Earlier this week, we noted that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill defeated the group known as Students for Fair Admissions in a case before a United States District Court in which the university was accused by SFFA of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants in its admissions process. It marked the third high-profile defeat for SFFA in recent court cases (not including losses in the appeals process) as the group previously sued both the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University — to no avail. But despite their losses, which have got to be incredibly demoralizing, the group’s longtime leader, Edward Blum, has put a positive spin on failure.

As Mr. Blum is quoted in a piece by Nick Anderson in The Washington Post entitled “Legal victory for UNC on race-conscious admissions comes as Supreme Court weighs whether to take up the issue,” “‘It is not unusual for high-profile and difficult legal cases to be resolved at the Supreme Court rather than the lower courts,’ Blum said Tuesday. ‘Students for Fair Admissions anticipated likely losses at the district court in all of the challenges to college admissions.'” Oh please. Rewind a few years and there’s no way that Edward Blum and SFFA would have been happy with these three decisive defeats, especially the Harvard defeat some thought could very well have swung their way. These outcomes are not what the one-man band challenging Affirmative Action had in mind and, no, Mr. Blum, it is unusual for high-profile and difficult legal cases to be resolved at the Supreme Court. Most cases — even high profile, difficult cases — don’t make the Supreme Court’s docket. But nice try there! We do love that spin.

The fact is if this case does end up before the Supreme Court — and it has a while to go before it would get there — the decisively conservative majority could rule that the consideration of race in college admissions is unlawful. But this case is not yet on our nation’s highest court’s docket and until it is, well, Mr. Blum is behind the eight-ball.