Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) blasted the Supreme Court’s decision to exempt military academies from its ruling on affirmative action as “outright grotesque.”
“This decision is deeply upsetting but outright grotesque for exempting military academies. The court is saying diversity shouldn’t matter, EXCEPT when deciding who can fight and die for our country—reinforcing the notion that these communities can sacrifice for America but not be full participants in every other way,” Crow, a former Army Ranger, wrote on Twitter.
“Justice Jackson is right: ‘deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,’” he added.
In dual rulings Thursday, the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices invalidated admissions practices from Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) by ruling they did not comply with the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, saying that both Harvard and UNC “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”
In a footnote, Roberts wrote that military academies are exempted from the court’s opinion.
“No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present,” the footnote states.
More coverage of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling
- Supreme Court upends affirmative action in college admissions
- READ: Supreme Court’s affirmative action majority opinion
- Sotomayor’s biting dissent: Ruling rolls back ‘decades of precedent and momentous progress’
- Obama says affirmative action ‘allowed generations of students’ to ‘prove we belonged’
- Trump praises SCOTUS ruling on affirmative action: ‘This is a great day for America’
Justice Sonia Sotomayor ripped the majority opinion’s exemption for military academies in a dissenting opinion, questioning how the military’s interests at academies are different from those at civilian universities.
She also pointed out that like military academies, religious universities were not a party in the case and questioned why those universities were not exempt, like military academies were.
“To the extent the Court suggests national security interests are ‘distinct,’ those interests cannot explain the Court’s narrow exemption, as national security interests are also implicated at civilian universities,” Sotomayor wrote.
“The Court’s carveout only highlights the arbitrariness of its decision and further proves that the Fourteenth Amendment does not categorically prohibit the use of race in college admissions,” she added.