Thread by @mtracey

Wait, is this a high school history paper the kid wrote the night before, or a Supreme Court dissent

John Marshall Harlan, 1896: lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson castigates Court for endorsing "subjugation" and "domination" of Blacks by whites. "Our Constitution is color-blind," Marshall said

Ketanji Brown Jackson, 2023: a color-blind Constitution endorses racial injustice

Thurgood Marshall's 1978 opinion in University of California v. Bakke is such a better reasoned, argued, and written case for the constitutional viability of affirmative action than whatever that thing was that Ketanji Brown Jackson put out yesterday in Supreme Court letterhead

I personally find Marshall's case persuasive as to the constitutionality of affirmative action. Which is a separate question to whether affirmative action is desirable or effective at any given time, whether 1978 or 2023. Jackson barely grapples with any of these considerations

In his last televised interview, Lyndon Johnson recounted particular "pride" at being able to appoint the first Black justice to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, "on the basis of merit." The interview was recorded January 12, 1973 -- Johnson died ten days later

It's legitimately shocking that Jackson's argument is so indiscernible, maybe even to herself, that she ends up resorting to a reprimand of the Court for "hampering" the judgment of *college administrators" -- probably the group with the absolute worst judgment in all of America