Today, in two separate cases, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that university admission programs that use affirmative action and other race-based admission procedures are unconstitutional. Disguising racial discrimination under the name of affirmative action is a blatant violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and undermines the Equal Protection Clause of our Constitution. By a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court agreed. 

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion. “Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Today’s decision, in combination with Dobbs, serve as a triumphant return to restoring our tattered Constitution. President Trump deserves great credit for being the first Republican President in modern history to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who regularly uphold our Constitution. These Justices have risked their own and their family’s personal safety to restore Constitutional merit against radical Leftists who want to use the Court to advance their woke agendas.

While today’s decision is an important step, racial bias of all types must be eliminated from all institutions in our society, whether they go by the name of affirmative action or fall under the newest Leftist moniker of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI).  To do otherwise – no matter how well-intentioned -- simply fosters the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.’

As Justice Thomas wrote in his concurrence, “The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity. Racialism simply cannot be un- done by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race.”

Since our founding in 1964, the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC) has advanced the movement to protect human dignity, religious rights, and individual liberties. Affirmative action wrongfully reduces an individual to their skin color while ignoring the importance of character and merit. Through CPAC’s ‘gold standard’ Ratings of Congress and the States, we have continually scored unconstitutional racism under the guise of race-based preferences since the flawed Bakke decision. CPAC supports today’s decision and will continue our fight to ensure equal justice under the law for all Americans.