He accused them of burying a power grab in the dissent. According to the Daily Wire, Roberts addressed page 46 of the dissent, claiming that the Justices had "divorced the case from the context in a concerted effort to make the Court the arbiter of which race[s] were entitled to preferential treatment.".
The dissent was penned by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, with Justice Elena Kagan concurring.
Roberts said, "The principal dissent wrenches our case law from its context, going to lengths to ignore the parts of that law it does not like. The serious reservations that Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher had about racial preferences go unrecognized." He continued, "The unambiguous requirements of the Equal Protection Clause - 'the most rigid,' searching scrutiny it entails - go without note."
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Justice Roberts continued:
"The repeated demands that race-based admissions programs must end go overlooked - contorted, worse still, into a demand that such programs never stop." And, "Most troubling of all is what the dissent must make these omissions to defend: a judiciary that picks winners and losers based on the color of their skin. While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is 'inherently unequal,' said Brown. 347 U.S., at 495 (emphasis added). It depends, says the dissent."
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Chief Justice Roberts addressed the liberal justices' apparent attempt to reserve for the Court the power to choose which race[s] deserve such beneficial treatment. He said it was so egregious that it mirrored decisions before the "Second Founding." The post-Civil War-era 14th Amendment and the included Equal Protection Clause ended the Court's freedom to do so. He said, "The dissent espouses a claim to power so radical, so destructive, that it required a Second Founding to undo."
He said that Judge Harlan knew better because of "the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens in this country. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." Plessy, 163 U.S., at 559 (Harlan, J., dissenting)."
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