admissions. it is a complete misnomer to suggest this is about color brined blind when in fact it is about being blind to history. tonight, the ruling, the powerful descent, and how clarence thomas finally won his long battle against affirmative action. n hi long did you give your degree back again? yale does not recognize me. [laughter] as the special counsel ramps up on the january 6th investigation that is what jack smith is going in for, absolutely, this is it, this is the big show. what we are learning today about new subpoenas in the documents case. i get everything right and they indicted me. when all in starts right now. good evening from new york. i m chris hayes. today in a landmark ruling that overturns decades of precedents, sweeping aside generations of arguments about racial justice and equality, the supreme court in a 6 to 3 decision, six conservatives to three liberals, effectively got rid of the use of race in college admissions a
interesting. first of all, what s your reaction to the court s decision today? devastation, frustration, another gut punch to progress. it just seems throughout my life, throughout history, being a black in america, you are under attack for being black in america. and the decision today we can be a capacity to use the 14th amendment, in a decision, is insane! like the 14th amendment is designed to protect and enfranchise african americans who now use it to reverse our enfranchisement to how education. it is just preposterous and disgusting, obviously. let me ask you this there s different critiques and people have all sorts of views on affirmative action, and i think there s interesting complicated nuances to some discussions. for instance, one thing say, people on the left, all those fancy college stuff is kind of a little bit of a right hearing. it s a small group of people. there s only 70 colleges in all of america that admit less than
when the court says that it is looking at texts from the 13th, 14th amendment, it is looking at it with a very narrow view. and she s called them out, including by exposing, which we all know, that the reconstruction amendments were a direct response to american slavery and dismantling that system, which was a race based system in the united states that discriminated against enslaved black people. this is the thing that i found so thrilling, honestly, about ketanji brown jackson s time in the court so far, which is the project of a kind of reconstruction era, originalism, around those foundational amendments, 13th, 14th, 15th amendments, where she says, hey, you want to talk about the founders? you want to talk about the amendments? let s talk about the reconstruction amendments, who wrote them, and why, and what they were trying to do. and the notion that those amendments were colour-blind, it is farcical on its face. jamal, you wrote this today, and i thought it was really insightf
brilliant human beings i ever met. i had a chance to know. in her dissent, i thought it was scathing and perfect. you know, i was not surprised because clarence thomas has been on a mission to dismantle every institutional attempt to help an aide, not just black people, but any people who have been disadvantaged in this society since he s gotten on the court. he, like samuel alito, appears to operate from a kind of rage, a cold rage, against the entire 20th century, the second half of the 20th century, which they found find to be an affront to their own self image, and to their image of america, as this country that is snowball, and has always been nobel, and whose slave holding founders were noble, and really hated slavery, and we re just so in pain from the fact that they had to own all these people,
race based consideration, diversity based consideration, and some elusive concept of true merit, abstracted from that, mutually exclusive, the foundation on which today s supreme court decision was bill. it was that that helped secure thomas legal legacy. he was eventually appointed to the d.c. court of appeals by president george h. w. bush. just two years later, bush nominated him to the supreme court, to replace that retiring justice thurgood marshall, at that point, the only black person to ever sit on the nation s highest courts. if the president is the best qualified person for the job, and denied that he selected thomas to replace the retiring thurgood marshall because he s black. the fact that he is a minority, so much better. that s not a factor, and i would strongly resent any charge that might be forthcoming on quotas when it relates to appointing the best men in the court. again, same thing here thomas was both qualified for