Dem
51
GOP
49
"Wait a minute," you might be saying. "Didn't the Supreme Court just address Affirmative Action, once and for all?" Ha! Such naiveté! The current version of the Court rarely has the final word on anything. Maybe that is because their moral authority has been sorely compromised by years of shenanigans and dubious decisions. Maybe it is because of the polarization of American politics, and the sense of partisans on both sides that every battle is just one chapter in a much larger war. Maybe it's both.
Whatever the case may be, the ink wasn't even dry on Chief Justice John Roberts' majority decision when new lawsuits started flying. A consortium of activist groups, making the very reasonable observation that legacy admissions are just Affirmative Action under a different name, and (largely) for a different race, has filed suit demanding that colleges be denied the ability to give special consideration to the children and grandchildren of alumni. The Harvards and Yales of the world are sure to fight that one tooth and nail; even with their billion-dollar endowments, they do not want to interfere with one of their very best sources of donations (i.e., alumni greasing the skids for their kids).
On the other side of the issue, meanwhile, is Stephen Miller, who undoubtedly got into Duke entirely on his own merits, and who surely did not benefit in any way from having wealthy parents educated at elite institutions of higher learning. Miller now leads a right-wing PAC called America First Legal, and he and his organization just sent letters to the deans of 200 different law schools warning that if they try to subvert the SCOTUS ruling striking down Affirmative Action, there will be lawsuits. In the past, it would have been difficult for a guy who got his diploma in 2007 to demonstrate he's being harmed by admission decisions being made in 2023 and beyond, and thus to establish standing. But these days, as Miller well knows, standing is no barrier to a right-wing-grievance lawsuit.
Miller isn't the only right-winger who is trying to press the advantage, as it were. Congressional Republicans are outraged that the service academies are still allowed to use Affirmative Action, and they want to put a stop to it. So, they are going to try to put a provision banning the practice in the next must-pass Department of Defense appropriations bill (which will come up later this year). People much more knowledgeable than we are on this subject wrote in to explain why it's important for the service academies to continue using preferential admissions (executive summary: to keep the officer corps looking something like the enlisted soldiers, which is important for cohesion and morale). For the Republicans in Congress to ignore this, in hopes of scoring brownie points with the base, certainly does nothing to dispel the impression being created by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) that the folks in uniform are not the GOP's highest priority, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
Moving along, since SCOTUS made its decision, there have also been numerous polls and analyses indicating that Americans are not broadly outraged by the Affirmative Action ruling (or by the others), and that this term's rulings are not likely to affect voter behavior the way that Dobbs did last term.
That is fair enough, as far as it goes. Dobbs was a generational decision, and few rulings in Supreme Court history were as monumental as that one. However, don't forget that the vast majority of people who were "motivated" by Dobbs were already going to cast their votes in the way they ultimately cast them. That is to say, thrilled right-wingers went to the polls and voted for Republicans and furious left-wingers went to the polls and voted for Democrats.
What really matters, though, in terms of political swings, were the people who crossed over to the other party because of Dobbs (mostly moderate women who shifted in the Democrats' direction), and the people who got themselves to the polls and who otherwise would not have voted (mostly younger people). Because folks like this are considerably rarer than the people who will stick with their usual voting pattern, it's nearly impossible for pollsters (with their small sample sizes) to predict their impact. Recall that, even heading into the 2022 midterms, we were very uncertain as to exactly how Dobbs would influence the results. It wasn't until the votes were counted that the story became clear.
We note all of this because while the Supremes' decisions about Affirmative Action, student loans, etc. are not likely to affect the ballots of most voters, they could (and will) affect the ballots of some significant minority. One could envision a world where, for example, the reaction to last week's decisions adds .25% to the Republicans' vote tallies and .75% to the Democrats. A net swing of .50% due to SCOTUS' rulings isn't a lot, and it isn't going to show up in polls very clearly if at all, but it is certainly enough to swing some close elections. (Z)