This week, the Supreme Court States is confronting yet again an issue that has bedeviled it for the past 30 years: the use of racial quotas by government-owned universities and private universities that accept government funding.

The last time the court looked at this issue, it punted. As is always the case when the court punts, the issue returned. This time around, the issue comes in an environment hot with racial anxiety and lack of constitutional fidelity.

Here is the backstory.

The 14th Amendment was enacted after the conclusion of the War Between the States. The radical Republicans who controlled the Congress and most Northern state legislatures wanted to punish the Southern states severely. Yet, their debates on the floors of Congress and state legislatures are unilluminating, as they offer contradictory purposes.

But the language of the Amendment — in the Equal Protection Clause — makes it clear that by requiring the laws to be applied equally, the mandate of the amendment is to remove race from the armament of states’ tools of governance.

Yet, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that states could use race as a basis to govern, so long as they did so equally. This is the separate but equal jurisprudence. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that jurisprudence was reversed when the court ruled that separate is inherently unequal.

Without saying so directly, the post-Brown federal jurisprudence has assumed as an underlying principle that the mandate of the amendment is to eradicate race from the states’ armaments of governance.

There is no federal Equal Protection Clause. Yet, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 purported to abolish all use of race in government, public accommodations, housing and workplaces, on public and on private property.

Since 1964, most states have enacted their own laws against racial discrimination. Today, nearly all colleges and universities use race as an admissions factor. According to their own public statements, they believe that they are serving a societal good and advancing the public policy of the United States by assuring a racially diverse makeup of all incoming classes.

To their point, the Supreme Court, in an absurdly reasoned 2003 opinion, generally accepted these goals and employed them to trump the 14th Amendment, but only until 2028. Why 2028? Because Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the opinion, opined that in the 25 years following her opinion, race relations in the United Stated will have so improved that racial quotas in college admissions will not be a public issue. How wrong she was!

In Supreme Court history, this is the only case in which the court put a time limit on the duration of its ruling.

Notwithstanding this lamentable history, a group of libertarian-leaning college students and professors have challenged the use of racial quotas in university admission policies by suing Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest public university.

Earlier this past week, the Supreme Court devoted five hours to oral argument on these two cases, but not before the feds jumped in. Surprisingly, the Biden Department of Justice entered the case in behalf of the plaintiffs, arguing for the purest view of the 14th Amendment — that it prohibits all state-owned or federally assisted institutions from racial discrimination.

After 150 years of slavery and 150 years of Jim Crow, America can’t shake its racial demons. All these problems were caused by governments that treated persons as chattel and enslaved and suppressed the African race.

The government needs to stay chained down to the Constitution.

That means it must be color-blind, stay off of private property and comply with the legal principles it imposes on the rest of us.

Harvard can do what it wants on its own lands, and the feds should stay off of them.

It is richer than the federal government; it doesn’t need and shouldn’t receive a penny from taxpayers. Even if it were poor, there is simply no constitutional basis for taxpayer funding of private schools.

UNC is directly bound by the Constitution, and it must be color-blind.

All this came about by government telling folks how to live, spend their money, use their private property and plan for the future.

This is the same government that lies, cheats, steals, kills, can’t deliver the mail, stop ro-bo calls or fill potholes.

Whenever will we learn that that government is best which governs least?