via Stewart Acuff's blog
Subject: The Supreme Court Takes Another Shot At American Democracy--mon blog
Sounding like Roger Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court which rendered the Dred Scott decision leading inexorably to the Civil War, Chief Justice John Roberts cited the 10th Amendment to the Constitution in the court's decision to cut the heart out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Last week the Supreme Court inspite of now years of states trying to suppress the vote, disenfranchise People of Color and our Elders and young people, used the 10th Amendment also known as states' rights to effectively destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act which was enacted after years of struggle, beatings, arrests, lynchings, murders, and mass protests to make certain that states could no longer use poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation to prevent People of Color from voting.
The struggle for the right to vote for African-Americans took 90 years from the end of Reconstruction to 1965. In one decision this anti-democratic, anti-American, anti-Black, anti-worker, anti-middle class, pro-oligarch Supreme Court embraced the notorious states rights doctrine to say all that struggle and pain and death--John Lewis' beating at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Viola Liuzza's murder on Highway 80, James Meredith's death by a back-shooting from the Klan at his house, the lynching of Mississippi Freedom Summer organizers Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, and the tens of thousands of indignities suffered by African-Americans no longer matter. And so Voting Rights is gone in America.
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Subject: The Supreme Court Takes Another Shot At American Democracy--mon blog
Sounding like Roger Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court which rendered the Dred Scott decision leading inexorably to the Civil War, Chief Justice John Roberts cited the 10th Amendment to the Constitution in the court's decision to cut the heart out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Last week the Supreme Court inspite of now years of states trying to suppress the vote, disenfranchise People of Color and our Elders and young people, used the 10th Amendment also known as states' rights to effectively destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act which was enacted after years of struggle, beatings, arrests, lynchings, murders, and mass protests to make certain that states could no longer use poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation to prevent People of Color from voting.
The struggle for the right to vote for African-Americans took 90 years from the end of Reconstruction to 1965. In one decision this anti-democratic, anti-American, anti-Black, anti-worker, anti-middle class, pro-oligarch Supreme Court embraced the notorious states rights doctrine to say all that struggle and pain and death--John Lewis' beating at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Viola Liuzza's murder on Highway 80, James Meredith's death by a back-shooting from the Klan at his house, the lynching of Mississippi Freedom Summer organizers Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, and the tens of thousands of indignities suffered by African-Americans no longer matter. And so Voting Rights is gone in America.
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10:14 AM (1 hour ago)
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I share Stuart's outrage completely. This must not simply be left to become a blip in the news.
So many people, Black and White, gave their energies and some their lives to end the brutal racist dictatorship(because that was what the one party poll tax segregated South was from the of reconstruction to the end of "legal" segregation and disenfranchisement.
And it didn't happen all at once, either. It happened in stages and in the 1880s and 1890s.
A Supreme Court dominated by corporate lawyers and politicians subservient to the Trusts(as they were called at the time), invalidated the Civil Rights laws passed after the Civil War, negated the 14th amendment as it applied to the former slaves(and it was drafted specifically for them as everyone knew),
To add insult to injury the Supreme Court then applied the 14th amendment protections to corporations, declaring them to be "persons"(the fourteenth amendment used the term "persons" for the four million former slaves, since the thirteenth amendment declared they were no longer slaves, but they were not yet citizens)
The Supreme Court then completed the injury in Plessy v. Ferguson, declaring a Louisiana segregation law to be constitutional on the states rights doctrine, but adding the provision of "separate but equal" to get around the equal protection guarentees of the fourteenth amendment and for that matter the whole bill of rights
Those courts robbed the American people of the advances in democratic rights that they had won through the Civil
War in the 1860s decades after the war was over and continued to attack the democratic rights of the America
people until the New Deal government began to change the composition of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary generally during the depression, changes which began to be undermined first by Nixon and then more
extensively by Reagan and the two Bush presidents.
This decision attacks the democratic rights won by the American people in the Voting Rights of 1965 directly. It
strengthens the reactionaries who have launched both public and private voter suppression campaigns, aimed primarily at African-American working class people, but also at Latinos and others in selected districts through the country who are seen as voters against Right Republican and "conservative" candidates.
Here, specifically, the Court is pulling a new Plessy v. Ferguson to "tolerate" public voter suppression directly in Southern states which today are the most important political base for the Republican Right, in Texas, where the growing Latino population constitutes a threat to the Republican right, and indirectly through the country.
We have got to fight this decision as the early Republican party fought the Dred Scott Decision, as progressives fought the anti-labor and anti-social welfare decisions of the Supreme Court until the New Deal government.
No one can reasonably expect President Obama, who would not be president if the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had not been enacted and sustained over the decades, to do what Franklin Roosevelt did in 1937--attempt to expand the membership of the court in order to defeat the rightwing majority. Roosevelt's tactic failed but it did frighten a few Justices into upholding Social Security the NLRB, minimun wages, and the forty hour week, by 5-4 votes, whereas previously they would have declared all of that legislation unconstitutional.
A sustained campaign by the President and all mass organizations, reflected in Congress, might in the short run have a similar effect on the Justice Kennedy on this Court and also set the stage for reversing the trends of the last three decades, which President Obama has, in his judicial appointments already challenged much more extensively than the Clinton administration did in the 1990s.
What Congress can do and must do is rewrite these provisions of the Voting Rights Act to invalidate the Supreme Court's decision--which they of course have the right to do and all small d democrats must struggle to see that they do. It is unlikely that this will happen with this Congress, but defeating the Republicans in 2014 will make it much more likely. In 1858, the then 2 years old Republican party ran against the Dred Scott decision and won a majority in Congress(that was one of many reasons, including most of all an economic depression and a sharp political backlash against the pro slaveholder policies of the Buchanan administration in the Kansas territory).
Also, beginning to demand reform of the federal judiciary so as to challenge both in principle and policy the Reagan-Bush president courts and elect presidents and congresses which will replace them so that they cannot hang orund to undermine progressive initiatives for decades to come should be what we are advancing today and in the near
future
Norman Markowitz
I had planned to write for the blog on the Supreme Court's decision undermining the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but this excellent commentary by Stuart Acuff, posted on Socialist Economics, really hit summed up the despicable nature of what the court has done. I responded with a lengthy historical analysis and Stuart then responded with a point that I agree with totally. This is an issue that we must advance and advance now.
Norman Markowitz
As an ugly postscript to this decision, Strom Thurmond, in 1968, offered to support Richard Nixon at the Republican convention over Ronald Reagan, successor to Barry Goldwater as the leader of the Republican right, if Nixon pledged to do what he could to block the renewal of the voting rights act, which Nixon did promise(fortunately, Tricky Dick doublecrossed Strom on that one). If there is an afterlife or something like it, which I don't believe of course, the spirits of Tricky Dick and Stom would be very happy with the Court's decision, although Essie Mae Washington Williams, the child whom Thurmond fathered with an African-American servant in the late 1920s and who only revealed this sordid story after his death(she was seventy eight at the time and she passed away recentlly at the age of 87) would look at the decision differently
via Stewart Acuff's blog
Subject: The Supreme Court Takes Another Shot At American Democracy--mon blog
Sounding like Roger Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court which rendered the Dred Scott decision leading inexorably to the Civil War, Chief Justice John Roberts cited the 10th Amendment to the Constitution in the court's decision to cut the heart out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Last week the Supreme Court inspite of now years of states trying to suppress the vote, disenfranchise People of Color and our Elders and young people, used the 10th Amendment also known as states' rights to effectively destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act which was enacted after years of struggle, beatings, arrests, lynchings, murders, and mass protests to make certain that states could no longer use poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation to prevent People of Color from voting.
The struggle for the right to vote for African-Americans took 90 years from the end of Reconstruction to 1965. In one decision this anti-democratic, anti-American, anti-Black, anti-worker, anti-middle class, pro-oligarch Supreme Court embraced the notorious states rights doctrine to say all that struggle and pain and death--John Lewis' beating at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Viola Liuzza's murder on Highway 80, James Meredith's death by a back-shooting from the Klan at his house, the lynching of Mississippi Freedom Summer organizers Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, and the tens of thousands of indignities suffered by African-Americans no longer matter. And so Voting Rights is gone in America.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
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10:14 AM (2 hours ago)
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I share Stuart's outrage completely. This must not simply be left to become a blip in the news.
So many people, Black and White, gave their energies and some their lives to end the brutal racist dictatorship(because that was what the one party poll tax segregated South was from the of reconstruction to the end of "legal" segregation and disenfranchisement.
And it didn't happen all at once, either. It happened in stages and in the 1880s and 1890s.
A Supreme Court dominated by corporate lawyers and politicians subservient to the Trusts(as they were called at the time), invalidated the Civil Rights laws passed after the Civil War, negated the 14th amendment as it applied to the former slaves(and it was drafted specifically for them as everyone knew),
To add insult to injury the Supreme Court then applied the 14th amendment protections to corporations, declaring them to be "persons"(the fourteenth amendment used the term "persons" for the four million former slaves, since the thirteenth amendment declared they were no longer slaves, but they were not yet citizens)
The Supreme Court then completed the injury in Plessy v. Ferguson, declaring a Louisiana segregation law to be constitutional on the states rights doctrine, but adding the provision of "separate but equal" to get around the equal protection guarentees of the fourteenth amendment and for that matter the whole bill of rights
Those courts robbed the American people of the advances in democratic rights that they had won through the Civil
War in the 1860s decades after the war was over and continued to attack the democratic rights of the America
people until the New Deal government began to change the composition of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary generally during the depression, changes which began to be undermined first by Nixon and then more
extensively by Reagan and the two Bush presidents.
This decision attacks the democratic rights won by the American people in the Voting Rights of 1965 directly. It
strengthens the reactionaries who have launched both public and private voter suppression campaigns, aimed primarily at African-American working class people, but also at Latinos and others in selected districts through the country who are seen as voters against Right Republican and "conservative" candidates.
Here, specifically, the Court is pulling a new Plessy v. Ferguson to "tolerate" public voter suppression directly in Southern states which today are the most important political base for the Republican Right, in Texas, where the growing Latino population constitutes a threat to the Republican right, and indirectly through the country.
We have got to fight this decision as the early Republican party fought the Dred Scott Decision, as progressives fought the anti-labor and anti-social welfare decisions of the Supreme Court until the New Deal government.
No one can reasonably expect President Obama, who would not be president if the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had not been enacted and sustained over the decades, to do what Franklin Roosevelt did in 1937--attempt to expand the membership of the court in order to defeat the rightwing majority. Roosevelt's tactic failed but it did frighten a few Justices into upholding Social Security the NLRB, minimun wages, and the forty hour week, by 5-4 votes, whereas previously they would have declared all of that legislation unconstitutional.
A sustained campaign by the President and all mass organizations, reflected in Congress, might in the short run have a similar effect on the Justice Kennedy on this Court and also set the stage for reversing the trends of the last three decades, which President Obama has, in his judicial appointments already challenged much more extensively than the Clinton administration did in the 1990s.
What Congress can do and must do is rewrite these provisions of the Voting Rights Act to invalidate the Supreme Court's decision--which they of course have the right to do and all small d democrats must struggle to see that they do. It is unlikely that this will happen with this Congress, but defeating the Republicans in 2014 will make it much more likely. In 1858, the then 2 years old Republican party ran against the Dred Scott decision and won a majority in Congress(that was one of many reasons, including most of all an economic depression and a sharp political backlash against the pro slaveholder policies of the Buchanan administration in the Kansas territory).
Also, beginning to demand reform of the federal judiciary so as to challenge both in principle and policy the Reagan-Bush president courts and elect presidents and congresses which will replace them so that they cannot hang orund to undermine progressive initiatives for decades to come should be what we are advancing today and in the near
future
Norman Markowitz
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11:01 AM (1 hour ago)
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Thanks very much, Brother Norman. One very concrete place to ramp up the education and mobilization across the country is a coordinated and very strong reaction to the voter suppression tactics states will soon begin to enact. That will make the campaign and the issue real, concrete, local, and close to the ground--all necessary but not guaranteed elements of social movement--or mass movement. stewart
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