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george wallace
The Andrew Johnson/Bull Connor Supreme Court: The Colorblind Society That Isn’t
Jul 02, 2023
If Andrew Johnson and Bull Connor were alive today, they’d be mighty happy with this Supreme Court. It might be their ghosts, along with their ideological chums from Roger Taney, architect of the infamous Dred Scott case, to Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and the other Southern Dixiecrats, wearing those Court robes today.
Those defenders of slavery and segregation would be thrilled with the efforts of Roberts and his cabal to rewrite the history of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” clause of the Reconstruction era that is the core of American democracy. And their frontal assault on the goal of a multi-racial society premised on diversity, equity, and inclusion that is so feared by the ghosts of the plantation class ideologues and their descendants longing for a return to those days past.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ labored efforts to pretend his court is not merely a far-right partisan cabal crashed aground in a parade of extremist court rulings in the waning days of the 2022-2023 court term.
In the cynical hands of Roberts and his cronies on the court, the original intent of the 14th has been perverted to instead buttress and protect white supremacy and white privilege. And to strike down reforms designed to expand rights and protections for the marginalized and disadvantaged.
The debauched majority opinion striking down affirmative action, defines the “core purpose” of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th as “do[ing] away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race,” by which Roberts argues means historically disadvantaged Black and Brown students should not “be admitted (to colleges and universities) in greater numbers than they otherwise would have been.”
That would surely be news to the authors of the 14th and its precursor, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, who specifically crafted the bill and amendment to reverse the horrors of slavery and the pseudo-scientific racism which buttressed it in the face of virulent racism and increasingly violent repression by the former Confederate soldiers abetted by the white politicians aligned with them.
As Eric Foner, one of the most prominent historians of Reconstruction, wrote in his seminal book “The Second Founding,” President Johnson vetoed the 1866 Act (overridden by Congress) as made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race” and opponents of the 14th directly attacked it as a violation of white supremacy.
“[E]qual protection of the laws is not achieved through indiscriminate imposition of inequalities,” Roberts pontificated, seeking to obscure and re-write the 14th’s “equal protection of the laws” clause as meant to advocate a colorblind society that as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her forceful dissent “is not, and has never been, colorblind.”
As with his mugging on the Voting Rights Act, the subtext of his evisceration of affirmative action is infused with his presumption that the racist sins of the past are now past.
Roberts’ interpretation of the 14th, noted Sonia Sotomayor, is not only “contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history, but is also grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation. Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today.”
Or as Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson in her dissent, noted in beautiful simplicity, “history speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today. By all accounts, they are still stark.”
The Court majority, wrote Sotomayor in her far reaching dissent, “subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society… Reduced to its simplest terms, the Court’s conclusion is that an increase in the representation of racial minorities at institutions of higher learning that were historically reserved for white Americans is an unfair and repugnant outcome that offends the Equal Protection Clause”.
Or as Leah Litman, one of three constitutional law professors who provide colorful takedowns on the Court in their entertaining podcast Strict Scrutiny put it, “there’s almost nothing more that the Republican appointed justices love to do than to deny doing what it is in fact they are doing.”
The veil of Roberts’ deception is easily ripped off by glaring exemptions in the majority opinion, another telling case described by Sotomayor, and a companion Court ruling the next day.
First, there is the court’s transparent acceptance of preferential admission policy for legacy applicants and the offspring of wealthy donors, which ensures special status rather than the “merit” of a supposed colorblind society. Of white Harvard students, 43 percent are either legacies, children of faculty, kin of donors or a recruited athlete who would not have gotten in if not for special treatment that the Court does not challenge.
Second, not well hidden in a footnote, Roberts exempts military academies, allowing them to continue to use race-based admissions “in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.” In other words, the highly diverse military and the need for a diverse officer corps.
“During the Vietnam War,” Sotomayor noted, lack of racial diversity “threatened the integrity and performance of the Nation’s military” because it fueled “perceptions of racial/ethnic minorities serving as ‘cannon fodder’ for white military leaders.” Or as Jackson put it, “the Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom.”
To Sotomayor, “the majority recognizes the compelling need for diversity in the military and
the national security implications at stake but it ends race-conscious college admissions at civilian universities implicating those interests anyway.” Diversity is equally essential everywhere in a society that is growing more multi-national, more multi-cultural by the day no matter how hard the Tucker Carlson’s and his ilk, try to stop it.
“Race-conscious college admissions,” Sotomayor added, are, for example, “critical for providing equitable and effective public services. State and local governments require public servants educated in diverse environments who can “identify, understand, and respond to perspectives” in “our increasingly diverse communities.”
Third, Sotomayor cited another case where the Court majority was perfectly comfortable with a race-based exception where “Mexican appearance” could be “a relevant factor” to justify a stop “at the border.” The Court, she wrote, thus facilitated racial profiling of Latinos as a law enforcement tool and did not adopt a race-blind rule. The Court later extended this reasoning to border patrol agents selectively referring motorists for secondary inspection at a checkpoint, concluding that “even if it be assumed that such referrals are made largely on the basis of apparent Mexican ancestry, [there is] no constitutional violation.”
And then came the subsequent ruling the next day ruling 6-3 on partisan lines if a Colorado web designer could hypothetically, as Strict Scrutinynoted, refuse to design hypothetical wedding websites for hypothetical same-sex couples despite a state law that forbids discrimination against gay people.
“For the first time in history”, Sotomayor wrote in another powerful dissent, “granted a business open to the public a Constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”
“The owner who hangs a shingle and offers her services to the public cannot retreat from the promise of open service. It is to convey the promise of a free and open society and then take the prize away from the despised few.”
Sotomayor aptly recounts the long struggle to achieve a “public accommodations law” that guarantees to every person the full and equal enjoyment of places of public accommodation without unjust discrimination. The civil rights freedom movement won enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 which prohibit discrimination by places of public accommodation on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or disability – laws premised, one might add, on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment that the Roberts Court majority is so determined to subvert.
Sotomayor and Jackson both emphasized the need for continued popular struggle to win the reforms needed to counter the rightwing assaults.
In a master class history that recounts the pervasive legacy of slavery, segregation and continuing structural racism, Jackson reminded all of us that “the justification for admissions programs that account for race is inseparable from the race-linked gaps in health, wealth, and well-being that still exist in our society (the closure of which today’s decision will forestall).”
From economic opportunity, savings and income to housing to education to the criminal justice system, the examples continue to rip through every fabric of our society. Those are reasons that historically disadvantaged Black and Latino students are disproportionately harmed by the Court’s overturning of President Biden’s plan to cancel federal student debt as well.
One of the most insidious consequences Jackson highlights, is the most basic – health, life and death. Citing the success of the University of North Carolina (UNC) policy outlawed by the court, Jackson wrote: “Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives.
“For marginalized communities in North Carolina,” she continued, “it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication).
“For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die. Studies also confirm what common sense counsels: Closing wealth disparities through programs like UNC’s – which, beyond diversifying the medical profession, open doors to every sort of opportunity – helps address the aforementioned health disparities (in the long run) as well,” Jackson wrote.
Sotomayor cited briefs submitted by the Southern Governors that increasing the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds who join “the ranks of medical professionals” improves “healthcare access and health outcomes in medically underserved communities.” And another from the Association of American Medical Colleges that all physicians become better practitioners when they learn in a racially diverse environment.
Other medical professionals have issued similar warnings. Lee Jones, dean of medical education at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, observed that the ruling will harm efforts to mitigate the country’s massive racial and health disparities, adding that white residents in Washington, D.C., live more than 15 years more than Black residents.
After California banned affirmative action in the notorious Prop. 209 initiative in 1996, the number of Black and Latino students in colleges and medical schools plummeted. At the University of California San Diego, the entering medical school class in 1997 did not include a single Black student.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra noted that people of color had been excluded from attending medical school and joining medical organizations for generations. “This ruling will make it even more difficult for the nation’s colleges and universities to help create future health experts and workers that reflect” the nation’s diversity. “We need more health workers, especially those who look like and share the experiences of the people they serve,” he said.
“It is important to have a representative, culturally and linguistically competent nursing workforce to provide the best care for our communities, and yet only 6.3 percent of RNs are Black and just 6.9 percent are Latinx, despite Black and Latinx people respectively accounting for 13.6 percent and 19.1 percent of the total U.S. population,” said National Nurses United. “We need to diversify the nursing workforce and thus increase, not cut back, educational opportunities for people of color who want to be nurses.”
Fig leaf efforts by Roberts to shroud his racist intent that universities can, as Sotomayor put it, “in some situations, consider race in application essays is nothing but an attempt to put lipstick on a pig. The Court’s opinion circumscribes universities’ ability to consider race in any form by meticulously gutting respondents’ asserted diversity interests. Yet, because the Court cannot escape the inevitable truth that race matters in students’ lives, it announces a false promise to save face and appear attuned to reality. No one is fooled.”
For everyone appalled by the ghosts of Andrew Johnson, Bull Connors et al who sit on the court bench today, it is long past time to revisit proposals for essential court reform, from term limits of the lifetime appointments to expansion of the court to reflect the political reality of the nation.
“Despite the Court’s unjustified exercise of power the opinion today will serve only to highlight the Court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound, Sotomayor concluded. “As has been the case before in the history of American democracy, concluded, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, “the arc of the moral universe” will bend toward racial justice despite the Court’s efforts today to impede its progress.”
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The Name of the Only Republican Possibly Worse Than Donald Trump Is Mitch McConnell
Perhaps even more than the morally bankrupt Trump, McConnell is the worst among us
Aug 11, 2019
Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell is from Kentucky, but he epitomizes what is wrong with the nation's capital.
McConnell is a 77-year-old white man who has been running the Senate -- deciding its agenda and what will or will not be voted on by all 100 senators -- longer than any previous Republican in history. He was first elected to the Senate in 1984 and was last re-elected with just over 56% of the vote.
McConnell's second wife is Elaine Chao, another Washington fixture who has served in a number of Cabinet posts and is currently heading the Department of Transportation. McConnell is worth an estimated $22.5 million, most of it inherited from Chao's mother. Chao's Chinese family runs a prosperous shipping company; she now oversees America's shipping industry.
"It's about clinging to power at any cost. It's about getting right-wing judges appointed to lifetime judicial posts who will be counted on for decades to keep the anti-abortion, pro-gun, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, social-safety-net-slashing, unlimited-campaign-donations-for-special-interests and anti-business-regulation agenda in full throttle."
We bring up McConnell, the Senate majority leader, because unequivocally he will never be awarded any sort of profile in courage award.
McConnell is steadfastly refusing to bring up two House-passed bills that would mandate stiffer background checks on sales of guns. After a week of devastating shooting massacres in California, Texas and Ohio, McConnell would not bring the Senate back from its August recess to vote on any form of common-sense gun control. That includes taking away guns from dangerously mentally ill people (red-flag laws), reducing the size of high-capacity magazines, making military-style assault weapons illegal, buying back unwanted guns or requiring tougher background checks.
This is despite the shooting deaths of so many Americans in schools, movie theaters, churches, mosques, temples, festivals, offices -- no place is safe. Two hundred fifty-five Americans have died in mass shootings in seven months this year.
Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said in disgust that McConnell "has an addiction to gun company money."
Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, said, "Come on, Mitch McConnell, where are your guts? Get off your ... and get something done.... You could walk out of the Senate with your head held high that you actually did something other than pad your pension."
Just days ago McConnell was dubbed "Moscow Mitch" for refusing to bring up bipartisan legislation that had passed the House to strengthen America's elections from manipulation from foreign governments such as Russia. Russia is now proven to have intervened in the 2016 elections in favor of Donald Trump. Intelligence agencies say there is no doubt that Russia will try to interfere in the 2020 elections and is already preparing. Nothing is being done to forestall that.
McConnell first came to the attention of many Americans when he refused to permit confirmation hearings on former President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, widely respected by both Republicans and Democrats, to be a Supreme Court justice even though Obama had another year in office.
Trump has now put two justices on the court, turning it solidly to the right, and hopes to win a second term and name one or two more. For that alone, McConnell will support Trump, right or wrong, through racism and white supremacist rants, through trade wars, through alienation of allies, through disregard for the environment, through praising evil dictators, through one moral outrage after another.
Time after time after time, McConnell has defended Trump's indefensible behavior and policy positions that at one time were anathema to the Republican Party.
It's about clinging to power at any cost. It's about getting right-wing judges appointed to lifetime judicial posts who will be counted on for decades to keep the anti-abortion, pro-gun, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, social-safety-net-slashing, unlimited-campaign-donations-for-special-interests and anti-business-regulation agenda in full throttle.
McConnell listens and smiles enigmatically as Trump defends white supremacists, talks about "invasions" of immigrants, separates children from parents and imprisons them, taunts minority members of Congress and abuses his power while being compared more to George Wallace than George Washington, in the words of former Vice President Joe Biden.
McConnell smiles and does nothing but wait to hear from Trump, applaud and implement Trump's agenda.
McConnell is what is wrong with the Republican Party. He is what is wrong with Washington and politicians who put themselves above the people.
Perhaps even more than the morally bankrupt Trump, McConnell is the worst among us. He sees evil and does nothing but permit it to flourish. He closes his heart to what is right and good about America. He is one of the most powerful people in the world but doesn't understand that power has responsibilities as well as privileges. And he is very likely to hold on to that perch of power for the foreseeable future.
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The Politics of Petulance, From Donald Trump to Boris Johnson
Four decades of relentless there-is-no-alternative propaganda has so many people believing that change is impossible, so you might as well stick your middle finger up at the world instead.
Aug 01, 2019
Donald Trump's campaign is selling drinking straws. Plastic drinking straws, naturally. The campaign has raised nearly half a million from sales of packs of fifteen red straws with "TRUMP" branded on them, as an alternative to "liberal paper straws."
The premise, of course, is that liberals with their silly ideas about saving the planet and banning plastic straws deserve to be mocked. Paper straws don't work and neither does liberalism. (Who knows what socialist straws might look like?)
The straw campaign is so utterly childish, so petty--with a dash of nihilism--that it's the perfect encapsulation of the real heart of Trumpism. Americans, after all, have long had politicians who used white supremacy as a selling point, from the founders to John C. Calhoun to George Wallace, Nixon's "Southern strategy" to Ronald Reagan, as the news this week reminded us. We're used to grandstanding about America being the greatest country in the world--that's bipartisan foreign policy since before the Monroe Doctrine.
But the politics of petulance is somehow perfect for our current moment. Four decades of relentless there-is-no-alternative propaganda has so many people believing that change is impossible, so they might as well stick their middle finger up at the world instead.
In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson has ridden a Trump-esque wave of Brexit demagoguery into the prime minister's office--not through an election but by being chosen by the Conservative party after Theresa May stepped down. He, too, puts this pettiness on display.
The Guardian writer John Harris, citing Fintan O'Toole, thinks Johnson's appeal is "the spirit of punk, or something like it." Punk surely had its nihilists, its priests of the rude gesture, those who revelled in wearing swastikas just to shock. And Harris is right that part of the impetus for Brexit is "a collective set of desires akin to the punk-era urge to break things, along with a connected inability to channel resentment into anything more than gestures of self-harm."
But punk isn't the right term.
In fact, punk was the last gasp of the age of social democracy. Funded by the dole and educated on free art school in the United Kingdom and cheap Manhattan rents in the United States, it nevertheless screamed its frustration at what it saw as the curdled promise of the peace-and-love generation.
When punk itself curdled, it could be nothing but bratty, the demands of a spoiled child. Yet Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are anything but punks. They are the opposite of the downwardly mobile children of the working class who took aim at the institutions of power that Trump and Johnson revel in pretending to control.
The politics of petulance is for those who feel a loss looming but can't quite put their finger on what it is because they haven't really lost much of anything yet.
Their petulance is that of the underachieving rich kid who nevertheless manages to snatch power for himself and has only contempt for those who let him get there. They are, as Duncan Thomas noted, in over their heads, unlikely to produce any real solutions. They just hope that if they shout loudly enough, it will mask the obvious fact that they have no idea what they're doing.
And it's the middle class driving the politics of petulance. It's a politics for those who feel a loss looming but can't quite put their finger on what it is because they haven't really lost much of anything yet. They cannot envision what that change will look like, so instead they overstate the smallest of slights. A blue passport instead of a burgundy one, a plastic straw instead of a paper one.
But if the planet burns or chokes on plastic, it won't just be liberals who die. If the United Kingdom crashes out of the European Union without a deal, everyone will feel the consequences. Everyone, that is, except the people who caused the crisis in the first place. The rich will also feel the sting, but they feel it through the insulation of wealth, the princess feeling the pea through her stack of mattresses.
After three years of Trump, the petulance is the only thing his supporters--the ones who don't thirst for out-and-out blood--have left. The wall has not been built, the factories keep closing, and the coal mines are declaring bankruptcy without paying their workers.
Trump and Johnson will likely be fine, unless the crisis turns bad enough that the followers they placate with rallies of chest-beating bigotry turn on them. Right now, though, there are fifteen-packs of plastic straws. Buy something to express your rage, and all it will do is help destroy your own world a little bit faster.
As Johnny Rotten once asked, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
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