Today's SCOTUS Fuckup

Clarence Thomas finally gets a little relief for his bruised ego self-loathing.

The guy got some of his schooling under Affirmative Action. I get the feeling he's always been eager to pull the ladder up behind him because he's spent 35 or 40 years listening to "conservatives" as they told him, almost straight up, that he didn't deserve anything he got because he stole the place that rightfully belonged to some white kid and blah blah blah.

Thomas has been gunning for Affirmative Action since before his appointment so this one may not look like some kind of outlier - unless...

Let's take Paranoid Mike's little tour and see how we might get to these odd-seeming decisions.

First: 

All of these "conservative" justices were chosen for nomination specifically to address particular pieces of the Project Plutocracy agenda. They've all been groomed and placed on the court in order to have a desired effect on whatever items their handlers deem appropriate at any given time.

Second:

Nobody is outright buying decisions from this court. That's totally illegal, and even though these dark-money yacht-buying assholes don't really care about following the law, they don't have to do it that way.

They pick a justice they're pretty sure is sympathetic to their side of the issue-du-jour, and they treat that justice to a really spiffy time at an exotic vacation spot, or they arrange a nice little junket to speak to a group of 'concerned citizens', having arranged for the justice to receive a right handsome honorarium from a grateful bunch of just regular hard-working Americans.

And they do all of that well before they start any legal action. 

The point of the exercise is to make all the legal steps fit with an overall strategy - combining political campaign funding, Voter Education SuperPACs, advertising and other media manipulation - together with some client head-hunting in order to get the right people with the right standing, in front of the right judges in the right lower courts, making the right arguments based on whatever loophole, gray area, or cockamamie "theory" they can come up with.

As the case works its way through the system, they keep refining the terms and testing the arguments on focus groups and OpEd pages and white papers and speeches and and and.

I'm betting it's way more gnarly and complicated than the picture I have in my cluttered little brain, but no matter how twisty-turny it gets, or how carefully it's set up, there can be surprises - it doesn't always work.

But this is Political Capitalism, and the players are going to do everything possible to be sure they know the outcome before the voting even starts.

We're told all our lives that we really don't want to see how they make the sausage - and we've been able to convince ourselves the ugliness of it was pretty well concentrated in the Legislative Branch. And maybe they've been mostly right. But this is definitely not the case now - not anymore.

Affirmative Action

Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.

The 6-3 ruling could drastically alter college admissions policies across the country. Criticizing the decision, President Biden said this was “not a normal court” and directed the Education Department “to analyze what practices can build a more inclusive and diverse” student body.

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Activists celebrate the affirmative action opinion at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times