President Joe Biden slammed the U.S. Supreme Court for its decision striking down racial preferences in college admissions on Thursday, declaring in the White House: “This is not a normal court.”
Biden scheduled a press event to react to the decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, in which a group representing Asian-American students sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina over their affirmative action programs. The court struck down racial preferences in college admissions that could not meet the “strict scrutiny” standards of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
Biden slammed the decision, saying that it interfered with colleges’ discretion over how best to achieve diversity within their student bodies — presuming that “diversity,” not excellence, is the purpose of college admissions.
He proposed an alternative standard for admission, an “adversity” standard that would examine an applicant’s socioeconomic circumstances and the difficulties they had to overcome to qualify for college. All applicants, he said, that met the academic standards for admission should then be measured by the “adversity” they had experienced. He did not explain how “adversity” might be an unconstitutional proxy for racial criteria.
Biden pounded the lectern and vowed to continue fighting for what he described as America’s core values.
As he finished his remarks and began to leave the lectern, a journalist asked whether the current Supreme Court was a “rogue” court. Biden said: “This is not a normal court.” He did not respond to a follow-up question from the same journalist asking about the idea of imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices.
Update: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre later told reporters aboard Air Force One to New York that the Department of Justice would join the Department of Education in advising colleges about lawful ways to advance diversity in admissions. She said that the White House would also host a summit on the issue. Reporters continued to press Jean-Pierre on whether the President would back changes to the Supreme Court.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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