Vox Sentences: The most important one-line Supreme Court decision you’ll ever read

Supreme Court to Abigail Fisher: girl, get over it; Supreme Court on immigration: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

An earth-shaking non-decision decision

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

• The Supreme Court announced today that it had deadlocked 4-4 on the lawsuit (brought by a coalition of states) challenging President Obama's 2014 executive actions on immigration.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• You can read the Court's opinion here. (It's all of one line.)

  [Supreme Court of the United States]

• This is the first major court case since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia that went the way conservatives might have wished — and wouldn't have done so had Obama nominee Merrick Garland been sitting on the Court.

  [Washington Monthly / Nancy LeTourneau]

• Technically, the Supreme Court deadlock did nothing — it simply allowed the actions to remain enjoined as federal judge Andrew Hanen considers his final ruling on them. (Given that Judge Hanen was last seen demanding that the government dox about 50,000 unauthorized immigrants, it's pretty clear how he's going to rule.)

  [ThinkProgress / Ian Millhiser]

• In practice, the Court's deadlock makes it extremely unlikely that the actions will go into effect in their current form, meaning 4.5 million immigrants will not have the chance to apply for protection against deportation or work permits.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• The immigrants who would have been helped by Obama's actions aren't exactly at high risk of deportation in their absence. The administration has hugely scaled back deportations in the past two years (high-profile raids aside).

  [Washington Post / Jerry Markon]

• The medium-term outlook for unauthorized immigrants in the US depends (and always has) on who's elected in November: Hillary Clinton, who's promised to protect even more unauthorized immigrants from deportation than Obama tried to, or Donald Trump, who's promised to deport all of them (and possibly their families).

  [Greg Sargent via Twitter]

• But the opportunity cost, at least for the moment, is huge. The 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who got protected under Obama's 2012 executive action (which still stands) have seen huge changes in their lives and families.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

One small setback for a white woman, one giant leap for whitewomankind

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

• Also Thursday, the Supreme Court sided with the University of Texas in the case Fisher v. University of Texas, upholding UT's affirmative action policy once and for all.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• The Fisher case has been going on for so long that Abigail Fisher, the plaintiff who sued UT for rejecting her application (despite being less qualified than many white or black applicants), has been out of college for years.

  [ProPublica / Nikole Hannah-Jones]

• (Ironically, white women are generally the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action policies, even though they're typically opposed to them.)

  [Vox / Victoria Massie]

• Of course, the case was never really about Fisher. She was recruited by a public interest "yenta" looking for a plaintiff to bring down affirmative action and race-based policies everywhere.

  [NYT / Morgan Smith]

• In that, they did not succeed. Justice Anthony Kennedy actually voted in favor of affirmative action for the first time in his career — though his narrowly tailored opinion doesn't exactly lay the issue to rest for good.

  [The Atlantic / Garrett Epps]

• (Kennedy's change of heart prompted an enormously bitter dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, who quoted, at length, from Kennedy's earlier anti–affirmative action opinions.)

  [Slate / Dahlia Lithwick]

• The next battle in the affirmative action wars: Asian Americans, whose status as people of color who aren't usually "disadvantaged minorities" gets brought to the fore in the context of college admissions.

  [City Journal / Dennis Saffran]

Paz Colombiano

Xinhua/Liu Bin via Getty Images

• The Colombian government signed a ceasefire agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Thursday, tentatively ending 50-plus years of civil war.

  [Reuters / Marc Frank and Carlos Vargas]

• By some counts, the civil war has been going on for 100 years. Suffice it to say, it's been a very long time.

  [The Nation / Greg Grandin]

• The terms of the ceasefire are surprisingly controversial. For one thing, FARC members who have confessed to crimes against humanity will essentially be paroled rather than going to prison — which is extremely unpopular among Colombians (and has been criticized vociferously by the country's former president).

  [Associated Press]

• But if the people of Colombia really hate the deal (or the unpopular president, Juan Manuel Santos), they have the opportunity to strike it down in a plebiscite this fall.

  [The Economist]

• Meanwhile, the Colombian government has another problem: The FARC's hardcore counterpart, the National Liberation Army (ELN), is still in the field and will be much harder to negotiate with.

  [InSight Crime / Jerremy McDermott]

MISCELLANEOUS

Mother Jones's Shane Bauer spent four months working as a for-profit prison guard. This is what he learned. [Mother Jones / Shane Bauer]

• A military contractor has killed at least 24 working dogs after losing a contract. It could end up killing as many as 140 total.

  [Sofrep News / Desiree Huitt]

• New trend: millennials in their mid-20s still going to their pediatrician.

  [NYT / Jane Furse]

• The best of the #teens' yearbook quotes, 2016 edition: "My A's turned to B's and so did my grades, God bless."

  [NY Mag / Madison Malone Kircher]

• One way to pay reparations for redlining: only allow mortgage interest deductions for people who buy in neighborhoods that are at least 10 percent black.

  [Washington Post / Emily Badger]

VERBATIM

"Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth." [The Atlantic / David Freedman]

• "Taping your webcam isn't paranoid. It's practical."

  [Slate / Will Oremus]

• "Two-thirds of gun deaths in the US – roughly 20,000 each year – are gun suicides … In rural, gun-loving states like New Hampshire and Vermont, it’s gun dealers and gun rights advocates who are leading the charge to prevent these kinds of deaths."

  [The Guardian / Lois Beckett]

• "The side hustle offers something worth much more than money: A hedge against feeling stuck and dull and cheated by life."

  [Quartz / Catherine Baab-Muguira]

• "I’m pretty certain that my daughters will not end up working on Wall Street."

  [President Barack Obama to Bloomberg Businessweek / John Micklethwait, Megan Murphy, and Ellen Pollock]

WATCH THIS

50 million Americans live with disabilities – so why ignore their vote? [YouTube / Liz Plank, Matteen Mokalla, and Dean Peterson]

Vox / Liz Plank, Matteen Mokalla, Dean Peterson

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via