Conservatives are on a roll in their quest to remake America through the courts

Conservatives – despite their limited federal elected power – racked up another huge win in the great political battle of the early 21st century.

The Supreme Court’s gutting of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday toppled another pillar of America’s liberal social infrastructure. Democrats have had their successes over the last 20 years – including earlier this month with decisions ordering the redraw of Alabama’s congressional map and rejecting a Trump-backed election law theory – but it often seems as though conservatives have the momentum.

Republicans only control one chamber of Congress, and narrowly so, while Democrats hold the White House and the Senate. And yet Thursday’s ruling further weakened a core principle of Democratic politics that unites the party’s presidents dating to Franklin Roosevelt – that the government should use its power to ease social injustices and lift up the disadvantaged. Civil rights advocates saw the decision as re-erecting barriers based on race that their forbears fought for decades to remove and a step back into tortured history.

Originalist conservatives, however – who argue that the text of the Constitution makes no consideration for prevailing social or racial realities – say justices struck a blow for the core founding principle that everyone is created equal.

The decision saying colleges can no longer take race into account as a specific basis for admissions – programs that advocates said had helped elevate underrepresented Black and Latino students in higher education – sent shockwaves across the country.

It was a generational decision comparable to another precedent-busting move a year ago, when the court’s conservative majority took away the constitutional right to an abortion by throwing out the half-century-old, society-molding decision of Roe v. Wade.

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