts in certain circumstances, with Roberts writing that “state courts do not have free rein.”

“Federal courts,” Roberts said, “must not abandon their duty to exercise judicial review.”

“When state legislatures act pursuant to their Elections Clause authority, they engage in lawmaking subject to the typical constraints on the exercise of such power,” he wrote. “In sum, our precedents have long rejected the view that legislative action under the Elections Clause is purely federal in character, governed only by restraints found in the Federal Constitution.”

Roberts was joined by fellow conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The decision will have ramifications for the future of elections nationwide.

Read more about the ruling here.

Justices heard oral arguments in February in two challenges to President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan, with several conservative justices appearing skeptical of the government’s authority to discharge millions of dollars in federally held loans.

If the conservatives do ultimately rule in favor of the policy’s challengers, the hearing made clear they will have to grapple with the legal questions around why states and individual borrowers should be allowed to sue over the program – questions that emerged as a flash point during the arguments.

Millions of qualifying student loan borrowers could see up to $20,000 of their debt canceled depending on the ruling. The timing of the justices’ opinion is also important — it will determine when payments on federal student loans will resume after a pandemic-related pause was put in place nearly three years ago.

In Biden v. Nebraska, a group of Republican-led states argued the administration exceeded its authority by using the pandemic as a pretext to mask the true goal of fulfilling a campaign promise to erase student loan debt.

The second case is Department of Education v. Brown, which was initially brought by two individuals who did not qualify for the program, argued the government failed to follow proper rulemaking process when putting it in place.

Here are some takeaways from the oral arguments:

Conservatives saw this case as another chance to rein in aggressive actions by Biden: In the questions the conservative justices posed, they signaled that they see the GOP states’ case as presenting the court with another chance to draw the lines around when the executive branch can and cannot act without Congress.

Several of the exchanges concerned the application of the so-called “Major Questions Doctrine,” a legal theory embraced by the court’s Republican appointees that says Congress can be expected to speak with specificity when it gives an agency power to do something of great political or economic significance.

The states argued that under the doctrine, the Biden student debt program should be blocked.

Chief Justice John Roberts said to US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar that the case “presents extraordinarily serious important issues about the role of Congress.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Prelogar to compare the dispute to cases in the court’s history where the court ultimately pushed back against government claims that a national emergency justified the aggressive, unilateral action by the executive branch. And Justice Neil Gorsuch asked Nebraska Solicitor General James Campbell, who represented the red states, a series a questions that seemed aimed at helping the court further flesh out the doctrine.

Lawyer for GOP state gets grilled on standing: Whether the GOP states are threatened by the type of harm that makes it appropriate for a court to intervene was a major theme. Nebraska Solicitor General James Campbell received a series of questions – from justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum – about whether the states had overcome this procedural threshold, which is known as “standing.”

A particular flashpoint in the hearing was the states’ arguments that the loan forgiveness program’s potential harms to MOHELA – the Missouri-created entity that services loans in the state – gives Missouri standing. Several justices noted that MOHELA could have filed its own lawsuit challenging the program, but has not.

Read more takeaways here.