Oh Steve, they're not discriminating against whites. They're discriminating for not whites. Sounds like someone needs a refresher on set theory. Maybe not you, but someone.
I saw a headline on this, and immediately expected it to be a 5-4, or at best 6-3, decision.
9-0 seems too good to be true.
I keep thinking there's got to be some kind of cunningly-disguised back door that will allow progressive judicial activists to reverse the decision's apparent meaning and application, and that John Roberts is surreptitiously distributing the cheat code to the SPLC and the rest of the NGOs even as we speak . . .
I'm not the only one who finds this decision odd; see this Daily Signal take from Tyler O'Neill, who reviews three recent unanimous SC decisions in which liberal justices wrote unexpected opinions:
Why Did the Liberal Justices Write Unanimous Conservative Rulings at the Supreme Court?
"I consider it far more likely that Kagan, the craftiest of the three, orchestrated this trifecta of rulings as a strategy. The next time conservatives fault Sotomayor, Jackson, or her for an ideologically skewed ruling, Kagan can point to these opinions as evidence of their “fairmindedness.”
Either that, or the liberal justices traded their votes in these cases in order to derail one or more of the remaining hot-button case decisions coming down the pike.
I celebrate these cases, but they also make me nervous. What’s really going on behind the scenes?"
Nixon's mistakes, Reagan's mistakes and Bush I's mistake held back quotas and affirmative action for over forty years. Nixon- Mr. Blackmun and Mr. Powell. Reagan- Mrs. O'Connor and Mr. Kennedy. Bush- Miss Souter.
Reagan and Bush I both toyed with the idea of getting rid of the federal affirmative action rules, as Trump has done, but both were told that all Democrats and a majority of Republicans would vote to reinstate federal AA by statute.
I'd be interested to read how the case came before the court. Has the plaintiff's life simply been on hold the whole time, is she working in another job, who has paid her legal fees (she lost twice along the way)? I'm guessing some entity saw this as a great test case and decided to take it on.
Working class men like me in Britain didn't get the vote until 1918.
If 1964 is history, then what is 1918?
Of course, some people might claim that I don't belong to a historically disadvantaged group because I was born after 1918. I find that those people are often born after 1964.
Ignorance of history is a key virtue. That way, when the good people highlight injustice and demand redress, there's none of this, "Uh, but what about?"
The decision, a 9-0 blanking, is fine enough. But none of the Civil Rights Laws of the 60s are going to be repealed. You're as likely to have a comeback of the old Sambo's breakfast joints or minstrel shows. But the decision only really applies to large corporations. Smaller and medium-sized companies have pretty much ignored quotas and affirmative action. The local HVAC, the local plumber and the town printer hire who they want and could care less about some Civil Rights Law Hubert Humphrey shoved down the Senate's throat sixty years ago. In Winchester VA where I go out to eat, all the Mexican restaurants have all-Latino staffs, the two upscale Italian restaurants have all-white staffs, my favorite pub has an all-white staff and most Chinese restaurants are staffed all-Chinese. Interestingly, Winchester's best Chinese restaurant has whites as the front of the house and Chinese cooks. There always has to be an outlier.
Speaking of outliers, we have two decent pizza joints in town; one is a mom and pop (old Italian American family), the other is small chain (they have one out west in Frederick and the other over on the Eastern shore) staffed by Latins (not from Europe).
When I lived on the Eastern Shore in Queen Anne's County, the best pizza joint was Carini's. The original Carini's was run by a Sicilian. He sold to North African who kept the standards up. Metro Washington's best Italian is the Three Brothers franchise. That's about the only thing I miss about not working in DC.
On the one hand liberals believe in tabula rasa, blank slate individuals that the society (e.g., the state) shapes and forms into progressive citizens. On the other, we (or some of us) inherit the past history of ancestors and the inability to be expunge our sins.
I don't see how anyone (okay I mean anyone with critical reasoning skills and education) can possibly believe in tabula rasa these days. It barely made sense back in the 1960s. I suppose if you took an extremely spiritual view, maybe.
I think this'll still ultimately be the death of the Civil Rights Act. Much as it's better morally applying to everyone than to someone, the fact that it now "protects" everyone, including majorities, means it's also going to be much more litigious. Imagine Masterpiece Cakeshop but with bad-faith heterosexual couples harassing gay bakeries, and repeated with every majority for every conceivable civil rights violation.
The only way to stop such things from suffocating the country will be by killing or neutering the CRA. Both of which I support, but the rightoids chomping at the bit for open season will very quickly make the case for why sacrificing freedoms of speech and association at the societal altar for the sake of equality was always doomed to bring us disaster.
I asked a well-prompted and somewhat right-shifted ChatGPT 4o to prepare an op-ed response to “Ames,” as Christopher “Age of Entitlement” Caldwell might have drafted it: The Return of Equal Treatment: A Note on the Supreme Court’s Ames Decision
By Christopher Caldwell (hypothetical)
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ames v. Department of Youth Services offers a curious reprieve — not from the reach of the civil rights state, but from its selective enforcement. The unanimous opinion, authored by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, confirms what was always supposed to be true but often wasn’t: that the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act apply to all Americans, not just to those deemed historically aggrieved.
That this ruling had to be made in 2025 — some sixty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act — tells us something about how distorted the application of that law has become. The plaintiff in Ames, a white, heterosexual woman, claimed she was involuntarily transferred to an inferior job post — not demoted, not docked pay, simply moved. Her case had been dismissed by lower courts under the now-discredited view that such transfers must cause “significant” harm to be legally actionable.
What the Court rightly understood — and what a generation of Title VII jurisprudence had obscured — is that the discrimination prohibited by law need not be dramatic to be real. It need only be intentional and harmful, however modestly so. This seemingly modest clarification signals a significant moment: the reassertion of formal equality under law.
The Long Arc of Unequal Enforcement
In The Age of Entitlement, I argued that the civil rights revolution did not supplement the Constitution of 1787 — it supplanted it. It created a new set of governing norms rooted not in individual liberty but in group identity. These norms came to override rights of speech, association, and even democratic self-government. And nowhere was this shift more visible than in how anti-discrimination laws were enforced.
Despite their universal language, the machinery of civil rights came to revolve around a moral hierarchy of identity. Courts, bureaucrats, and corporate HR departments operated under the assumption — sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit — that protections were meant chiefly for minorities, women, and sexual minorities, not for everyone. Thus, a Black lesbian alleging discrimination could expect institutional sympathy. A straight white woman? A skeptical shrug.
A Correction — or an Aberration?
The Ames decision suggests, at least for now, a judicial preference for individual harm over identity-based hierarchy. It reorients Title VII back toward its original promise: that no citizen should suffer workplace discrimination because of who they are — any citizen. One could call this a restoration of liberal legalism: a law that sees individuals, not demographic avatars.
Yet, one must be cautious. The deeper bureaucratic culture that surrounds anti-discrimination law — the implicit quotas, the disparate-impact metrics, the DEI mandates — remains untouched by Ames. Indeed, the decision may be read as a one-time concession to the growing class of middle Americans who have felt excluded from the moral calculus of post-1960s governance.
The Court’s decision does not renounce the regime born of the civil rights revolution. But it does moderate it. For those who believe the Civil Rights Act was a noble law weaponized by ideology, Ames is a flicker of restraint — an act of legal hygiene, if not quite repentance.
A Final Thought
If this ruling holds as precedent, and if it is applied consistently, Ames might one day be remembered as the case in which the Court finally admitted: equal protection cannot mean special rules for some and procedural roadblocks for others.
But in a culture habituated to politics by identity, equality before the law is the most radical idea of all.
Jacques Barzun warned at the time that affirmative action would almost certainly perpetuate racism. If race is made an issue in any process of selection or evaluation of people then “race-thinking” will continue and this will generate muddled thinking and inappropriate actions with potentially dangerous unintended consequences.
But who reads Barzun these days? He lived from 1909 to 2012 and produced nearly 40 books with a masterwork on racism that should have been front and centre in the recent surge of interest in the topic.
Just in time for the end of disparate impact.
no more airbags in cars!
Oh Steve, they're not discriminating against whites. They're discriminating for not whites. Sounds like someone needs a refresher on set theory. Maybe not you, but someone.
, but some animals are more equ
I saw a headline on this, and immediately expected it to be a 5-4, or at best 6-3, decision.
9-0 seems too good to be true.
I keep thinking there's got to be some kind of cunningly-disguised back door that will allow progressive judicial activists to reverse the decision's apparent meaning and application, and that John Roberts is surreptitiously distributing the cheat code to the SPLC and the rest of the NGOs even as we speak . . .
My guess is Justice Jackson got confused between majority and minority and was surprised the other justices voted with her.
I'm not the only one who finds this decision odd; see this Daily Signal take from Tyler O'Neill, who reviews three recent unanimous SC decisions in which liberal justices wrote unexpected opinions:
Why Did the Liberal Justices Write Unanimous Conservative Rulings at the Supreme Court?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/06/05/why-did-liberal-justices-write-unanimous-conservative-rulings-supreme-court/
O'Neill's conclusion:
"I consider it far more likely that Kagan, the craftiest of the three, orchestrated this trifecta of rulings as a strategy. The next time conservatives fault Sotomayor, Jackson, or her for an ideologically skewed ruling, Kagan can point to these opinions as evidence of their “fairmindedness.”
Either that, or the liberal justices traded their votes in these cases in order to derail one or more of the remaining hot-button case decisions coming down the pike.
I celebrate these cases, but they also make me nervous. What’s really going on behind the scenes?"
It is hard to believe this is the first case of this type to get to the Supremes since Bakke. Was something holding them back?
Nixon's mistakes, Reagan's mistakes and Bush I's mistake held back quotas and affirmative action for over forty years. Nixon- Mr. Blackmun and Mr. Powell. Reagan- Mrs. O'Connor and Mr. Kennedy. Bush- Miss Souter.
Reagan and Bush I both toyed with the idea of getting rid of the federal affirmative action rules, as Trump has done, but both were told that all Democrats and a majority of Republicans would vote to reinstate federal AA by statute.
Right. Even Bob Dole was liberal on affirmative action.
I'd be interested to read how the case came before the court. Has the plaintiff's life simply been on hold the whole time, is she working in another job, who has paid her legal fees (she lost twice along the way)? I'm guessing some entity saw this as a great test case and decided to take it on.
probably some group such as the alliance defending freedom, or countless others
Historically disadvantaged groups?
Working class men like me in Britain didn't get the vote until 1918.
If 1964 is history, then what is 1918?
Of course, some people might claim that I don't belong to a historically disadvantaged group because I was born after 1918. I find that those people are often born after 1964.
Ignorance of history is a key virtue. That way, when the good people highlight injustice and demand redress, there's none of this, "Uh, but what about?"
Mr. Carr, your ancestors were also disadvantaged by serfdom in the long past just like mine. We should get redress, too.
You can always tell how full of it someone is by the language they use. It is painful to read the NYT framing.
It’s a shame.
Well that is just downright civil.
The decision, a 9-0 blanking, is fine enough. But none of the Civil Rights Laws of the 60s are going to be repealed. You're as likely to have a comeback of the old Sambo's breakfast joints or minstrel shows. But the decision only really applies to large corporations. Smaller and medium-sized companies have pretty much ignored quotas and affirmative action. The local HVAC, the local plumber and the town printer hire who they want and could care less about some Civil Rights Law Hubert Humphrey shoved down the Senate's throat sixty years ago. In Winchester VA where I go out to eat, all the Mexican restaurants have all-Latino staffs, the two upscale Italian restaurants have all-white staffs, my favorite pub has an all-white staff and most Chinese restaurants are staffed all-Chinese. Interestingly, Winchester's best Chinese restaurant has whites as the front of the house and Chinese cooks. There always has to be an outlier.
Speaking of outliers, we have two decent pizza joints in town; one is a mom and pop (old Italian American family), the other is small chain (they have one out west in Frederick and the other over on the Eastern shore) staffed by Latins (not from Europe).
When I lived on the Eastern Shore in Queen Anne's County, the best pizza joint was Carini's. The original Carini's was run by a Sicilian. He sold to North African who kept the standards up. Metro Washington's best Italian is the Three Brothers franchise. That's about the only thing I miss about not working in DC.
On the one hand liberals believe in tabula rasa, blank slate individuals that the society (e.g., the state) shapes and forms into progressive citizens. On the other, we (or some of us) inherit the past history of ancestors and the inability to be expunge our sins.
I don't see how anyone (okay I mean anyone with critical reasoning skills and education) can possibly believe in tabula rasa these days. It barely made sense back in the 1960s. I suppose if you took an extremely spiritual view, maybe.
I think this'll still ultimately be the death of the Civil Rights Act. Much as it's better morally applying to everyone than to someone, the fact that it now "protects" everyone, including majorities, means it's also going to be much more litigious. Imagine Masterpiece Cakeshop but with bad-faith heterosexual couples harassing gay bakeries, and repeated with every majority for every conceivable civil rights violation.
The only way to stop such things from suffocating the country will be by killing or neutering the CRA. Both of which I support, but the rightoids chomping at the bit for open season will very quickly make the case for why sacrificing freedoms of speech and association at the societal altar for the sake of equality was always doomed to bring us disaster.
I asked a well-prompted and somewhat right-shifted ChatGPT 4o to prepare an op-ed response to “Ames,” as Christopher “Age of Entitlement” Caldwell might have drafted it: The Return of Equal Treatment: A Note on the Supreme Court’s Ames Decision
By Christopher Caldwell (hypothetical)
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ames v. Department of Youth Services offers a curious reprieve — not from the reach of the civil rights state, but from its selective enforcement. The unanimous opinion, authored by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, confirms what was always supposed to be true but often wasn’t: that the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act apply to all Americans, not just to those deemed historically aggrieved.
That this ruling had to be made in 2025 — some sixty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act — tells us something about how distorted the application of that law has become. The plaintiff in Ames, a white, heterosexual woman, claimed she was involuntarily transferred to an inferior job post — not demoted, not docked pay, simply moved. Her case had been dismissed by lower courts under the now-discredited view that such transfers must cause “significant” harm to be legally actionable.
What the Court rightly understood — and what a generation of Title VII jurisprudence had obscured — is that the discrimination prohibited by law need not be dramatic to be real. It need only be intentional and harmful, however modestly so. This seemingly modest clarification signals a significant moment: the reassertion of formal equality under law.
The Long Arc of Unequal Enforcement
In The Age of Entitlement, I argued that the civil rights revolution did not supplement the Constitution of 1787 — it supplanted it. It created a new set of governing norms rooted not in individual liberty but in group identity. These norms came to override rights of speech, association, and even democratic self-government. And nowhere was this shift more visible than in how anti-discrimination laws were enforced.
Despite their universal language, the machinery of civil rights came to revolve around a moral hierarchy of identity. Courts, bureaucrats, and corporate HR departments operated under the assumption — sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit — that protections were meant chiefly for minorities, women, and sexual minorities, not for everyone. Thus, a Black lesbian alleging discrimination could expect institutional sympathy. A straight white woman? A skeptical shrug.
A Correction — or an Aberration?
The Ames decision suggests, at least for now, a judicial preference for individual harm over identity-based hierarchy. It reorients Title VII back toward its original promise: that no citizen should suffer workplace discrimination because of who they are — any citizen. One could call this a restoration of liberal legalism: a law that sees individuals, not demographic avatars.
Yet, one must be cautious. The deeper bureaucratic culture that surrounds anti-discrimination law — the implicit quotas, the disparate-impact metrics, the DEI mandates — remains untouched by Ames. Indeed, the decision may be read as a one-time concession to the growing class of middle Americans who have felt excluded from the moral calculus of post-1960s governance.
The Court’s decision does not renounce the regime born of the civil rights revolution. But it does moderate it. For those who believe the Civil Rights Act was a noble law weaponized by ideology, Ames is a flicker of restraint — an act of legal hygiene, if not quite repentance.
A Final Thought
If this ruling holds as precedent, and if it is applied consistently, Ames might one day be remembered as the case in which the Court finally admitted: equal protection cannot mean special rules for some and procedural roadblocks for others.
But in a culture habituated to politics by identity, equality before the law is the most radical idea of all.
Jacques Barzun warned at the time that affirmative action would almost certainly perpetuate racism. If race is made an issue in any process of selection or evaluation of people then “race-thinking” will continue and this will generate muddled thinking and inappropriate actions with potentially dangerous unintended consequences.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/from-plato-to-black-lives-matter-a83
But who reads Barzun these days? He lived from 1909 to 2012 and produced nearly 40 books with a masterwork on racism that should have been front and centre in the recent surge of interest in the topic.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/jacques-barzuns-monumental-contribution