politicsnation. today from essence festival in new orleans. tonight s lead, justice not served. less than a week after the nation marked the first anniversary of roe s reversal, our conservative majority supreme court handed down a series of regressive decisions. collectively ruling against young and vulnerable people in a diversifying nation. on affirmative action, decades of transformative tools for underrepresented, specifically black kids seeking a higher education. the court left them to their own devices. on president biden s plan to apply a modest relief to suffering student borrowers, the court ruled that the administration had overstepped its bounds. and on lgbtq rights, the court insisted that the right to deny business on religious grounds can be protected as freedom of speech. president biden yesterday after days of responding to these judicial attacks on social progress, laid the blame for this week s decision at the feet of conservative lawmakers and the justice
corps, family status, location and geography, a wide range of different factors of which race was simply one. and so here, the court talked about these policies as though every minority student who had been admitted to these elite schools was admitted on the virtue of the race. but that was not the case. they were admitted on the basis of a lot of different factors, and now moving forward, race will not be able to be used as one of those factors, although the court did say that individuals could talk about the racial identity if they could connect it to some sort of personal identity characteristic like leadership and courage. and we ve already seen universities and colleges beginning to think about how they will solicit that kind of information going forward, from applicants. so in effect, we re saying that the applicants and those that were accepted had many things that they had to present, it wasn t just race. but now this court is saying
about equity. and it s from slavery to jim crow to the mass incarceration, but it s still to this very day the inequities that contribute to why we do have to empower race conscious policy that helps address the systemic issues that have plagued our country since its founding. all right, thank you for being with us. the chair of the congressional black congress, congressman steven horsford. joining me now is a new york university law professor melissa murray. professor, very busy week for the supreme court of our nation, and we need you to help us with some analysis of the major rulings. six conservative justices, all six, were appointed by republican presidents, voted to undo race based affirmative action in university admissions thursday. and i argue, that precedent can be used in other areas.
in a year, does that happen, and do we now face the threat of someone suing that, going to this court, and overturning it if they overturn affirmative action, which is why voting becomes important. it is absolutely why voting is important. why every election matters. reverend sharpton, i want to underscore this point around affirmative action. affirmative action still exist for the privilege. for those who have been under legacy programs. people who are third generation college students who get accepted because their parents were involved, or their big contributor to the university. but it struck it down for race. but yet and still, we do not fund schools properly in this country, we don t have certified teachers and every classroom. we have issues with the pipeline of teachers and administrators of that do not look like the students that they serve, and so this is what we talk about when we talk
my first question is who will be most directly affected by this ruling, and how? are the implications for this ruling beyond just universities, and for example, in the workplace. so, truly this ruling will be attempted to be used in other venues. we are already seeing conservatives lining up to extend the ruling to other venues. but it s really important to understand what was at stake here. the race based affirmative action policies that were dismantled here, the court talked about it as the race was an entirely determinative feature of the admissions decision. but that wasn t the case. based on earlier supreme court presidents like meter versus ballinger which was decided in 2003 and affirmed later in official versus the university of texas in 2016, made clear that universities and colleges could only use race in a very limited way. as part of a holistic calculus that considered a wide range of factors including grades, test