An excellent Op-Ed a few weeks ago in the LA Times by University of Chicago law professor Justin Driver puts current Supreme Court jurisprudence in historical context:
On March 12, 1956, the majority of Southern senators and congressmen joined forces in Washington, D.C., to publicize the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles.” Now known by its more evocative label, the “Southern Manifesto,” this statement denounced the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which two years earlier had invalidated racial segregation in public schools.
The nation will not celebrate Saturday’s 60th anniversary of the Southern Manifesto as it does civil rights victories — and for good reason. But we should not permit this crucial date to pass unacknowledged, because doing so invites the comforting delusion that the mind-set supporting the manifesto has been banished from polite society. Although the Southern Manifesto may seem utterly disconnected from current racial realities, arguments marshaled by its drafters presaged recent developments in the Supreme Court’s constitutional doctrine. …
In the 1960s, when it became clear that the Supreme Court would not reverse Brown, Southern Manifesto signatories shifted strategies from condemning the opinion to embracing their neutered version of it. They contended that Brown, properly understood, actually mandated “colorblind” policies. Under this theory, Brown forbade districts from even voluntarily striving for meaningful integration if they considered the race of individual students in pursuing that goal.
Today, this anemic reading of Brown is the law of the land. In 2007, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision invalidated school integration programs in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle. Although both programs enjoyed broad local support, the court reasoned that taking students’ race into account to promote school integration nevertheless violated the Equal Protection Clause.
In striking down those programs, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. reached for Brown’s mantle, writing: “Before Brown, school children were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.” For Roberts, the same principle that once required the invalidation of intentionally segregated schools now required the invalidation of intentionally integrated schools.
Rather than view the Southern Manifesto as the last gasp of a dying regime, it may be more accurate to understand it as the first breath of the prevailing order.
The key clause in the article in my view: “in a 5-4 decision.” And now back to our regularly scheduled programming …
…to discover that the “principles” outlined in the Southern Manifesto may not be quite as dead and buried as I previously thought and certainly continue to wish that they were.
Our median age rose another 3 years in the last census as the state gets older and older, since younger people are leaving to make lives in less expensive states with better employment prospects. If you factored out our perenial temporary college population, we’d more closely resemble Maine which had a jump in median age of 5 years. So it will affect fewer and fewer people.
We can couple that with the $15/hr minimum wage but only for fast food franchises, since REAL businesses are already testifying that they can’t afford that. They can rely on a waiver process, like they do for other things. And MAYBE GE makes the robotic ordering kiosks that they fast food workers will be replaced with!
It will just hasten our transition to being an elderly Disneyland, all benefits, all the time.
Does this rant have anything to do with this diary?
Even if the premise of this comment were true (which I do not accept). what does it have to do with the “Southern Strategy” of finding ways to preserve racial segregation and discrimination?
The same comment is on the paid family leave thread which is probably where she intended to put it.
I had the other thread open, clicked on add comment, and it apparently popped up here. But, due to inability to correct or delete, it must remain. I was unaware of this duplication before Tom asked, so thank you.
managed to duplicate comments, though not on different threads.
…when I have something I’m dying to say, then forget which diary I’m looking at after scrolling down.