The U.S. Supreme Court always ends its annual term with several big decisions, and it did so again this year.
Last week, in the closing days of its term, a conservative majority of the justices tossed out the use of affirmative action in considering college applications. It upheld the rights of business operators who wish to decline customers on religious grounds. And it said President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan was an unconstitutional use of executive branch authority.
There has been plenty of wailing about those rulings, especially on affirmative action and debt forgiveness. The complaints are overwrought.
Universities are not going to suddenly become lily-white institutions. The people who run them will figure out ways to enroll deserving minorities without race being a factor. Reserving space for students from families of modest incomes would be a good place to start.
As for debt forgiveness, the president’s idea clearly was a stretch of existing law that was too much to ignore. Without being heartless, too many of the former students obviously were allowed to sign up to borrow too much money. That is their mistake as much as it was the lender, and if it takes a second job to repay it, so be it.
These rulings, however, should not overshadow other notable developments during the term that ended. It is certainly safe to say that while the court has a majority of conservative justices, it did not accept every single conservative argument. Two that come to mind involve elections.
One was a case in which the court ruled 5-4 that the Alabama Legislature drew its seven congressional districts that illegally diluted the political power of the minorities, creating only one with a majority-Black population even though 25% of the state’s residents are Black.
The other ruling was in a North Carolina case in which conservatives contended that the U.S. Constitution gave state legislatures almost unlimited power to decide federal election rules and draw congressional district maps without interference from state courts.
Three conservative justices, presumably recalling John Marshall’s famous Marbury vs. Madison ruling in 1803, when he wrote, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” were among the six that said the courts have a role to play in elections and redistricting.
All these are interesting rulings. Unfortunately, the most noteworthy developments during this year’s Supreme Court term involved questionable judgment by two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
The two justices, Thomas in particular, accepted gifts from politically active friends without listing them on their annual financial disclosure reports. Thomas said he was told he didn’t have to list the gifts of free travel, only to be further embarrassed with disclosures that he had made property transactions with the same person. He did not report those, either.
Alito said he has no conflict of interest with the hedge fund manager who gave him a free flight to Alaska 15 years ago — and who then had 10 cases before the Supreme Court.
The failure to ask one simple thing — “How would this look if it becomes public?” — was the most interesting development at the Supreme Court this year. The justices are smart people whose job is, as John Marshall put it 220 years ago, to decide what the law is. Yet two of them willfully decided not to report personal activities that could be reasonably questioned.
If the court has a public-relations problem, as some say, that is the reason. Not its rulings.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
