Be careful which Judicial hero you choose future Supreme Court nominees, especially those selected by Democratic Presidents. Because if, like Elena Kagan, you admire the first African American Supreme Court Justice and the lead attorney in the seminal civil rights case in our nation’s history, Brown v. Board of Education, the one that began the disassembling of racial segregation, Jim Crow, and the horrid “separate but equal” doctrine, you may learn you;ve been a very baaaaaa-d girl.
Or at least that was the reaction of the Republican Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee who attacked Ms. Kagan after her opening statement at her nomination hearing praised Thurgood Marshall as one of her heroes:
Looks like Senate Judiciary Republicans have at least one unified talking point today: Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to ever serve on the Supreme Court, was an “activist judge.” As Elena Kagan kept on her listening face, multiple senators slammed both Marshall’s judicial philosophy and her service as his clerk in the late 1980s.
Ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) criticized Kagan for having “associated herself with well-known activist judges who have used their power to redefine the meaning of our constitution and have the result of advancing that judge’s preferred social policies,” citing Marshall as his son, Thurgood Marshall Jr., sat in the audience of the Judiciary Committee hearings.
In an example of how much the GOP focused on Marshall, his name came up 35 times. President Obama’s name was mentioned just 14 times today.
That’s right, folks. Apparently Marshall advancement the social policy” enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and in the Bill of Rights and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments that African Americans deserved due process, equal treatment under the law and the same privileges and immunities as white Americans made him an evil “activist” judge. How awful!
I guess Sessions is still pissed he got passed over for a federal judgeship after his racist, segregationist and bigoted past came to light during his own Senate confirmation hearing:
In 1986, Sessions was a 39-year-old U.S. attorney in Alabama. His nomination to be a U.S. District Court judge was troubled from the start because of controversy surrounding his prosecution of civil rights activists for voting fraud.
Sessions’ fate was sealed after Democrats called several witnesses who accused him of a pattern of racial insensitivity — including calling a black lawyer “boy” and civil rights groups such as the NAACP “un-American.” […]
The year before his nomination to federal court, [Sessions] had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers–including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.–on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the “Black Belt” counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions’ focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause celebre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator [Jeremiah] Denton.
On a day after the Supreme Court’s conservative justices rewrote the second amendment to prevent any future “Dodge City” gun bans, I find this hypocrisy of the highest order. We have the most activist court in years led by five conservative members, and Sessions is bitching about Marshall’s record of extending civil rights to all people in this country? The man who tried to prosecute civil rights workers for “voter fraud” for registering black voters in Alabama?
The more things change, the more they stay the same is a cliche that seems apropos this evening. Without a man like Thurgood Marshall we would still be living in a country where people of different races could not get married. A country where blacks and whites could not attend the same schools or eat at the same restaurants or shop in the same stores or live in the same neighborhoods.
Marshall wasn’t an activist, he was a man who sought justice. Unlike Justices Scalia and Thomas who recently opined from the bench that the constitution did not guarantee that an innocent man could not be executed by the State, he believed and fought for the fundamental rights of all people to fairness and justice. Sessions, not so much.
If we weren’t an overgrown South Africa, Marshall wouldn’t have had to be ‘active’ at all.
I hope Kagan defends Marshall tomorrow and tells Sessions to go fuck himself, in the proper way to handle such things at a hearing like this, of course
I think the Alito opinion is boring, but Clarence Thomas’s argument is strangely compelling (pdf). You have to scroll about halfway down to find his opinion.
Of course people at the time understood the 14th amendment to incorporate all eight enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights. And the denial of Second Amendment rights to blacks in the antebellum South made them especially vulnerable targets. It’s actually a brilliant piece of reasoning even if it blows off 140 years of Supreme Court precedent to make the NRA happy. Kudos to Clarence.
Sorry, I’ll never give Clarence kudos for using racial discrimination to justify expanding the second amendment to make it more powerful and far reaching than the first, especially when guns weren’t the only thing blacks were deprived of in the Jim Crow south.
How long before the GOP argues that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments are invalid because the confederate states were excluded from the count?
Sorry, make that “because the confederate states’ ratification of them was forced.”
It surprises you that this enrages a Senator from Alabama?
this really can’t surprise you.
they are who we thought they were.
The irony here is that Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito are the most activist judges in the history of the Supreme Court.
If you Yankees can hear it, it wasn’t a dog whistle.
Sessions’s comments about Thurgood Marshall are exactly what we have been hearing for 50 years in the South. Communist civil rights workers, activist judges exceeding the Constitution, the whole rigmarole. No one needs a translation any more. The segregationist then, segregationists now, and segregationists forever want control of the courts in order to deny civil rights. And Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is still one of them. No grand revelation there.
It is past time for Democrats to be a little uncivil in the civil Senate about this kind of talk. It demeans the Senate and show up someone who should not be sitting in that august body. (Of course that list is getting a bit long these days with Vitter, Ensign, and …still sitting without shame.)
“You start out in 1954 by saying, `Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say `nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now (that) you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is (that) blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than `Nigger, nigger.'”
Guess why all of those racist tropes backfired.
People pushed back on them. There was a whole generation of Southerners taught in school to say Negro instead of nigger. And those teachers pushed back on the epithet as “not being nice” or “being ugly”.
Opposition to busing raised its head all over the country from St. Louis to Boston. It was not exclusively Southern. And everywhere it was transparently racist, white flight racist. Parochial and religious schools were in; public schools were out; vouchers were the proposal. It’s not very subconscious at all except to folks in denial about their attitudes. This is not abstract at all.
The funny thing about government spending is that in the framing of what it meant for America to be anti-communist, government spending was to be limited to the military functions and private contract enforcement. Anything else was socialist. But so was support of the labor movement.
The labor movement in the South failed when non-Southern unions failed to support the 1938 textile workers strike because the organizers (and some indeed were socialists and communists) had brought blacks and whites together into the textile labor movement. Toleration of segregation was a national norm; the form it took outside the South was different than the form it took within the South. Nothing abstract at all in the failure of labor to win the South.
If you think about it, it really is the epithets that are abstract. The discrimination is very, very real.
I hate to give the impression of defending a swine like Sessions but I could swear that Obama accused Marshall and those liberals (yuck!) on the Burger court of “overreaching,” too. What’s the difference when Sessions says it and Obama says it?
I doubt Obama was talking about Loving v. Virginia. More likely he was making a vague Roe v. Wade reference.
Well, why didn’t he say all that instead of leaving a cloud of confusion and angst? Obama opened this door by opening his trap. When Obama says it, it’s good, noble and true. When Sessions says the exact same thing, suddenly it’s racist and incendiary. What does that spell?
I don’t think Sessions is saying the exact same thing as Obama.
to put it mildly.
LOL
I love how Sessions is reduced to quibbling over the semantics of “and” in “cruel and unusual”. That’s some Kubrick-level black humour.
What he is saying is that even if the death penalty were cruel, it was not, at a certain moment in history, unusual, hence it is constitutional. So now we see why the republicans pinched a butt-nugget about “empathy”: cruelty is constitutionally protected. This is what passes for originalism.