This week, the Supreme Court declared affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional, killed Biden’s student debt relief plan, and permitted a graphic designer in Colorado to refuse service to same-sex couples. Of course, twice-indicted former president Donald Trump wasted no time in taking credit for it all during his speech at a summit for Moms for Liberty — a right-wing, anti-government group — on Friday.
“Many presidents never get the opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice. I had three. They are gold,” he boasted to the crowd gathered in Philadelphia that night, referring to Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. “Maybe we’ll get three or four more. Can you imagine?.. Let’s have seven or eight or maybe even nine.”
While Trump continued to wail against the ongoing criminal cases against him, while also airing out his grievances about immigration and the media, the ex-president vowed to enact a series of dangerous educational policies that would target vulnerable youth and marginalized communities.
He called for increased incarceration of students, promising to “completely overhaul federal standards of school discipline and juvenile justice to get violent monsters out of your children’s classrooms and into reform schools or correction institutions.” Such reform schools and institutions in the “troubled teen industry,” which generates billions of dollars annually, have been criticized for the countless reports of psychological and physical abuse of young people.
Trump also pledged to eliminate funding for schools that teach students about race and gender.
“On Day One, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” said the former president, who also promised to ban federal agencies from promoting gender-affirming care for people of any age.
Although Trump has spent the last several months personally attacking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as he vies for the presidential nomination, both joined other 2024 hopefuls in praising the Supreme Court’s devastating decisions that have and will ultimately harm countless people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and low-income Americans.
On Thursday, following the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, called out her conservative colleagues in a scathing dissent. “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” she wrote. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”
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