The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome. Welcome, welcome! Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report, as I told you, as I mentioned yesterday, late this week. Was going to be a couple of big decisions of the US Supreme Court and it came down today. The biggest decision in a long Time and an extraordinary decision, really, in so many ways singular in its in its focus or singular in the way it can be characterized, end of affirmative action, but complicated in what it all means. And we’ll get to that in a moment. And what you need to know welcome. Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report, Excuse me, Pro America Report. Don’t forget visit proamericareport.com proamericareport.com. Head on over there and sign up for the daily e-mail. The daily WYNK comes out 8:00 AM, East Coast, 5:00 AM Pacific Time, right into your inbox, a couple of key stories, a couple of key links, and then, the WYNK. What you need to know, my description. Usually 3, 4, 5, sometimes 6 sentences on what is important. What you need to know, the WYNK you get that in the morning. Go sign up proamericareport.com. Follow me on Twitter @EagleEdMartin, on Facebook Ed Martin Live on YouTube. Also, everywhere you go, PhyllisSchlafly.com is where you can see all the work of our great organization, the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles. OK.
So the decision came down today and as you might expect, half the country and most of the news entities came out and said the following thing. They said affirmative action is dead. America is deeply flawed. Barack Obama jumped out, Michelle Obama jumped out. And said, Oh my gosh, this is such a terrible, terrible moment and it’s really horrendous. It’s their response to me, was worse than any anything I’d seen. For President Obama to be so baldly political to be so inattentive to what the moment is in life in people’s lives, in people’s lives, not in what you think the reality of law should be, but people’s lives. Just nasty. These are nasty people that they think so much of themselves and so much. Of their power. That they just are are out of control, so that was terrible.
On the other side and on the other hand, the reality was the decision basically says. You have to not discriminate on the basis of race. You’re not allowed to group people by race. You are allowed to say you know what your experience as an African American young man who comes out of the projects or an African American young woman who goes through these challenges or whatever. Those are valid. Those are valid. But it’s not valid for you to lump people together and treat them as a group instead of individuals. And so that that seems to me to be progress and and it seems to me to be progress in the sense that the court got back to saying you have to treat everybody every individual equal equally. By the way the case is called Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard just so you know the name of the case. And I I guess they say it was divided along ideological lines, but six to three that means that the Republicans or the Republican appointed justices who are more conservative actually stayed together because they certainly don’t go vote as a bloc that often.
But let’s get back to something. If the response. Of so-called conservatives, Republicans and so-called conservatives is ohh good. Let’s get back to judging people by the content of their character, by the the Arc of their story, by how they succeed or fail, instead of by their skin color or their grouping. Isn’t that good? How can it be bad? What is it that can be bad? Because in the decision, Chief Justice Roberts explicitly said he referred to the fact that admissions for schools can certainly consider the fact that if someone writes about what it’s like to be a young black man or a young black woman or a young minority of some other kind, that they can take into consideration their story. The point is, let people have their story, their history, their wholeness. Instead of putting them in a group because the groups are fake, the groups are not helping to actually move people who are in need.
For example. It may be true 50 years ago that very few African Americans had an opportunity to go to college. Might be true. I think it’s probably true to some extent, but I don’t know it. I’m just saying it. But today affirmative action slots in universities were being occupied by African Americans, who were second, third or fourth generation educated. They were coming from the the the, the community, the families of wealth and and and success. It wasn’t how to say a program that lifted people up. It was just. A program that allowed people to be lumped together. And what is the Constitution if not a protection against lumping people together? Not allowed to. Lump people together by race, not by gender, not by ideology. The one thing you have to do is give every person. Due process give every person their rights under the law. You don’t say ohh you’re in that group. Therefore you won’t get rights under the law.
If you’re an American citizen. You escape from categories. Now, actually, if you’re. If you’re not American citizen, you still do too. You don’t get expelled from the country. For example, if you’re here illegally because you’re a part of a group, we don’t say no African Americans or no Africans allowed. We say if you’re here illegally, you get sent out.
And so the Great American experience, the Great American experiment, the Great American sort of reckoning was to say. In every way. Under the law, under the Constitution. We the people, those three magic words, we the people have our rights. We the people have individual property rights, individual interests, individual rights of speech and assembly, etc. And those can’t be diminished because someone says a category I call you this group or that group, or this grouping, or that grouping, or this look or that look. That’s not allowed in America, and precisely because it’s not allowed. We have had it and let. Let me be clear for the people listening, you, we still to make progress. We still have to improve, we still have to Move forward and get smarter. Get more decent, but ultimately the reason the American experiment is so successful. Rule of law. Constitution. Is because people can rely on that system to make it work for them.
So if you want to get ahead, I’m not saying it’s easy for everyone. It’s not easy for a poor kid to get ahead. But you can. And it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white anymore. It may have mattered from bigotry. And by the way, it still may matter. I’m not saying race racism is gone or bigotry is gone. I think people like taller people better. I think people like handsome, more handsome people better. I think people like sometimes men over women, women over men. Right now, if you’re an African American man and you get a college education, I think you’ll beat the white guy every time because people will want to feel good about America working. And that’s not against the law. What is against the law is to set up a system that says we’re just going to group people together based on. Immutable characteristics and pretend that there’s a fairness in that and call it fair.
So again, it’s very hard to argue. You know, you can picture MLK Jr, Martin Luther King Jr, talking about don’t judge us on the color of our skin, but on the content of our character. Et cetera, et cetera, that that was the dream, right? That was the dream. Well, this is closer to the. Dream than not, and again explicitly. The Chief Justice writes the opinion and says you can still take into account and weigh an individual’s experience. You just can’t say because the individual is black. They get better treatment than an Asian kid. That’s not allowed.
And the fact that Obama, Michelle and Barack and Biden Biden called it an the court not normal. I mean, these are terrible. Nasty things to say. That undermine the chance for people to get together and be together. And build together. I I even I and I knew the decision would go this way. Even I am surprised by how the reaction happened and the politics of it.
Court packing people in the in the US House of Representatives, Democrats saying it’s time to pack the court. We need to load the court up with more justices that we can control, let’s add five more, we’ll make them all Democrats. Then we’ll have control and then the next time around that Republicans will add five more. We’ll end up with the Supreme Court of 28 people. Which other countries have, and it will be unwieldy, it’ll just keep changing back and forth.
I don’t think that the Supreme Court gets every decision right and I don’t think that the Supreme Court should have as much influence as it does. But in this case it got the decision right. And the fact that it got the decision in the direction of saying you cannot be racist and call it progress. And racist, meaning you see people based on race instead of by merit.
By the way, when I say you can’t treat people or see people based on race instead of merit, I don’t mean that you have to ignore race. Nobody’s saying that. We’re saying groups, treating people as groups. Is inherently wrong and unconstitutional in this case, so hopefully the decision will play out over the coming weeks with more respect than what we’re Seeing right now, but I don’t know, I doubt it.
Alright, we will take a break. We’ll be right back. We got a couple of great guests, Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report back in a moment.
