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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   35010 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?

In practice, I think things like party affiliation are the driving factors behind the correlation. But I also think there's a rather simple "underlying principle" that ties both decisions together.

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you find an intelligent person who's fluent in English but totally ignorant of American history and law. You hand this person a copy of the US Constitution and have him read it carefully. Then you ask him to answer two questions based on his understanding of the plain text of the document:

  1. Does the Constitution allow the government to treat people differently based on their race?

  2. Does the Constitution allow the president to spend money without congress's approval?

The answer to both questions is clearly "no" if you're just reading the text of the document without bringing any external knowledge or biases to bear. In order to answer anything other than "no" to both questions, you either need to come up with complicated interpretive arguments or you need to just not care about the text of the Constitution.

So I think a rather simple underlying principle unifying both decisions is: "the plain text of the Constitution is binding."

So you do think it was obvious in the UNC case?

I am much more sympathetic to Gorsuch’s statutory argument though I would get rid of the statute he relied upon.

And federally funded universities under Title VI.

Title VI applies.

The equal protection clause is taken to apply because it is (probably wrongly) held that a portion of the Title VI is a summary of the equal protection clause, and universities must meet that standard if they want federal funds.

Here's the relevant bit of Title VI:

No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

I was responding to where you said "a purely textualist argument," without qualifying it to be referring only to the constitution. I should have made it clearer that you were correct if we were referring strictly to the constitution, not to a strictly textualist interpretation of the law in general. You're right that I didn't read the thread carefully enough, and the context should have made what you were saying clear.

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