Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/44

36 constitutional provision whose central command is equality.” Id., at 506.

The dissents here do not acknowledge any of this. They fail to cite Hunt. They fail to cite Croson. They fail to mention that the entirety of their analysis of the Equal Protection Clause—the statistics, the cases, the history—has been considered and rejected before. There is a reason the principal dissent must invoke Justice Marshall’s partial dissent in Bakke nearly a dozen times while mentioning Justice Powell’s controlling opinion barely once (’s opinion ignores Justice Powell altogether). For what one dissent denigrates as “rhetorical flourishes about colorblindness,” (opinion of ), are in fact the proud pronouncements of cases like Loving and Yick Wo, like Shelley and Bolling—they are defining statements of law. We understand the dissents want that law to be different. They are entitled to that desire. But they surely cannot claim the mantle of stare decisis while pursuing it.

The dissents are no more faithful to our precedent on race-based admissions. To hear the principal dissent tell it, Grutter blessed such programs indefinitely, until “racial inequality will end.” (opinion of ). But Grutter did no such thing. It emphasized—not once or twice, but at least six separate times—that race-based