The U.S. Supreme Court has a habit of issuing plenty of opinions in June, right before the justices go on vacation. This year is no different in that regard. What is different, though, is the concentration of socially conservative cases where conservatives won.
Or, in the eyes of the livid Left: a significant setback for their efforts to turn America into a socialist wasteland.
After last year’s landmark ruling where the Supreme Court ended the federal government’s protection of abortion, many conservatives felt a sense of hope. After decades of seemingly unending political and legal victories for left-wing radicals, the Court’s decision to return the abortion issue to the states was a light-in-the-tunnel experience.
This week, the Supreme Court lit many more candles for conservatives. They did so not by crusading for conservatism, but simply by applying the U.S. Constitution to the cases that citizens had appealed to them.
Three cases stand out from the crowd of Supreme Court rulings: one on so-called affirmative action, one on the freedom of speech, and one on whether or not the government can forgive student loans at will.
Content of character, not color of skin
Perhaps the most pivotal decision by the court came in the case over affirmative action in college admissions. This is the practice where college admissions departments look at a student’s race (and other identity-related criteria) to decide whether he or she is accepted or rejected. Formally, affirmative action prioritizes students of allegedly underprivileged ethnicities; as it is being practiced, it gives preferential treatment primarily to black students and those of Native American descent.
Some students no doubt benefit from affirmative action, but one student’s admission is another student’s rejection. It has been known for a long time that affirmative action has its victims. Ten years ago, The College Fix reported that “an Asian applicant must score 140 points higher on the SAT to have an equal chance of being admitted as a white student.” In 2014, a group of Asian Americans sued Harvard University over this practice, alleging “that Harvard effectively employs quotas on the number of Asians admitted.”
Since then, the opposition to affirmative action has grown in scope. Harvard is one of two schools targeted in the affirmative-action case that the Supreme Court has now ruled on:
Students for Fair Admissions brought two lawsuits that ended up before the Supreme Court last fall, against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, alleging they discriminated against white and Asian-American students. Lower courts rejected their challenges.
The Court was blunt in its ruling:
Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
It is ironic that universities are being criticized for racial discrimination by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. American universities have built a well-earned reputation for being bastions of tolerance and diversity; by being told they cannot discriminate based on skin color, they now come across as racial segregationists of the American South in the early decades of the last century, who are forced by an enlightened federal government to end their erstwhile practices.
Leftists who love racial discrimination when they control it have responded widely and loudly. This tweet from Erica Marsh, a Democrat operative, provides an excellent summary of them all:
A young black woman responded:
The young Ms. Marsh then tried to save herself by ‘explaining’ her explanation:
This did not go very well. Another black woman then accused her of “blacksplaining”:
Government cannot compel speech
While Erica Marsh was busy trying to ride a bicycle in zero gravity, the Supreme Court issued another opinion against leftist discrimination. This case, known as 303 Creative after the party who originally filed it, is about a woman whose religious beliefs were being violated by the State of Colorado. Lorie Smith, a web designer who refused to produce websites “that violate her beliefs about marriage.”
In response to Ms. Smith’s refusal to help in the celebration of gay marriage, the State of Colorado used a law that forces any “public accommodation” to accept all customers, even those whose product requests violate the business owner’s own beliefs. After losing in two courts, Ms. Smith appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the state was on a very slippery slope:
Under Colorado’s logic, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a given topic to accept all commissions on that same topic—no matter the message—if the topic somehow implicates a customer’s statutorily protected trait.
And then comes the big punch:
Taken seriously, that principle would allow the government to force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty. The Court’s precedents recognize the First Amendment tolerates none of that.
Both the affirmative-action practice and the Colorado law that forces businesses to express opinions they dislike are instruments of leftist social engineering. They have been using those instruments in an affront to the U.S. Constitution, simply because—and this is not an exaggeration—the nation’s founding document does not resonate with their ideology. Despite not calling themselves socialist, the modern American Left does indeed share the same ideological roots as their leftist brethren in Europe. Socialism, in turn, is an ideology founded on the concept of structural conflict: it stipulates that the resources in human society are finite in a strictly static sense, which means that the only way one group of people can become more prosperous is by reducing the prosperity of another group.
This thought originates in Marxist economic theory, although it has been modified over the past 160 years to fit a broader range of artificial conflicts. Feminism stipulates that the sexual relations between men and women are not about consent and a mutual experience, but about one class—that would be men—exploiting another class, namely women. This exploitation exists axiomatically, and all men apparently participate in it whether they know that they do, or not.
By the same token, racial ‘theory’ assumes that whites exploit blacks, regardless of whether they do so or not.
No socialist theoretician, be it Marxist, feminist, or racialist, has ever been able to explain how he or she can know that exploitation exists if those who are said to produce exploitation are not aware that they do. Since it is supposedly subconscious, by definition there can be no epistemological revelation process to establish its existence.
This nature of socialism, even in the diluted American form where it is all about pinning group against group in societal settings, helps us understand why the Left so lividly reacts to the Supreme Court when it strikes down the instruments that they use to fight their phantoms of discrimination. To them, the axioms of their worldview hold a higher status than the U.S. Constitution, which explains why Democrats from time to time float the idea of adding several more seats to the Supreme Court so they can fill them with judges they deem to be ‘leftist’ enough.
In the eyes of the left, the U.S. Constitution is a conservative ideological document. They often add other labels, including ‘racist.’ This is, of course, entirely without merit: the Constitution is indeed a neutral instrument insofar as discrimination is concerned. It was affirmed as such after slavery ended in 1865 and the 14th Amendment was passed three years later.
Constitutional limits, socialism and student loans
After these two blows to socialist value engineering, you would think the Supreme Court would take a break. They did not:
The Supreme Court ruled Friday [June 30th] that the Biden administration cannot go forward with its student loan debt handout program. In a 6-3 decision, the court held that federal law does not allow the [United States] secretary of education to cancel more than $430 billion in student loan debt.
Back in 2020 when he was running for president, Joe Biden promised to use taxpayers’ money to help college graduates with their student loans. Last year, he announced a plan to reduce or eliminate student debt for any individual making less than $125,000, or $250,000 for a household.
In its analysis, the Congressional Research Service noted that this program is without precedent. The Supreme Court agreed, and added that the whole idea is unconstitutional. The statute that the Biden administration has referred to, known by its acronym as the HEROES Act, does not allow them the power to modify laws to the extent they tried to do:
The authority to “modify” statutes and regulations allows the Secretary to make modest adjustments and additions to existing provisions, not transform them. … the “modifications” challenged here create a novel and fundamentally different loan forgiveness program
than the one Congress created when they passed the law.
In the eyes of the Left, here the Supreme Court committed two ideological offenses. First, they struck down an entitlement program that was supposed to provide cash benefits (albeit in a roundabout fashion through debt forgiveness) to a specific demographic that the Left has deemed ‘in need’ or ‘entitled.’ Economic redistribution is the essence of socialism, and any opposition to such practices is an affront to the ideology itself.
In the Soviet Union, you were classified as a counter-revolutionary—an enemy of the communist revolution—if you in any way opposed economic redistribution. Democrats in America are nowhere near that extreme, but ideologically they are on the same scale; communism is merely the totalitarian end station of their ideology. However, since economic redistribution is axiomatically good from a socialist viewpoint, that axiom stands above the Constitution and leads the Left to conclude that the Supreme Court is their ideological enemy.
The second reason why the Left considers the rejection of the student-debt forgiveness program to be an ideological sin is that it criticizes the president for overstepping the limits of his constitutional powers. The Left, whether in America or elsewhere, does not believe in the separation of government powers as the U.S. Constitution stipulates it. They see it as an instrument for limiting the powers of government.
You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to see that this is exactly the point with the separation of powers. However, the Left goes one step further than simply demanding unlimited government: they oppose the philosophical principle of limited government because it puts the citizen above government. The Constitution enumerates government powers, especially those of the federal government, and in doing so prohibits the rule by simple majority.
Wherever simple majoritarianism cannot work, socialism cannot expand unhindered. Therefore, in the view of America’s Left, any reminder from the Supreme Court of limits to the powers of the elected branches of government is a reminder that socialism is having a hard time conquering America.
The America Report: Three Cheers for Conservatism
The U.S. Supreme Court has a habit of issuing plenty of opinions in June, right before the justices go on vacation. This year is no different in that regard. What is different, though, is the concentration of socially conservative cases where conservatives won.
Or, in the eyes of the livid Left: a significant setback for their efforts to turn America into a socialist wasteland.
After last year’s landmark ruling where the Supreme Court ended the federal government’s protection of abortion, many conservatives felt a sense of hope. After decades of seemingly unending political and legal victories for left-wing radicals, the Court’s decision to return the abortion issue to the states was a light-in-the-tunnel experience.
This week, the Supreme Court lit many more candles for conservatives. They did so not by crusading for conservatism, but simply by applying the U.S. Constitution to the cases that citizens had appealed to them.
Three cases stand out from the crowd of Supreme Court rulings: one on so-called affirmative action, one on the freedom of speech, and one on whether or not the government can forgive student loans at will.
Content of character, not color of skin
Perhaps the most pivotal decision by the court came in the case over affirmative action in college admissions. This is the practice where college admissions departments look at a student’s race (and other identity-related criteria) to decide whether he or she is accepted or rejected. Formally, affirmative action prioritizes students of allegedly underprivileged ethnicities; as it is being practiced, it gives preferential treatment primarily to black students and those of Native American descent.
Some students no doubt benefit from affirmative action, but one student’s admission is another student’s rejection. It has been known for a long time that affirmative action has its victims. Ten years ago, The College Fix reported that “an Asian applicant must score 140 points higher on the SAT to have an equal chance of being admitted as a white student.” In 2014, a group of Asian Americans sued Harvard University over this practice, alleging “that Harvard effectively employs quotas on the number of Asians admitted.”
Since then, the opposition to affirmative action has grown in scope. Harvard is one of two schools targeted in the affirmative-action case that the Supreme Court has now ruled on:
The Court was blunt in its ruling:
It is ironic that universities are being criticized for racial discrimination by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. American universities have built a well-earned reputation for being bastions of tolerance and diversity; by being told they cannot discriminate based on skin color, they now come across as racial segregationists of the American South in the early decades of the last century, who are forced by an enlightened federal government to end their erstwhile practices.
Leftists who love racial discrimination when they control it have responded widely and loudly. This tweet from Erica Marsh, a Democrat operative, provides an excellent summary of them all:
A young black woman responded:
The young Ms. Marsh then tried to save herself by ‘explaining’ her explanation:
This did not go very well. Another black woman then accused her of “blacksplaining”:
Government cannot compel speech
While Erica Marsh was busy trying to ride a bicycle in zero gravity, the Supreme Court issued another opinion against leftist discrimination. This case, known as 303 Creative after the party who originally filed it, is about a woman whose religious beliefs were being violated by the State of Colorado. Lorie Smith, a web designer who refused to produce websites “that violate her beliefs about marriage.”
In response to Ms. Smith’s refusal to help in the celebration of gay marriage, the State of Colorado used a law that forces any “public accommodation” to accept all customers, even those whose product requests violate the business owner’s own beliefs. After losing in two courts, Ms. Smith appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the state was on a very slippery slope:
And then comes the big punch:
Both the affirmative-action practice and the Colorado law that forces businesses to express opinions they dislike are instruments of leftist social engineering. They have been using those instruments in an affront to the U.S. Constitution, simply because—and this is not an exaggeration—the nation’s founding document does not resonate with their ideology. Despite not calling themselves socialist, the modern American Left does indeed share the same ideological roots as their leftist brethren in Europe. Socialism, in turn, is an ideology founded on the concept of structural conflict: it stipulates that the resources in human society are finite in a strictly static sense, which means that the only way one group of people can become more prosperous is by reducing the prosperity of another group.
This thought originates in Marxist economic theory, although it has been modified over the past 160 years to fit a broader range of artificial conflicts. Feminism stipulates that the sexual relations between men and women are not about consent and a mutual experience, but about one class—that would be men—exploiting another class, namely women. This exploitation exists axiomatically, and all men apparently participate in it whether they know that they do, or not.
By the same token, racial ‘theory’ assumes that whites exploit blacks, regardless of whether they do so or not.
No socialist theoretician, be it Marxist, feminist, or racialist, has ever been able to explain how he or she can know that exploitation exists if those who are said to produce exploitation are not aware that they do. Since it is supposedly subconscious, by definition there can be no epistemological revelation process to establish its existence.
This nature of socialism, even in the diluted American form where it is all about pinning group against group in societal settings, helps us understand why the Left so lividly reacts to the Supreme Court when it strikes down the instruments that they use to fight their phantoms of discrimination. To them, the axioms of their worldview hold a higher status than the U.S. Constitution, which explains why Democrats from time to time float the idea of adding several more seats to the Supreme Court so they can fill them with judges they deem to be ‘leftist’ enough.
In the eyes of the left, the U.S. Constitution is a conservative ideological document. They often add other labels, including ‘racist.’ This is, of course, entirely without merit: the Constitution is indeed a neutral instrument insofar as discrimination is concerned. It was affirmed as such after slavery ended in 1865 and the 14th Amendment was passed three years later.
Constitutional limits, socialism and student loans
After these two blows to socialist value engineering, you would think the Supreme Court would take a break. They did not:
Back in 2020 when he was running for president, Joe Biden promised to use taxpayers’ money to help college graduates with their student loans. Last year, he announced a plan to reduce or eliminate student debt for any individual making less than $125,000, or $250,000 for a household.
In its analysis, the Congressional Research Service noted that this program is without precedent. The Supreme Court agreed, and added that the whole idea is unconstitutional. The statute that the Biden administration has referred to, known by its acronym as the HEROES Act, does not allow them the power to modify laws to the extent they tried to do:
than the one Congress created when they passed the law.
In the eyes of the Left, here the Supreme Court committed two ideological offenses. First, they struck down an entitlement program that was supposed to provide cash benefits (albeit in a roundabout fashion through debt forgiveness) to a specific demographic that the Left has deemed ‘in need’ or ‘entitled.’ Economic redistribution is the essence of socialism, and any opposition to such practices is an affront to the ideology itself.
In the Soviet Union, you were classified as a counter-revolutionary—an enemy of the communist revolution—if you in any way opposed economic redistribution. Democrats in America are nowhere near that extreme, but ideologically they are on the same scale; communism is merely the totalitarian end station of their ideology. However, since economic redistribution is axiomatically good from a socialist viewpoint, that axiom stands above the Constitution and leads the Left to conclude that the Supreme Court is their ideological enemy.
The second reason why the Left considers the rejection of the student-debt forgiveness program to be an ideological sin is that it criticizes the president for overstepping the limits of his constitutional powers. The Left, whether in America or elsewhere, does not believe in the separation of government powers as the U.S. Constitution stipulates it. They see it as an instrument for limiting the powers of government.
You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to see that this is exactly the point with the separation of powers. However, the Left goes one step further than simply demanding unlimited government: they oppose the philosophical principle of limited government because it puts the citizen above government. The Constitution enumerates government powers, especially those of the federal government, and in doing so prohibits the rule by simple majority.
Wherever simple majoritarianism cannot work, socialism cannot expand unhindered. Therefore, in the view of America’s Left, any reminder from the Supreme Court of limits to the powers of the elected branches of government is a reminder that socialism is having a hard time conquering America.
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