Brace Yourselves for the Supreme Court’s Racial-Preferences Case to Be Argued Before Election Day

The biggest Supreme Court cases of the 2022 term are expected to be the challenges to the use of race in admissions for Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The two cases were recently un-consolidated so that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who promised the Senate that she would recuse herself because of her role at Harvard, could nonetheless sit on the UNC case. That upset one common assumption about the cases; a second was that the Court would not want to inject itself further into electoral politics by hearing the argument before the midterm elections. After all, the actual decisions are very unlikely to come until many months later, and the justices hate to have their questioning treated as a political football.

But that is now out the window as well: Yesterday, the Court released its argument calendar for October 31 through November 9, and lo and behold, the UNC case will be the first one argued, on Halloween — eight days before the election. And, after Justice Jackson then steps off the bench, the Harvard case will be the second. Brace yourself for what will undoubtedly be a weeklong campaign of dishonest racial demagoguery aimed at getting out Democratic voters.