Last Call For Blacked Out In College

The Nation's Elie Mystal doesn't mince words, stating plainly that colleges and universities are going to have to all but eliminate Black students from admissions, lest they be sued out of existence by white students accusing them of back-door, unconstitutional affirmative action.

 

The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case banning race consciousness in college admissions, is facially unenforceable. That’s an underreported aspect of Chief Justice John Roberts’s gobbledygook ruling, mainly because most of the white people doing the reporting have adopted the gospel of “race-neutral” and “color blindness” without giving those concepts a whole lot of critical thought. But humans cannot retroactively make themselves unaware of race. People cannot un-conscious themselves, and ordering them to not think about race just ensures that they will. (In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called it a “classic pink-elephant paradox.”) The court expects college admissions officers to know about the race of their applicants, and not care, but there’s really not going to be any way to tell if colleges are disregarding the precise bit of information the court wants them to.

As a result, the real upshot of the affirmative action ruling is this: Colleges and universities must now punish Black applicants by decreasing the enrollment of Black students, by any means necessary. That’s because the only way universities can show compliance with Roberts’s new rules is to show that they’ve decreased the number of Black kids they let into school. Anything less than that will likely trigger litigation from the white supremacists who have already promised to hunt down schools that admit too many Black people, as determined by their own white-makes-right accounting system.

This intended revival of segregationist educational opportunities flows directly from the sheer hubris of Roberts’s attempt to legislate how admissions officers think, along with his open threats to universities that do not comply with his version of thought-policing. In his decision, Roberts expects that colleges and universities will be responsible for self-enforcing his ruling, but he also warns them that additional litigation will be coming their way if they try a work-around to achieve racial diversity in their classes. Again, the white media has made a big deal about the part of Roberts’s ruling where he says that colleges can still consider how race has affected an applicant (for instance, as described in a college essay), but they’ve ignored the last lines of his ruling where he specifically threatens schools that use those very essays to achieve racial diversity.

Roberts writes:

But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today…. “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.”… A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.

I’s sho hopes Massa Roberts thinks I is a good Negro wit the determination to keeps learnin’ my letters at the fancy school.

Roberts’s closing flourish here is trash on many levels. First of all, I don’t recall anyone appointing him as the chief judge for how Black people are supposed to overcome racial discrimination. Second, I’d argue that college admissions officers should pay special attention to applicants who didn’t fully overcome the hurdles white people put in their way, but might do so in the future. And third, Roberts’s paean to model minorities is still a white man’s wishes disguised as a legal remedy: How in the hell will Roberts know if some essay reader saw “courage and determination” in an applicant? How can Roberts possibly know what constitutes a unique contribution to a university, and how can Roberts place himself in a position to second-guess what the admissions officers on the ground think are worthwhile contributions?

Most important of all, how can Roberts, or anybody else, know if universities are following his rules? Roberts doesn’t tell us outright, but he sure drops a powerful hint. In his decision, he effectively accuses Harvard of using a backdoor quota system to maintain a consistent rate of Black students. He writes: “For the admitted classes [at Harvard] of 2009 to 2018, black students represented a tight band of 10.0%-11.7% of the admitted pool.” He adds in a footnote: “Harvard must use precise racial preferences year in and year out to maintain the unyielding demographic composition of its class.”

Even if you think Roberts is right (and I’ll point out that Roberts offered no evidence that Harvard “must” be using precise racial preferences to achieve this kind of diversity, nor did the trial court, whose presentation of facts was what Roberts was supposed to be bound by, instead of his own conglomeration of fact-free inferences), how will a school like Harvard prove, to Roberts’s satisfaction, that it is not using racial preferences in the future?

The answer: Only a decrease in Black enrollment is likely to satisfy Roberts. If Harvard maintains its class diversity, Roberts will accuse it of using racial preferences. If Harvard increases Black enrollment, Roberts will accuse it of using newly unconstitutional race-consciousness to promote Black applicants—beyond historical levels, he’ll likely say. Only a decrease in Black enrollment will satisfy Roberts’s unworkable standard of ignoring race. It doesn’t actually matter how Harvard goes about putting together its class: If this doesn’t produce Roberts’s desired outcome of decreasing Black enrollment, Roberts will accuse it of thinking about race.

Of course, Roberts doesn’t say by how much universities will have to decrease their Black enrollment to satisfy his new legal requirements. If he had, white media might actually have reported on this aspect of his ruling. Instead, Roberts can almost certainly rely on the efforts of outsourced goons to keep an eye on universities and sue them if too many Black kids get in. One goon squad leader in particular, Trump political adviser Stephen Miller, has already volunteered to do this work, and has basically said the quiet part aloud.

 

Every Black student at a non-HBCU is going to have to "prove" they didn't get in from affirmative action, just like we've been doing for decades now. The difference with the end of race in college admissions is now non-Black students can sue.

 

Expect a sharp drop in college admissions for Black students as a result.

 

Which is the point.

 

Oh, and wait until the Roberts Court gets rid of the EEOC. If you're Black and employed in anything more than an entry-level minimum-wage job, well, that's affirmative action, and you need to be fired as a result.

 

Stay tuned.

Supremely Corrupt Cads, Crooks, and Creeps, Con't

You have got to be friggin' kidding me.

 

Several lawyers who have had business before the supreme court, including one who successfully argued to end race-conscious admissions at universities, paid money to a top aide to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the aide’s Venmo transactions. The payments appear to have been made in connection to Thomas’s 2019 Christmas party.

The payments to Rajan Vasisht, who served as Thomas’s aide from July 2019 to July 2021, seem to underscore the close ties between Thomas, who is embroiled in ethics scandals following a series of revelations about his relationship with a wealthy billionaire donor, and certain senior Washington lawyers who argue cases and have other business in front of the justice.

Vasisht’s Venmo account – which was public prior to requesting comment for this article and is no longer – show that he received seven payments in November and December 2019 from lawyers who previously served as Thomas legal clerks. The amount of the payments is not disclosed, but the purpose of each payment is listed as either “Christmas party”, “Thomas Christmas Party”, “CT Christmas Party” or “CT Xmas party”, in an apparent reference to the justice’s initials.

However, it remains unclear what the funds were for.

The lawyers who made the Venmo transactions were: Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy who recently successfully argued that affirmative action violated the US constitution; Kate Todd, who served as White House deputy counsel under Donald Trump at the time of the payment and is now a managing party of Ellis George Cipollone’s law office; Elbert Lin, the former solicitor general of West Virginia who played a key role in a supreme court case that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; and Brian Schmalzbach, a partner at McGuire Woods who has argued multiple cases before the supreme court.

Other lawyers who made payments include Manuel Valle, a graduate of Hillsdale College and the University of Chicago Law School who clerked for Thomas last year and is currently working as a managing associate at Sidley, and Liam Hardy, who was working at the Department of Justice’s office of legal counsel at the time the payment was made and now serves as an appeals court judge for the armed forces.

Will Consovoy, who died earlier this year, also made a payment. Consovoy clerked for Thomas during the 2008-09 term and was considered a rising star in conservative legal circles. After his death, the New York Times reported that Consovoy had come away from his time working for Thomas “with the conviction that the court was poised to tilt further to the right – and that constitutional rulings that had once been considered out of reach by conservatives, on issues like voting rights, abortion and affirmative action, would suddenly be within grasp”.

None of the lawyers who made payments responded to emailed questions from the Guardian.

According to his résumé, Vasisht’s duties included assisting the justice with the administrative functioning of his chambers, including personal correspondence and his personal and office schedule.

 

I mean Venmo is convenient and all.

 

It also leaves a transaction record for this exact reason.

 

Don't do crimes with Venmo, kids.

Their Gal Friday

TPM's Josh Marshall recounts the long, crazy ride of Gal Luft, the House GOP's supposed star mystery witness in the Biden "bribery scandal", who apparently is also a wanted fugitive by the Justice Department.  Republicans are howling at the indictment, but the problem is Luft was indicted last year, well before his spurious accusations.

“The timing is always coincidental according to the Democrats and the Department of Justice,” Comer told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday evening. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who said that Luft could be a key witness, said on Sunday that he “does not trust the Department of Justice.”

The facts, as laid out in and around the indictment, tell a far more familiar story of D.C. grubbiness.

Per the docket, unsealed on Tuesday, the indictment came down on Nov. 1, 2022. That’s eight months before the DOJ made it public, and three months before Luft himself first loudly alleged that he was the victim of a Biden political persecution.

And per the indictment, Luft’s assertion that he’s been charged with “thought crimes” appears far-fetched.

He faces eight separate counts, including two charges of making false statements to federal officials, one for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and five counts relating to separate schemes which allegedly involved Luft trying to trade in sanctioned Iranian oil and broker deals for a Chinese firm to supply, among other things, “strike UAVs” to Kenya and anti-tank missile launchers to Libya.

The foreign agent scheme, prosecutors say, had less to do with the Bidens than it did with the Trump administration’s entrance to power in 2016.

Luft, while co-director for a Maryland energy security think tank, allegedly agreed in 2015 to receive annual payments of $350,000 from CEFC, the Chinese energy firm that would go on to ink contracts with Hunter Biden. The payments were made, prosecutors say, as part of an agreement with Luft to advance China’s interests in the U.S.

Luft was, the indictment alleges, to do three things in exchange for the payments: arrange an “international meeting” in a major U.S. city on “energy security issues,” secure CEFC’s chair an honorary position at a separate energy group that Luft advised, and help make a member of that energy group a “senior advisor” to CEFC.

The arrangement allegedly continued through the 2016 election, when Luft began to develop a relationship with a person whose description in the indictment matches that of former CIA Director James Woolsey.

At one point, prosecutors cite a quote from a December 2016 conference in D.C. about China’s Belt and Road project, in which Woolsey allegedly said that “We want to joyfully participate with China in international trade operations and economic growth.” The same quote appears attributed to Woolsey in a China Daily article about the meeting.

When Woolsey was named in a September 2016 article as a Trump campaign adviser on national security policies, Luft allegedly sent a celebratory email to an unnamed associate.

Luft, prosecutors say, tried to use his relationship with Woolsey — and the prospect that Woolsey might be asked to take a top position in the Trump administration — as part of his agreement to help China. That included an alleged plan for Luft’s think tank to make a monthly payment of $6,000 to Woolsey from November 2016 to October 2017, in exchange for which Woolsey would allegedly publish pro-China articles. In one case alleged by prosecutors, Luft purportedly edited an introductory email that Woolsey planned to send to another Trump adviser post-election.

 

Knowing that he was indicted, Luft came up with a scheme to not only skip town, but to accuse President Biden of "bribery" and to contact House Republicans as a wanted fugitive. Doesn't exactly seem like the "star witness" that Jim Comer promised, does he? 

No, all this seems like nonsense to try to cover up the fact that Luft was a spy for China during the Trump regime, and that he faces a long stint in prison if convicted as a result. Republicans are going to call him as a witness anyway, it seems.

Good luck with that, I guess.