Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) bashed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for suggesting affirmative action was sending Africans Americans to schools too advanced for them. Reid called the comments — made during Wednesday’s oral arguments for a major affirmative action case — “stunning,” “deeply disturbing” and “racist.”
“It is deeply disturbing to hear a Supreme Court justice endorse racist ideas from the bench on the nation’s highest court,” Reid said from the Senate floor Thursday. “His endorsement of racist theories has frightening ramifications, not least of which is to undermine the academic achievements of Americans, African Americans especially.”
Reid went on to connect Scalia’s comments to GOP 2016 frontrunner Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigration as well as Republican leaders’ refusal to disavow Trump outright for the idea.
“And now a Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice endorsing racist ideas from the Supreme Court bench,” Reid said. “The only difference between ideas endorse by Trump and by Scalia is that Scalia has a robe and a lifetime appointment. Ideas like this don’t belong on the Internet, let alone the mouths of national figures.”
During Wednesday’s hearing for the case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Scalia referenced an amicus brief and said that “there are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.”
