The Supreme Court on Thursday outlawed the consideration of race as a factor in college admissions, ending America's "long and failed experiment with racial quotas and government-sanctioned racial discrimination," said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Cruz was one of nine Texas Republicans who signed on to a brief filed in May 2022 that challenged Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 landmark ruling that upheld the ability of colleges to narrowly tailor race-conscious admission and diversify the student population for educational benefits.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority overturned admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation's oldest private and public colleges, respectively.
Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have "concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice."
Cruz said in a statement: "Today, the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment rights of Asian-Americans and ruled that Harvard and the University of North Carolina's explicit and egregious policies of racially discriminating against Asian-Americans and other students are unconstitutional.
"Both Harvard and UNC have had long and ugly traditions of discrimination — Harvard with its anti-Jewish quotas in the 20th century and UNC with racial segregation — that made it impossible for a prospective student to be judged on his or her own merit, rather than their skin color or religious background. These universities eventually ended these forms of overt discrimination, instead substituting them for a different, more subtle form of discrimination in Affirmative Action."
The Supreme Court's vote was 6-3 in the North Carolina case and 6-2 in the Harvard case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sat out the Harvard case because she had been a member of an advisory governing board there.
The affirmative action cases were brought by conservative activist Edward Blum, who also was behind an earlier affirmative action challenge against the University of Texas as well as the case that led the court in 2013 to end use of a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act.
Blum formed Students for Fair Admissions, which filed the lawsuits against both schools in 2014.
The decisions, Cruz said, "restored some measure of objectivity and fairness to the college admissions process. This is a great day for all Americans."
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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