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"The decision tortured the Constitution — the South will torture the decision.”
These are the hostile words of southerner John Temple Graves in reference to Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that ended de facto school segregation in the United States.
The South’s resistance to the decision — which lasted for decades — was characterized by hostile rhetoric, legal maneuvering, violence and outright defiance of the Supreme Court.
After the decision, “In Congress the court was subjected to assaults of explosive violence,” writes historian C. Vann Woodward in “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” from which the Graves quotation is also pulled. “The House passed bills restricting the court’s powers, and the Senate came within eight votes of nullifying several Supreme Court decisions.”
“The Strange Career of Jim Crow” is a conspicuous read in early April 2012, as the Supreme Court faces a vote that 75 percent of Americans, according to a March 2012 Bloomberg poll, believe will be decided along political lines. But the court is not the only political actor in this drama. President Obama has been taken to task over the past week for slyly suggesting the Supreme Court “exercise judicial restraint” and uphold the Affordable Care Act.
“Imagine if President Eisenhower before Brown v. Board of Education had heckled, ‘those unelected judges better not be dreaming up ways to undo the decisions of elected school boards around the country on how to run their schools,’” wrote an indignant Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post in an article highly critical of the president’s statements last Tuesday. “If the president does not defend the rule of law and urge civil debate and acceptance of the court’s decisions, he is opening a Pandora’s box.”
Yet President Eisenhower did heckle, albeit quietly, and Brown v. Board was his target. “I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions,” he repeated throughout the era. And while the aforementioned Congressional assault on the court raged, Eisenhower calmly “refused to deny a report that he privately deplored the Brown decision and said that integration should proceed more slowly.”
The resistance to desegregation, as with the resistance to the Affordable Care Act, was cloaked and shrouded in the impartiality of the law, defended through the discernment of its rightful interpreters (whomever they may be), and bolstered by a dutiful and unwavering faithfulness to the Constitution.
A version of this article appeared in the Apr 12 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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This is, quite possibly, the worst article I've ever read.
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This is, quite possibly, the best article I've ever read on the pages of the CT.
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I can't believe the author compared the two cases with respect to the Constitution. The Brown vs. Board decision was based on equal rights and liberty, supported by the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. Why would I have to buy a product that I do not want? So I can pay for someone else's surgery when I'm completely healthy or for birth control when I am an abstinent male? This argument is about liberty and not having someone else run our own lives. I have the freedom to take those risks. If anything, the resistance in both stems from the resistance to change.
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The individual mandate is not a 14th amendment issue (as was Brown vs. Board of Education). 14th Amendment issues deal with states rights not individual rights. The SCOTUS should not stray from constitutional precidents (the commerce clause has never historically been applied until the point of sale has occurred). The desire for a health care system should not preclude good judgment and decision making. You may deride conservatives for opposing the mandate (although most don't oppose health care reform - you seem to get that confused), but it was the liberals who passed a PARTISAN law w/o any compromise on how to do it best. If the mandate is struck down that certainly doesn't prevent health care reform from occuring in this country; it restores integrity to the legislative process by forcing congress to come up with a compromise that 50% of the states won't oppose. If the law gets struck down it's not like we're going to lose health care forever, in fact most people will still have it, including the poor.
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You should read the article again, or failing that, just give up altogether.
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So it's alright to force people to support certain causes as long as your political opinion is popular? True, but most unfortunate.
Remember this (if you are white):
Having non-white friends and lovers in your majority white society, is like slave masters having affairs with their slaves during plantation days. (I'll be a few of them got along very well with their masters too.) But please, wax poetic for us about how integrated and diverse your life really is. Tell us how enlightened you are for keeping the society you live in majority white and how little of your own money and other possessions you give away to charity each year.
It sure is fun to talk abour money being spent when it mostly comes from people other than yourself.
For all those like yourself who wish to share the misery equally, I say share it among yourselves. You balk at that? Well then, now you see why I don't want to pay for everyone else's good time either.
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