Biden rejects packing Supreme Court after affirmative action decision

President Joe Biden rejected renewed calls to pack or expand the Supreme Court in the wake of its landmark ruling on Thursday to forbid the consideration of race as a criteria for college admissions.

In an MSNBC interview with Nicole Wallace after the decision, Biden rejected calls to pack the court with judges more favorably disposed to his policies, saying "if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy."

"Maybe it’s just the optimist in me — I think that some of the court are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways that it hadn’t been questioned in the past," he added.

The 6-3 decision rejected the admissions practices of the University of North Carolina and Harvard, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that "[m]any universities ... have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice."

Biden has appointed a single Supreme Court justice thus far in his term, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who voted against the majority. All three of former President Donald Trump's appointees sided against race-based admissions.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.