Tag: Plessy v. Ferguson

Firework

I don’t know about you, Constant Reader, but I’m not feeling particularly “free” this year, are you? This holiday has always been a bit bittersweet for me, anyway; how do you celebrate freedom when your rights as a human being and American citizen are constantly under attack or in danger of being stripped away? SCOTUS has proven that they are guided by no principle by maintenance of power by the worst of the far right; can renewal of Jim Crow laws in Southern states be far behind? They’ve already stripped women of bodily autonomy, they’ve wiped out regulatory control over industries that long-ago proved they cannot be trusted to operate out of anything other than pure greed. I guess there aren’t many of us around who remember the unregulated hellscape we had before regulations, when the Cuyahoga River used to catch on fire, when our air and water were becoming so polluted that they were respectively unbreathable and undrinkable. People used to just throw their trash out of their cars onto the side of the roads. Garbage was literally everywhere, and our beautiful country was turning into a massive garbage dump. We were killing off animal, bird and insect species without even thinking about it.

And what’s more, the Right has promised us bloodshed if we don’t submit and let them take over our country and turn it into the Fourth Reich. (For the record, government control over reproductive freedom also means the government can decide when and if you have a child. That’s the slippery slope of reproductive control. Look up “sonnenkindern” sometime if you want to learn about the Nazi breeding program. I despair.

And I feel it is important to point out Hillary was right about everything, going back to that interview in 1993 when she said “there is a vast right-wing conspiracy.” She was always right, and never listened to, like Cassandra on the walls of Troy. I look at our country and our world right now and see that my own observations from the 1990s–that we were on the same path as Germany in the 1920s–were also correct. Ronald Reagan was the first “party above all else” conservative, and he also married the party to the evangelicals. The rot Nixon brought to the White House (“it’s no illegal when the President does it”) had already taken root in the party and Reagan’s co-infection accelerated the decline of the Republican Party into a power-hungry party of despots who do not recognize that they have degenerated into an anti-American party who thinks fascism is better than allowing Democrats, or anyone not evangelical or Republican, to rule and legislate.

It is so sad that the party that was originally formed to fight slavery has degenerated into what it has over the course of my lifetime. They’ve poisoned the discourse, deliberately blocked legislation that could be seen as a win, and then point to the failures that they created to blame Democrats for. The only thing they’ve truly accomplished this century is the takeover of the courts and the slide into Gilead and exploding the deficit while blaming Democratic programs that attempt to level the playing field for causing it. Not the corporate giveaways (how much do we need to be subsidizing oil companies for as they score record profits over and over again) which they are very careful to never characterize as what it actually is–corporate welfare–but somehow the deficit is the fault of food stamps and housing supplementation and public education. People always say the right is trying to turn the clock back to the 1950s but I’d say they are more interested in going back to the 1890’s, the Gilded Age of the robber barons. Bezos, Musk, and the others are no different from duPont or Rockefeller or Astor or Vanderbilt; unscrupulous men whose greed limits were never reached. Yet we are supposed to idolize these men, as the “entrepreneurs who built America.” That very same gilded age had all the same discrimination against women, queers and racialized people they want to bring back, plus even less regulation and no one gave a shit about the poor then, either.

And the irony that we are having a holiday to celebrate our freedom as our Constitution is literally turned into scrap paper by Republican appointees to federal judgeships is almost too much.

One thing that gives me heart and hope during these dark times is that we’ve had illegitimate supreme courts before that gave us such horrific decisions as Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson, legal decisions that are horrific on their very face; we must always remember that SCOTUS upheld slavery in 1857, and Jim Crow in the early 1900s. Lincoln often ignored the rulings of his own Supreme Court when he felt it necessary; he was saddled with the same Roger P. Taney SCOTUS that ruled in Dred Scott.

If we survive this election in November–make no mistake, MAGA isn’t going anywhere, especially if they lose the election; it’s just a question of how violent their attempt will be–we also need to control Congress so we can pass legislation to control the Court and set up binding rules and a code of ethics. No gratuities for their decisions, ever; the fact that they are so blatantly corrupt will remain a scandal for the ages. You don’t fucking tip a judge, and that ruling was a clear indication that the court is rogue and some justices don’t support the Constitution, which is a violation of their oath and they also all lied to Congress during their Confirmation hearings, which is a fireable offense in the real world; you can lose your job in a finger snap if your boss finds out you lied during the interview to get the job…which means they could and should be impeached and tried in the Senate for corruption.

No one in this country is above the law. NO ONE. That was the entire fucking point of the country, you motherfuckers. Miss me with your “patriotism,” thank you very fucking much.

If they win or succeed at stealing the election–their hope in a close race is that it will end up in the Supreme Court, who will rule against the Democrats any chance they get, will reward them with the White House the same way it did in 2000 with Bush v. Gore, which was really the first stolen election of this century (if MAGA can also hang on to their Big Lie about 2020, I can also continue believing they stole 2016 as they did 2000) and a sad indicator of what the future held for the country.

And on that note, have a lovely 4th. And remember, everyone needs to vote this November. It’s important, unless it’s already too late.

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I’d Die Without You

I have always been amazed at how uninterested Americans–particularly the ones who worship symbols like the flag, the national anthem, etc.–are in learning, and learning from, our shared history as a country.

This observation is not, by the one, a partisan one, despite my comment about American symbols; the vast majority of Americans, no matter how they fall politically, have little to no interest in our history…and thus, we are doomed to repeat it, over and over again.

Friday, as is my wont, I chose to take comfort in rereading some history; in particular, the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision.

Everyone knows the name, and everyone knows what the ruling was. Historians and jurists both agree it was without question the worst Supreme Court ruling in our history, and it certainly deserves every degree of vilification it has received since it entered our collective history, if not more.

Essentially, the case was about this: Dred Scott was a slave whose owners had taken him into free states, and therefore, by living in a free state, was entitled to his freedom. The case, from beginning to end, went on for nearly twenty years. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger B, Taney, threw the case out based on these legal considerations:

  1.  Negroes could not be United States citizens, therefore they could not sue in federal courts;
  2. the laws of Illinois could not affect him in Missouri, where he now lived;
  3. his residence in Minnesota Territory north of the Missouri Compromise line could not confer freedom because the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

The Missouri Compromise was legislation reached in attempt to settle the slavery question; Missouri was allowed into the Union as a slave state, but a line was drawn across the continent below Missouri. Anything new state or territory above the line was free; anything below slavery was legal. This ruling essentially said that slavery followed the flag, and any anti-slavery laws in states in the north did not apply to slaves brought into those states or territories.

Taney’s ruling in the first part was actually even worse than quoted above (from Robert Leckie’s The Wars of America, a really good summary of each war the United States has participated in, through Vietnam); his actual ruling said “Negroes and descendants of slaves.” There were more free people of color living in the United States than most people commonly suppose; in New Orleans, they were an entire class of society, with rules and etiquette and customs (an excellent mystery series is Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series, set in New Orleans in the 1830’s; Benjamin is a free man of color and went to medical school in Paris, but as a black man he cannot practice in the United States. Anne Rice also wrote a terrific novel about the free people of color, The Feast of All Saints). This ruling invalidated their citizenship–it might have been second-class, but it was still citizenship nonetheless. The newly elected president, James Buchanan, connived with Taney to come up with the ruling, and put pressure on other justices to agree to the ruling, thinking it would end the slavery question once and for all.

Needless to say, it did not settle the slavery question. Instead, it inflamed passions on both sides, with the almost inevitable election of Abraham Lincoln, secession, and civil war.

Taney remained chief justice until he died in 1864, and is known to history as one of our worst Supreme Court justices. The Dred Scott decision lives on in infamy, even if most people don’t really know what the case was about, what it’s background was, and what happened because of it. During the Civil War, both Lincoln and Congress not only ignored Taney but the rest of the Supreme Court as well. Lifetime appointments, you see, and pro-slavery justices appointed to appease the slave-owning southern states–they could not trust the court to be impartial–which they showed they were definitely not in the Dred Scott case–and it took decades for the court to regain its luster and credibility.

Which, of course, they proceeded to destroy again in the 1890’s with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which essentially legalized segregation. It wasn’t until Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that the arc of American justice began to bend away from racism, bigotry, and legalized discrimination.

I also had a brief moment of hilarity yesterday when I imagined what social media might have looked like (had it existed) in the 1850’s, with the abolitionists and the proslavery people fighting about the legality of owning people.

Someone had posted, about a year ago, somewhere about something about how we all need to pull together as Americans!!! The country has never been this divided!!!

The excess of unnecessary punctuation should give you an idea of where the poster fell on the political spectrum.

That was, however, one of the few times I broke my rule of “do not engage on social media” and replied, The hundreds of thousands killed in the Civil War would beg to differ with that statement.

There has always been a divide in this country; rural v. urban, rich v. poor, conservative v. progressive. Our country has never quite lived up to the lofty ideals it was founded upon; slavery was written into the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled it legal and then later legalized segregation. Religious, gender, racial and sexuality-based bigotry continue to this day.

That divide will always be there, and sometimes it’s more rancorous than others. We are living in a particularly rancorous time; but if you look back through American history, as I tend to do, you will see that rancor and hatred between opposing opinions has always existed.

Everyone knows that George Washington, for example, had wooden teeth. But in the eighteenth century dentistry was not what it is today and dental hygiene and health was almost primitive. It was very rare for anyone past the age of forty in that time to actually keep their teeth. They all wore false teeth. Washington’s just fit him poorly, and newspapers that resisted his presidency mocked him for his bad dentures. So, George Washington’s teeth have entered American lore and everyone knows that about the first president.

As a nation, we really need to know and understand our history better.

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