| | | | |  | | By POLITICO MAGAZINE | |  | | 
| |  Illustration by Michelle Garcia for POLITICO |
A pair of cases brought by Asian American applicants against Harvard and the University of North Carolina have placed affirmative action on the conservative Supreme Court’s chopping block. But the real reason affirmative action appears to be doomed is something you might find surprising: Diversity.
To explain, we have to go back to 1963, when the term “affirmative action” had its debut in an executive order, signed by President John F. Kennedy, that established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities, to be chaired by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Conceived by special counsel Hobart Taylor, Jr., “affirmative action” connoted forward-looking efforts to fight racism itself. As Johnson put it in a 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, “You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains, and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Martin Luther King Jr. said something similar in his now infamous 1965 Playboy interview: “All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.” But in 1977, when Alan Bakke’s challenge to quotas at UC Davis Medical School (which, for the record, had included zero Black, Latino or Native American students in its 1968 inaugural class) made it to the Supreme Court, the meaning of affirmative action began to change. Sensing the Court’s hesitation following backlash to its civil rights rulings, particularly in the era of busing, former Watergate special prosecutor and Harvard professor Archibald Cox, who represented the University of California system against Bakke’s claim, questioned whether a majority of the justices would support the proposition that Black people deserved reparations for America’s centuries of slavery and discrimination. So Cox articulated a new justification that he hoped would sway the right-leaning court: Not justice for long-oppressed communities, but “diversity” for everyone. “A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer,” Cox wrote in a brief for an earlier case. “Similarly, a Black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.” It turned out to be a winning argument; the court sided with Cox in a 5-4 decision, based on “a vague notion of academic freedom and the educational benefits of diversity,” writes Evan Mandery, author of Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us. “Originally intended to compensate Black Americans for historical discrimination, affirmative action instead came to be justified under a mantra of diversity — effectively co-opting its benefits for white people,” he writes. “The bottom line is that elite institutions’ collective refusal to reckon with their racist conduct has left affirmative action on a rickety constitutional foundation that will ensure its doom.” Read the story.
| | | |  | “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Can you guess who said this about Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in 1984? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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POLITICO illustration/Images by iStock | Lights! Camera! Politics? … This month, legendary talent agency WME — which represents the likes of Rihanna, Matt Damon and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — raised eyebrows in Washington when it scooped up Ross Yoon, the Dupont Circle book agency known for high-brow, D.C. nonfiction (like that of POLITICO’s own Ryan Lizza). What’s a conglomerate that includes everything from reality TV to the Ultimate Fighting Championship want with comparatively boutique Beltway books? “It turns out that the pool of writers a Beltway-based agent might encounter … are attractive for things beyond the scoop of the minute,” writes Michael Schaffer in this week’s Capital City column. “Between crises, book writers of the D.C. think-tank and journalistic worlds are long on the sorts of historic curios and lost real-life characters that drive a ton of content in the age of streaming and podcasts.” (Hey Lizza, got a pitch for a TV series?)
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| In a normal world, there would be no politics around golf. But in America in 2023, there's political valence to everything. And, as it happens, golf has been in the news lately. Don’t sound out of loop when your friends start talking geopolitics seemingly out of nowhere during the U.S. Open this weekend. Catch up with these details. (From POLITICO’s Michael Schaffer) — In 2016, amidst sponsorship controversies over the then-unlikely candidate's incendiary remarks, the PGA tour dropped one of former President Donald Trump's properties. — Trump repaid the favor by embracing the Saudi-backed upstart LIV tour when it challenged the PGA in 2021. Two of the first season's stops were at Trump courses. — The battle between the two golf outfits didn't just break on partisan lines. LIV's critics included conservatives like Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who called it "an exercise in public relations" on behalf of Saudi Arabia. — Last month, Ron Desantis met with a group of 9/11 families that had been among LIV's biggest critics, an effort to stake out the opposite side of the issue from Trump. — Days later, LIV and PGA shocked the world by announcing a merger. Trump hailed the move. But the PGA's Desantis-friendly PR firm dropped the tour as a client. On Capitol Hill, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy has led calls for an investigation. | | | |  | | 
Vice President Aaron Burr (center left) stood trial for treason in 1807 after shooting former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. | Bettmann Archive via Getty Images | History’s Problem With the Trump Indictment … The latest indictment of Trump has thrust America into new territory. Unlike much of the rest of the world, we haven’t had much practice prosecuting former heads of state. But as unprecedented as Trump’s situation is, it’s not totally without historical antecedents, writes historian Joshua Zeitz. If you squint a little, you’ll see parallels in the trials of Vice President Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Spoiler alert: They both got off scot-free.
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Texas State Rep. James Talarico sits for a portrait at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary’s Shelton Chapel in Austin, Texas, on March 20, 2023. | Tamir Kalifa for POLITICO | The Young Christian Dem Praying for a Blue Texas … The power of Christianity in politics is hardly surprising, especially in Texas. But it’s not too often that a millennial Democrat quotes scripture in a hearing. For 34-year-old state Rep. James Talarico, though, Biblical wisdom turned into a viral moment when he spoke out against a bill that would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. “I believe this bill is idolatrous,” he told the bill’s Republican sponsor, fellow “devout Christian” Rep. Candy Noble. “I believe it is exclusionary. And I believe that it is arrogant, and those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.” Now, the Harvard-educated rising star is juggling his legislative responsibilities with seminary school — and by the time he graduates to become a pastor around 2025, it’ll be time to consider a 2026 gubernatorial run. Adam Wren went to Texas to find out how a young Democrat is keeping the faith in a true blue future.
| | | **Who Dissed answer: That would be incumbent President Ronald Reagan, who delivered the indelible line in a presidential debate in response to a question from Baltimore Sun journalist Henry Trewhitt about Reagan’s age and endurance. (Reagan was 73 at the time — younger than both the 2024 frontrunners.) politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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