Jason Mazzone at Balikinization, raising exactly a point I’d been pondering:

namudno (verb): to persuade one’s colleagues (esp. on a court) to sign onto an opinion with broader implications than they perceive and then accuse them of backtracking when they later resist said implications.

Many commentators wonder whether the current Supreme Court will overrule Roe v. Wade (by which they really mean Planned Parenthood v. Casey). My own view is that the Court is far more likely to do away with affirmative action than with the right to obtain an abortion. This term supports that prediction with the Court’s decisions in June Medical Services (invalidating a Louisiana requirement that abortion providers have hospital admitting privileges) and Bostock (holding that an employer who fires an individual for being gay or transgender violates Title VII).

Justice Gorsuch in Bostock lays some groundwork for a future decision holding sex- and race-based affirmative action in employment and university admissions (and other contexts) illegal as a matter of federal statutory law. Along the way, Gorsuch seems to have namudnoed the Court’s four liberals, who signed fully onto his opinion (and did not issue any opinions of their own).

As many readers will know, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One [NAMUDNO] v. Holder is the 2009 decision in which the Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts joined in full by all members of the Court except for Justice Thomas, held that a small utility district challenging the coverage and pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act was entitled to seek a bailout from the VRA’s provisions. In his opinion, Roberts highlighted the “federalism concerns” the VRA presented. However, in light of the statutory ruling, Roberts concluded that “[w]hether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.”

Four years later, Roberts authored the Court’s opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, ruling that the VRA’s coverage formula was unconstitutional and thus did not support the pre-clearance requirements. This time, the Court’s ruling was 5-4. In the course of his opinion, Roberts repeatedly invoked and quoted from Northwest Austin, which he presented as foretelling the outcome. “[W]e expressed serious doubts about the Act’s continued constitutionality,” Roberts wrote of Northwest Austin; “[e]ight Members of the Court subscribed to these views, and the remaining Member [Justice Thomas] would have held the Act unconstitutional.” In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg—fairly described as having been hoodwinked—complained about Roberts’ reliance on broad language from Northwest Austin.

In Bostock, the absolutist language in Gorsuch’s opinion (joined, recall, by all four liberals) about Title VII is readymade for a future ruling that Title VII prohibits sex-based affirmative action by covered employers. And if that is true, the same outcome may hold with respect to race and other Title VII categories—and extend also (under Title VI and Title IX) to university admissions and other practices (and those of other entities receiving federal funding) that take account in any way at all of race or gender (or other barred factors). In a nutshell, even if by enacting these statutory provisions Congress did not imagine it was making affirmative action illegal (say because it aimed instead to equalize the workforce and the university) that is what the plain statutory text does.