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.