How a Fleeting Encounter With an Officer Changed Khalif Cooper’s Life - The New York Times

Paralyzed by a Police Bullet, He Describes a Life Forever Changed

“Why did you run from me?” an officer asked Khalif Cooper, then 28, immediately after the shooting in Paterson, N.J. “I was scared,” he answered.

July 5, 2023Updated 10:49 a.m. ET

“My whole life just changed,” said Khalif Cooper, 29.Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

The bullet, fired by a police officer who was sprinting into the 3 a.m. darkness, struck Khalif Cooper with improbable precision.

The projectile penetrated the young man’s lower back before ripping through organs and coming to rest near a vertebra that controls lower-body movement. By morning, Mr. Cooper had lost a kidney, half his colon and his ability to ever walk again.

“My whole life just changed,” Mr. Cooper, who is 29 and Black, said in his first interview since the shooting.

It happened on a warm Saturday last June in Paterson, N.J., and Mr. Cooper, the father of two young daughters, said he was running away from the sound of gunfire.

A police officer, Jerry Moravek, came racing down the sidewalk toward the same noise. Their paths crossed, footage from a police body camera shows, and Officer Moravek pivoted to begin chasing Mr. Cooper, convinced that he was holding a gun.

Months later, Officer Moravek would be charged with aggravated assault for his decision to fire his weapon, without warning, toward a man who was running away. In March, the shooting would become one of the many data points used to justify the state attorney general’s decision to take the rare step of seizing control of the troubled Paterson Police Department.

But that is largely beside the point to Mr. Cooper. He worries most these days about his inability to help when his daughters cry and the mild humiliations that define his day-to-day existence. He cannot hoist himself out of his wheelchair into bed without help, and his girlfriend, who gave birth to their daughter a week after the shooting, now must change his diaper, too.

“There have been times when I just couldn’t take it, and I was, like, ‘I just want to die,’” he said.

Mr. Cooper had had past run-ins with the police, and he had been released from prison less than two years earlier after serving time for weapons and drug convictions. But he has not been accused of doing anything wrong the night he was shot. And a gun found about a block from where he fell held none of his DNA or fingerprints, court records show.

“Why did you run from me?” the officer asked Mr. Cooper after pulling his wrists into handcuffs, according to video released by prosecutors. “I was scared,” he answered.

Narcia Cooper, Khalif’s mother, spent nearly every day at her son's bedside during the three months he was hospitalized. She still cannot make sense of why he was shot. “If someone is running away from you, why shoot them?” she asked.

Many police shooting victims’ names become rallying cries for reform upon death. As someone who survived, Mr. Cooper understands the power he now holds as a bleak, living reminder of America’s policing crisis.

“What I experienced — I don’t want nobody to ever go through this,” he said.

Mr. Cooper lost a kidney and half his colon while hospitalized after a shooting that also left him paralyzed from the waist down.

This week, Mr. Cooper filed a $50 million federal lawsuit against Officer Moravek, the City of Paterson and its former police chief and police director. He has dual goals: locking in enough money to pay for a lifetime of medical care and driving home a point.

“We pray that the good cops keep being good cops,” said Kenyatta Stewart, who grew up with Mr. Cooper in Paterson and is one of three lawyers representing him, “and the bad cops understand what can happen when you make these decisions.”

Officer Moravek remains on paid leave. Paterson’s mayor, André Sayegh, said the city does not comment on pending litigation. Officer Moravek’s lawyer, Patrick Caserta, could not be reached for comment, but he has said that his client made a split-second decision based on a belief that his life and the lives of people nearby were at imminent risk.

Isa M. Abbassi, a former New York Police Department chief who was instrumental in crafting the city’s strategy after the 2014 police killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island, has been in charge of the Paterson department since early May.

“We have already begun the process of providing supplemental training for our members in the areas of constitutional policing and use of force,” Mr. Abbassi said on his first day on the job.

“The next generation of public safety starts today,” he added, “and it starts in Paterson, New Jersey.”

The state seized control of the Paterson Police Department and appointed Isa M. Abbassi, a former New York Police Department chief, to lead the agency.Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

With 157,000 residents, Paterson, which is about 20 miles northwest of New York City, is the state’s third-largest city.

It has its landmarks. Hinchliffe Stadium, one of the last Negro Leagues ballparks still standing, reopened in May behind the Great Falls, a hydropower behemoth that fueled the country’s Industrial Revolution. Over the past two decades, refugees from Afghanistan and Syria and elsewhere, eager to build new lives, have flooded the welcoming city.

But unlike Newark and Jersey City, the state’s two larger cities, which are closer to the shimmer of New York City and benefit more from its reflected glow, Paterson has struggled for economic traction.

Its schools, under state control for 30 years until 2021, were shut during the pandemic for longer than all but one other district in New Jersey. Last spring, 46 percent of the city’s third-graders scored at the lowest level on standardized reading tests, more than twice the statewide failure rate.

And of the 46 fatal encounters with New Jersey law enforcement officials since 2019, eight were in Paterson — more than any other community in the state, according to an analysis by NJ Spotlight News.

Every year in the United States, more than 80,000 people suffer nonfatal injuries during contact with law enforcement officials, according to a University of Illinois Chicago study of data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2018, the most recent year with all relevant figures available, 54 percent of those injured were Black, even though African Americans make up only about 14 percentof the country’s population.

Before the shooting, Mr. Cooper said he never felt particularly distrustful of the police. “I look at cops like they’re people, they do what they got to do,” said Mr. Cooper, whose uncle and cousin are both police officers in Paterson. “That’s their job.”

Dennis Hickerson-Breedon, one of Mr. Cooper’s lawyers, said it would be impossible to know what Officer Moravek was thinking when he pulled the trigger. Still, he said he believed that Mr. Cooper’s well-being “was much more expendable than a person who may live in a more suburban neighborhood.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, argues that Officer Moravek fired his weapon on June 11, 2022, “without need, justification or cause,” in violation of Mr. Cooper’s civil rights.

In spring of 2022, Mr. Cooper had moved with his girlfriend, Kaelah Pace, to Sugar Notch, Pa., about two hours west of Paterson by car, and had been preparing to start work at a pet food supply company, the couple said. His lawyers said he was in Paterson the weekend of the shooting to see his older daughter, who is 6.

Police body camera video from that night shows about a dozen people milling around outdoors. Officer Moravek pulls up in a police car at about 3:15 a.m. and explains to them that several neighbors had called to complain. Then, over the radio, another officer reports having a suspect with a gun in custody. Seconds later, three shots ring out, and Officer Moravek begins running toward the noise, encountering Mr. Cooper along the way.

“Drop the gun,” he shouts several times, but never orders Mr. Cooper to stop or warns that he is about to shoot — omissions the attorney general said were violations of the state’s use-of-force policy when he charged Officer Moravek with assault and official misconduct.

The bullet has never been removed from Mr. Cooper’s back. For now, he said, it is safer to leave it untouched.

Ms. Pace, a certified nursing assistant who also has a 5- and a 7-year-old, is his main caregiver, but physical therapists and nurses visit regularly. Wound care, managing a diet that is easy on his remaining kidney and the strain involved in lifting Mr. Cooper in and out of the wheelchair are constant struggles.

“It’s just a lot,” Ms. Pace, 23, said before starting to cry, awakening their 1-year-old daughter, who began to fuss.

Mr. Cooper reached out and placed her on his lap in the wheelchair, and the baby smiled.

“She thinks it’s a ride,” he said.

Mr. Cooper said he missed the small things most: walking to the park; being able to swim with his daughters; the dream of eventually having another child.

“I wish I could go back. I wish I could go back in time,” he said.

“But I’ve got to keep going for my kids — you know? — for my daughters.

“They give me life.”

Tracey Tully covers New Jersey. She joined The Times in 2018 as a senior editor. She previously covered city and state government at The Daily News, the Albany Times Union and the Jersey Journal. More about Tracey Tully"

How a Fleeting Encounter With an Officer Changed Khalif Cooper’s Life - The New York Times

Opinion | Stephen Vladeck Q&A: Supreme Court term showed expansion of judicial power - The Washington Post

Opinion Top court watcher: This term was marked by a broad expansion of judicial power

Ruth Marcus

Proponents of affirmative action hold signs during a protest at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on Saturday. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images)

"Columnist Ruth Marcus spoke this week with University of Texas law professorStephen Vladeck, author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.” This is an edited transcript of their conversation about the Supreme Court.

Marcus: If the best adjective to describe the 2021-2022 term is cataclysmic, what’s the best way to describe the term that just concluded?

Vladeck: Reaffirming, as in reaffirming that last term was not an aberration. The thread that ties together almost all of the cases of the term is just how much power they all contemplate the courts exercise. And so the student loan case [rejecting the Biden administration’s debt cancellation] is about expanding standing, which will expand the kinds of cases that can come to the federal courts, and about expanding the major questions doctrine in a way that, you know, is going to empower federal courts to be even more aggressive in reining in policies with which they disagree. Moore v. Harper [on the independent state legislature doctrine] is a profoundly court-power-expanding decision with regard to how much authority it’s going to give federal courts in future elections. For anyone who thinks that judicial restraint is an important principle, this term shows very little of it.

Let’s just go up to the 30,000-foot level. This was a term in which major damage was done to the law from a liberal point of view. At the same time, the damage could have been way worse. The things that I have in mind are the [Voting Rights Act Section 2] case, probably the most surprising win of the term with a win being defined as leaving the status quo in place; the independent state legislature case, because certainly people were fearing a major adopting of the theory; some of the other cases where people were braced for the worst and got less than that. Is that the way you see it?

I start from a proposition to always remember that these are the cases the justices chose to decide. And so against that backdrop, the fact that they took some of these cases and ruled against the more visibly, if not conservative, at least Republican position, is not necessarily a sign of any kind of moderation, as opposed to just maybe daylight between [Chief Justice] John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, on one hand, and [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton on the other. I mean, you know, Texas was 0 for 4 [at the court this term].

The other thing I’ll say is with the exception of [the Voting Rights Act case], which is the outlier, almost all of the cases being portrayed as liberal victories, I really don’t think they’re a victory. They’re just not defeats. Yes, it could have been worse in the sense that the court could have embraced the democracy-destroying version of the independent state legislature theory. The court could have allowed Texas to challenge President Biden’s immigration enforcement priorities. The court could have struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act.

But the fact that the court is not all the way to the Fox News version of the contemporary Republican Party’s agenda doesn’t tell us much relative to the court. When the decisions that are hailed as consensus rejections of conservative positions are invariably not about the merits or are decisions that are rejecting the broadest view of a theory while actually embracing a narrower view, I have a hard time giving the Supreme Court a participation trophy for that. The current position is a position that would not have had five votes five years ago.

Do you have a theory about what’s happening on the court that caused these outcomes, which are not necessarily outcomes to be cheered, but bad consequences that we ducked?

I think the reality is that the chief justice and Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Barrett are fairly conventional conservatives, what we might call Bush conservatives. And it ought not to be surprising that Bush-type conservatives are troubled by some of the especially envelope-pushing arguments that are being advanced by plaintiffs and some states in these cases.

I’m curious about that, particularly with Justice Barrett. Clearly Justice Kavanaugh is personally and ideologically close to the chief; this term much more than last term that manifested itself in his votes. We had a case on the Clean Water Act in which he actually came out to the left of the chief. I’m a little less clear about where Justice Barrett falls.

There’s less data on her. But I often look at some of the votes on emergency applications as relevant data points, and she has moderated her behavior there. She voted to put the Texas social media law back on hold last year. I assume she voted for the mifepristone stay because [Justice Samuel] Alito criticized her in his dissent. She has an ability to speak for the Democratic appointees in some of these cases that you don’t typically see from Alito or [Clarence] Thomas.

You mentioned the emergency docket. It wouldn’t be a Steve Vladeck interview if we didn’t talk about how the court handled its shadow-docket authority this term.

Yeah, something changed. Only they know why, but they’ve adjusted their behavior. With the summer still ahead of us, there have been five grants of emergency relief [this term]. Three of those were uncontroversial or at least not closely divided. The other two were clearing the way for an Alabama execution and the Title 42 [immigration] order. That’s still more than we would have seen 10 years ago but it’s a lot less than we’ve seen at any point since the beginning of the Trump administration. It suggests that maybe the court is not quite as immune to public critiques as the justices might portray themselves to be.

We talked about two of the newer justices, but what did we learn about the newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson?

Boy, I think we learned quite a lot. Justice Jackson came out swinging in a way that I don’t know that we’ve seen a justice in their first term, maybe since Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s first term, the October ’86 term. Justice Jackson has, in no time at all, established her bona fides as a powerful voice for progressives on the court. It’s hard to think of a term where a brand new justice just was so visible. I think Justice Barrett probably had more of an impact on her first term just because of how her appointment shifted the ideological center of the court. That was never going to happen with Justice Jackson, but for a new justice whose appointment did not move the court at all, it’s a pretty remarkable performance in my book.

What did you make of the chief’s role this term? There was a lot of “he’s a chief in name only, he’s lost control of his court” chat before this term. Did this term tell us something different?

I think reports of the chief’s demise might have been exaggerated. This term did not have the same confluence of cases where he was most likely to align with the Democratic appointees. I think the real story of the chief’s term is just how many of the big majority opinions he kept for himself, an unusual amount of major opinions that he wrote, perhaps as a way of reasserting himself over the court.

We haven’t talked about the sideshow yet, but I also think his role in the ethics story is a no less important part of the term. Because he could have agreed to go testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he could have provided more conciliatory responses to the requests from [Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)]. And I think the attitude [Roberts] has pushed in his capacity as chief justice is very much a reassertion of the court’s institutional autonomy from Congress.

So a double power grab. He grabbed his own power in the court and power for the court from Congress.

Yep. A pretty good term for the chief. And I can’t remember a big ruling in which he was dissenting.

Do the affirmative action cases fit into your rubric of judicial assertion of power? Or do they reflect something different?

I don’t think it’s quite as overt as the student loan case or Moore v. Harper or 303Creative [the Christian website designer excused from having to create wedding websites for same-sex couples]. But I think it’s of a piece in the sense that there’s nothing restrained about it. If anything, there’s something more restrained about Justice Thomas’s concurrence, because that would just take [race] off the table entirely. The chief is almost worse, in the sense that he’s trying to shoehorn his analysis into a line of cases that it’s deeply inconsistent with. He creates a bit of a mush.

Is that unrestrained or it just intellectually dishonest?

Both? The problem is they’re related. The virtue of Justice Thomas’s concurrence is it is a clean categorical rule that would not lead to messy litigation fights. Whereas the chief’s opinion is only going to precipitate more litigation, because now some folks are going to point to the part where it says, “Well, if the applicant puts this in their essay, then you know, that’s fine.” And other folks are going to say, “No, but you can’t.” I just think that if this was how it was going to end, it should have ended in a way that was less chaotic.

Talk about next term. How is it shaping up? We have at least two very major questions coming up, one on gun rights and the other on Chevron deference[the rule that courts should generally defer to administrative agency’s interpretation of the laws they enforce].

I would add a third, is the administrative state still constitutional [challenging agencies’ use of administrative law judges in enforcement proceedings]? The court has granted a remarkably low number of cases for next term. So I think it’s really hard to say what next term is going to look like. You know, at least the [administrative state] and Rahimi Second Amendment cases strike me as additional candidates for the Bush conservatives to push back against the 5th Circuit [the ultraconservative appeals court that covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi].

The 5th Circuit had a terrible term at the court. If you just look at bottom lines in cases, they were 2 for 9 — two wins and seven losses, which is not good. And the losses were on standing in the private plaintiff student loan case, on standing in U.S. v. Texas [the immigration priorities case], on standing in [the Indian Child Welfare Act case]. The losses were ideological.

So, it’s possible that the early returns from the grants for next term are not the continuation of the conservative agenda that gave us [abortion, gun rights, major questions doctrine, affirmative action] etc., but rather more pushback against overreach in the lower courts. But I think it’s just way too soon to tell."

Opinion | Stephen Vladeck Q&A: Supreme Court term showed expansion of judicial power - The Washington Post

Federal Judge Limits Biden Officials’ Contacts With Social Media Sites

“The order came in a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who claim the administration is trying to silence its critics.

July 4, 2023Updated 6:21 p.m. ET

The lawsuit named as defendants President Biden and dozens of federal officials.Doug Mills/The New York Times

A federal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online, a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.

The order, which could have significant First Amendment implications, is a major development in a fierce legal fight over the boundaries and limits of speech online.

It was a victory for Republicans who have often accused social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of disproportionately taking down right-leaning content, sometimes in collaboration with government. Democrats say the platforms have failed to adequately police misinformation and hateful speech, leading to dangerous outcomes, including violence.

In the ruling, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana said that parts of the government, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

In granting a preliminary injunction, Judge Doughty said that the agencies could not flag specific posts to the social media platforms or request reports about their efforts to take down content. The ruling said that the government could still notify the platforms about posts detailing crimes, national security threats or foreign attempts to influence elections.

“If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the judge said. “The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”

Courts are increasingly being forced to weigh in on such issues — with the potential to upend decades of legal norms that have governed speech online.

The Republican attorneys general of Texas and Florida are defending first-of-their-kind state laws that bar internet platforms from taking down certain political content, and legal experts believe those cases may eventually reach the Supreme Court. The high court this year declined to limit a law that allows the platforms to escape legal liability for content that users post to the sites.

The ruling on Tuesday, in a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, is likely to be appealed by the Biden administration, but its impact could force government officials, including law enforcement agencies, to refrain from notifying the platforms of troublesome content.

Government officials have argued they do not have the authority to order posts or entire accounts removed, but federal agencies and the tech giants have long worked together to take action against illegal or harmful material, especially in cases involving child sexual abuse, human trafficking and other criminal activity. That has also included regular meetings to share information on the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.

The White House said the Justice Department was reviewing the ruling and evaluating its next steps.

“Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present,” the White House said in a statement.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment. Twitter did not have a comment, and Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Jeff Landry, the Louisiana attorney general, said in a statement that the judge’s order was “historic.” Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, hailed the ruling as a “huge win in the fight to defend our most fundamental freedoms.” Both officials are Republican.

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“What a way to celebrate Independence Day,” Mr. Bailey said on Twitter.

The issue of the government’s influence over social media has become increasingly partisan.

The Republican majority in the House has taken up the cause, smothering universities and think tanks that have studied the issue with onerous requests for information and subpoenas.

The judge’s order bars government agencies from communicating with some of those outside groups, including the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project and the Stanford Internet Observatory, in order to induce the removal of protected speech online. Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was involved in leading the two other projects, declined to comment.

Since acquiring Twitter last year, Elon Musk has echoed Republican arguments, releasing internal company documents to chosen journalists suggesting what they claimed was collusion between company and government officials. Though that remains far from proven, some of the documents Mr. Musk disclosed ended up in the lawsuit’s arguments.

The defendants, the social media companies and experts who study disinformation have argued that there is no evidence of a systematic effort by the government to censor individuals in violation of the First Amendment. David Rand, an expert on misinformation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his understanding was that the government had at most a limited impact on how social media platforms engaged with misinformation.

At the same time, emails and text messages made public in the case that Judge Doughty ruled on have shown instances where officials complained to social media executives when influential users spread disinformation, especially involving the coronavirus pandemic.

The states said in their lawsuit that they had a “sovereign and proprietary interest in receiving free flow of information in public discourse on social-media platforms.”

In addition to the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, the case was brought by four other plaintiffs: Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologists who questioned the government’s handling of the pandemic; Aaron Kheriaty, a professor dismissed by the University of California, Irvine, for refusing to have a coronavirus vaccination; Jill Hines, a director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization that has been accused of disinformation; and Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site. The four additional plaintiffs said social media sites removed some of their posts.

Although the lawsuit named as defendants President Biden and dozens of officials in 11 government agencies, some of the instances cited took place during the Trump administration.

Judge Doughty, who was appointed to the federal court by President Donald J. Trump in 2017, has been sympathetic to conservative cases, having previously blocked the Biden administration’s national vaccination mandate for health care workers and overturned its ban on new federal leases for oil and gas drilling.

He allowed the plaintiffs extensive discovery and depositions from prominent officials like Anthony S. Fauci, then the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who told the plaintiffs’ lawyers that he was not involved in any discussions to censor content online.

Some experts in First Amendment law and misinformation criticized the Tuesday ruling.

“It can’t be that the government violates the First Amendment simply by engaging with the platforms about their content-moderation decisions and policies,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “If that’s what the court is saying here, it’s a pretty radical proposition that isn’t supported by the case law.”

Mr. Jaffer added that the government has to balance between calling out false speech without stepping into informal coercion that veers toward censorship. “Unfortunately Judge Doughty’s order doesn’t reflect a serious effort to reconcile the competing principles,” he said.

Judge Doughty’s ruling said the injunction would remain in place while proceedings in the lawsuit continued unless he or a higher court ruled differently.

Emma Goldberg contributed reporting.

Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation for The Times. He has worked in Washington, Moscow, Baghdad and Beijing, where he contributed to the articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2021. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.” @stevenleemyers •Facebook

David McCabe covers tech policy. He joined The Times from Axios in 2019.“

Leaked details of Rudy Giuliani interview suggest Jack Smith targeting Trump lawyers: report

Mon, July 3, 2023 at 2:45 PM EDT

Sidney PowellTom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

“Special Counsel Jack Smith's team has shown an increasing interest in examining the involvement of former Donald Trump's attorneys and other individuals, who plotted to overturn the 2020 election, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Prosecutors issued subpoenas focusing on several prominent individuals involved in the post-election efforts, according to the WSJ. These figures include conspiracy theorist and lawyer Sidney Powell, who propagated unsubstantiated allegations of extensive voter fraud. The subpoenas have also sought communications involving Emily Newman, a lawyer who collaborated with Powell, as well as Mike Roman, a Republican operative responsible for overseeing Election Day operations for the Trump campaign and deploying lawyers to key battleground states prior to November 2020.

Federal prosecutors recently conducted an almost eight-hour interview with Rudy Giuliani, who formerly served as President Trump's personal lawyer, individuals familiar with the testimony to the WSJ. They asked Giuliani about Powell and a December 2020 meeting that took place in the Oval Office, during which Powell presented a proposal suggesting the U.S. military should take control of the voting machines. Prosecutors also reportedly questioned Giuliani about John Eastman, the attorney responsible for devising the unsuccessful plan involving alternate electors that was undermined when Vice President Mike Pence certified the Electoral College results on January 6. "Giuliani and Eastman were central figures in the so-called war room at the Willard hotel in downtown Washington, where some of Trump's most loyal advisers worked to overturn the 2020 election results," The Wall Street Journal reported.“

Trump PRESSURE CAMPAIGN BACKFIRED and NOW Key Evidence Against Him

Supreme Court decision could BACKFIRE with NEW Legal Challenge

Column: On affirmative action, Justice Jackson blasts her colleagues’ ‘let-them-eat-cake obliviousness’

By Robin AbcarianColumnist  

July 2, 2023 3 AM PT

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of two nonwhite women on the bench who dissented from the majority.

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

“There is no way around this: The Supreme Court’s split decision overturning affirmative action in college admissions is a perfect example of how racial diversity enriches us, and why it should be enshrined as a goal in our laws.

Writing for the conservative majority in cases involving the admissions policies of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, Chief Justice John Roberts paints a picture of a country where all have an equal start, where individuals are responsible for their own fates, where systemic racism not only doesn’t matter but really doesn’t even exist at all. Oh sure, he glancingly regrets horrendous Supreme Court decisions of yore, such as Plessy vs. Ferguson, which affirmed the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

But that’s all in the past, people! 

Affirmative action, the court has declared, is incompatible with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts writes, as if centuries of discrimination that favored white people have not produced a legacy that hobbles people of color, especially Black people, today.

“At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a scathing — dare I say Scalia-esque — dissent, “the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to undo the effects of a world where laws systematically subordinated Black people and created a racial caste system.”

We’re all created equal?

Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?

In their dissents, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson see the world through an entirely different lens from the majority. As women of color who presumably do not take all-expenses-paid vacations with white billionaires, they bring a diversity of viewpoint to the court that is healthy and necessary.

Jackson argues persuasively that we are not even close to living in a country where all are on an equal playing field, and that “holistic” admissions policies that take race into account as one factor are important steps toward a more equal world.

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” writes Jackson. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

She asks us to imagine two college applicants from North Carolina: John, who is white, would be the seventh generation of his family to attend the University of North Carolina. James, who is Black and most likely descended from enslaved forebears, would be the first member of his family to attend college. “Does the race of these applicants properly play a role in UNC’s holistic merits-based application process?” she asks. The school has no racial quota system. It only takes race into account as one of many factors.

Our newest justice offers a history lesson to her fellow conservatives about why it should. “A page of history is worth a volume of logic,” she writes, quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Her insinuation: The majority cannot see the forest for the trees.

“Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored, race-based preferences in America” (which have always favored white people), she writes, “to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our country.”

She lists the familiar ways that the prosperity of Black Americans has been hindered by laws and government policies.

Sharecropping prevented freed Black people from attaining property and prosperity. Vagrancy laws criminalized free Black men. Racially exclusionary zoning, redlining, the inability of Black people to qualify for FHA loans or obtain credit. Between the boom years of 1934 and 1968, Jackson notes, 98% of FHA loans went to white Americans. The ensuing wealth disparity continues to be stark. Gaps in health outcomes and educational achievement persist.

“For present purposes,” she writes, “it is significant that, in so excluding Black people, government policies affirmatively operated — one could say, affirmatively acted — to dole out preferences to those, who if nothing else, were not Black.” (Italics mine.)

For most of this country’s history, being Black was an automatic disqualifier to college admission (and so much else).

“Holistic programs,” writes Jackson, “reflect the reality that Black students have only relatively recently been permitted to get into the admissions game at all. Such programs also reflect universities’ clear-eyed optimism that, one day, race will no longer matter.”

It does seems like a contradiction, she notes, but the only way we’ll become a country where all races are equal is by taking race into account to correct historical inequities.

We are at a bizarre moment in the racial history of America.

The Supreme Court has ruled against colleges taking the race of applicants into consideration, yet, at the very same time, many serious discussions about reparations for the descendants of enslaved Americans are taking place, in California and elsewhere.

And yes, it’s true that most Americans oppose the concept of reparations. Of course they do. When you have benefited from the color of your skin over generations, or do not care to recognize that others have been and continue to be penalized, it’s very easy to believe that everyone has an equal shot at health, wealth and education.

That is not true and never was.

It’s a shame that our conservative Supreme Court justices have to pretend otherwise.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

“No one benefits from ignorance.”

“The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism.”

“The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority opts to ignore).”

“The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room— the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”

“It would be deeply unfortunate if the Equal Protection Clause actually demanded this perverse, ahistorical, and counterproductive outcome. To impose this result in that Clause’s name when it requires no such thing, and to thereby obstruct our collective progress toward the full realization of the Clause’s promise, is truly a tragedy for us all.”

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