Court lets school diversity move stand
Trump lawyers, GOP reps also see appeals rejected
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court disappointed three sets of petitioners Tuesday: a group of Virginia parents, Sidney Powell and three Republican U.S. House members.
In a significant move, the high court declined to review a controversial admissions policy meant to increase diversity at one of the nation’s most prestigious public high schools.
By declining the appeal, the Supreme Court leaves in place the appeals court ruling that upheld the policy. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas disagreed, siding with plaintiffs who said the policy violated the Constitution.
The call on the Virginia case came months after the Supreme Court ended the use of affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Other universities, schools and businesses have been reviewing diversity policies to ensure they can withstand legal scrutiny.
The Supreme Court also let stand sanctions against a group of lawyers who challenged President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Michigan, rejecting appeals from Powell, Lin Wood and five other lawyers allied with former President Donald Trump. It did not comment on that rejection.
Finally, again without comment, the court declined an appeal from Reps. Thomas Massie, Ralph Norman and Marjorie Taylor Greene in their suit against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for docking their pay over mask mandates.
Against the backdrop of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Virginia’s Fairfax County School Board changed its admissions policy at a magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. It is often ranked as one of the best high schools in the nation, but Black and Hispanic students made up only a small portion of the student body.
The new policy required the school to accept 1.5% of the eighth-grade class at each of the district’s middle schools. Because some of the district’s middle schools are made up predominately of minority students, guaranteeing admission to a portion of the graduating class increased diversity at Jefferson.
The school board said the policy was race-neutral because it set no racial targets and the race of applicants was not known to admissions officials. In other words, the policy is based on geography, not race.
Jefferson’s current freshman class, which was admitted under the new policy, has a significantly different racial makeup. Black students increased from 1% of the student body to 7%, according to court records. Hispanic representation increased from 3% to 11%. Asian American representation decreased from 73% to 54%.
A group of parents asserted that the policy had the effect of increasing the number of Black students but “had a substantial adverse impact on Asian American students,” violating the 14th Amendment.
U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton agreed, and ruled that impermissible “racial balancing” was at the core of the new admissions policy.
But a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision. The appeals court said it was “satisfied that the board’s adoption of the challenged admissions policy fully comports with the Fourteenth Amendment’s demand of equal protection under the law.” That policy, the court ruled, “visits no racially disparate impact on Asian American students.”
In Michigan, Powell, Wood and several other lawyers spearheaded a legal effort to award the battleground state’s Electoral College votes to Trump despite his loss. The district judge called their suit a “historic and profound abuse of the judicial process” and imposed financial and professional sanctions.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld most of those sanctions. The appeals court said many of the lawyers’ allegations of fraud were refuted by their own evidence. Others relied on clearly unreliable expert reports or were “simply baseless.”
In their appeal, the lawyers argued the sanctions would “chill legitimate election challenges.” They also charged Democrats with trying to “marginalize political opponents and destroy their counsel.”
Wood, who has argued he did not work on the lawsuit and was not included in all the sanctions, filed a separate appeal.
Lawyers for the city of Detroit said the suit was part of a broader effort to delegitimize the election results and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
“Any attorney with the slightest understanding of Michigan election law and procedures had to know that these claims were destined for dismissal,” the city’s lawyers told the Supreme Court. “There is no First Amendment right to file frivolous litigation.”
The lawyers owe almost $133,000 to Detroit and were ordered to pay more than $19,000 in legal fees to the state.
Greene, Massie and Norman had their pay docked $500 for flouting a mask mandate on the floor of the House of Representatives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
They argued that unless the Supreme Court sided with them, lawmakers could continue to be retaliated against for acting “in accordance with the desires of their district rather than the desires of the Speaker of the House.”
But lower courts said Pelosi could not be sued because courts don’t have jurisdiction over Congress’ internal rules.