Fox’s Turley Argues Affirmative Action Decision Will Define Justice Roberts’s Legacy: ‘Wrong to Reduce People to a Box’
Fox News legal analyst and law professor Jonathan Turley weighed in on Thursday’s Supreme Court decision to effectively ban affirmative action from college admissions by ruling race can no longer be a factor in who gets in.
Turley argued the ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts was the culmination of Roberts’s long-held view that the law must be blind to race and that the decision will define his legacy as chief justice.
Anchor Dana Perino began by asking Turley to weigh in on Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calling the decision “a giant roadblock in our country’s march towards racial justice.”
“I mean, he definitely has the gift for overstatement. But on the merits of that, is he correct?” Perino asked.
“No, I don’t believe he is correct,” Turley replied, adding:
What the court is saying is that you need to make admissions decisions on the basis of individual merit, which can include a person’s past struggle with discrimination. But it also will obviously elevate other issues like what I think is even more important, and that is economic background and the struggle that it took for many students to get to these institutions of higher education. The other thing to keep in mind about Senator Schumer’s comments is that the public has consistently rejected affirmative action.
Co-anchor Bill Melugin followed by noting, “Jonathan, I’m just scrolling through Twitter, just seeing a lot of people outraged, a lot of people thrilled. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of neutral.”
“Do you agree with the idea that this isn’t the end of this battle, that even with this ruling, some of these schools and universities are going to try to find ways around this ruling?” Melugin asked.
“I’ve been teaching for 30 years, I promise you. Right now, college admissions staffs are working on the next generation of applications. They could encourage applicants to share any struggles they’ve had with racial discrimination,” Turley replied, adding:
The essays will still identify the race of the applicant, and I expect that high school admissions officers are taking these three lines from the opinion and saying, write this, you know, write about your struggles. So there’s going to be a displacement factor here. But for Chief Justice Roberts, this is an amazing moment. He feels that it’s still important to say that it’s wrong to reduce people to a box. It’s wrong to try to lower the number of Asian-Americans admitted because they’re Asian-Americans. That is going to be a lasting and important part of his legacy.
Watch the full clip above via Fox News.
