Congress, Politics, Society, Supreme Court

Massive Resistance and the Government Shutdown

 By Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger 

“We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation. 

-The Southern Manifesto,  Cong. Rec., 84th Cong. 2d Session, Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956)

‘This was an activist court that you saw today.  Anytime the Supreme Court renders something constitutional that is clearly unconstitutional, that undermines the credibility of the Supreme Court.  I do believe the court’s credibility was undermined severely today.” 

-Michele Bachmann (R. Minn.),  June 26 2012

Most people are familiar with the opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al., 349 U.S. 483 (1954), in which a unanimous Supreme Court summarily outlawed public school segregation by tersely declaring, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” 349 U.S. at 495.  But many people do not know that Brown involved a consolidation of cases from four states.  The “et al.” in the style refers to decisions on similar facts in Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia.  And the response of Virginia to the ruling in Brown provides an interesting comparison with the actions leading to the current government shutdown.

In 1951 the population of Prince Edward County, Virginia was approximately 15,000, more than half of whom were African-American.  The county maintained two high schools to accommodate 386 black students and 346 white students.  Robert R. Moton High School lacked adequate science facilities and offered a more restricted curriculum than the high school reserved for white students.  It had no gym, showers or dressing rooms, no cafeteria and no restrooms for teachers.  Students at Moton High were even required to ride in older school buses.

Suit was filed in federal district court challenging the Virginia constitutional and statutory provisions mandating segregated public schools.  Although the trial court agreed that the school board had failed to provide a substantially equal education for African-American students, it declined to invalidate the Virginia laws, concluding that segregation was not based “upon prejudice, on caprice, nor upon any other measureless foundation,” but reflected “ways of life in Virginia” which “has for generations been a part of the mores of the people.”  Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 103 F. Supp. 337, 339 (E.D. Va. 1952).  Instead, the court ordered the school board to proceed with the completion of existing plans to upgrade the curriculum, physical plant and buses at Moton High School.  When the plaintiffs took an appeal from the decision, the Democratic machine that had for many years controlled Virginia politics under the firm hand of Sen. Harry Byrd had little reason to believe that “ways of life” that had prevailed since the end of the Reconstruction era would soon be declared illegal.

When the Brown decision was announced, the reaction in Virginia was shock, disbelief and anger. Reflecting the prevailing attitudes, the Richmond News Leader railed against “the encroachment of the Federal government, through judicial legislation, upon the reserved powers of the States.”  The Virginia legislature adopted a resolution of “interposition” asserting its right to “interpose” between unconstitutional federal mandates and local authorities under principles of state sovereignty.  And Sen. Byrd organized a campaign of opposition that came to be known as “Massive Resistance.”

In August of 1954 a commission was appointed to formulate a plan to preserve segregated schools.  Late in 1955, it presented its recommendations, including eliminating mandatory school attendance, empowering local school boards to assign students to schools and creating special tuition grants to enable white students to attend private schools.  Enabling legislation was quickly adopted and “segregation academies” began forming around the state.  Subsequent legislation went even further by prohibiting state funding of schools that chose to integrate.

In March of 1956, 19 senators and 77 house members from 11 southern states signed what is popularly known as “The Southern Manifesto,” in which they declared, “Even though we constitute a minority in the present Congress, we have full faith that a majority of the American people believe in the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness and will in time demand that the reserved rights of the States and of the people be made secure against judicial usurpation.”

Throughout this period the Prince Edward County schools remained segregated, but when various court rulings invalidated Virginia’s various attempts to avoid integration, the school board took its final stand.  It refused to authorize funds to operate any schools in the district, and all public schools in the county were simply closed, and remained closed from 1959 to 1964.

There are striking similarities between Sen. Byrd’s failed plan of Massive Resistance and Republican efforts to prevent implementation of the Affordable Care Act.  There was widespread confidence among conservatives that the Supreme Court would declare the Act unconstitutional.  When that did not occur, legislators such as Michele Bachmann, quoted above, attempted to deny the legitimacy of the Court’s ruling.  Brent Bozell went further, denouncing Chief Justice Roberts as “a traitor to his own philosophy,” hearkening back to the days when southern roadsides were replete with billboards demanding the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The House of Representatives has taken over 40 votes to repeal the ACA, quixotic efforts pursued for reasons known only to John Boehner and his colleagues.  And in accordance with the Virginia legislative model, the House has attempted to starve the ACA by eliminating it from funding bills.  Following the failure of these efforts, Republicans have elected to pursue the path ultimately taken by the school board of Prince Edward County and have shut down the government.

Even the strategy followed by Republicans is largely a southern effort.  Approximately 60% of the Tea Party Caucus is from the South.  Nineteen of the 32 Republican members of the House who have been instrumental in orchestrating the shutdown are from southern states. It is hardly surprising therefore, that the current impasse is characterized by the time-honored southern belief in nullification theory as a proper antidote to disfavored decisions by a congressional majority.

In reflecting upon the experience of Virginia many years later, former Gov. Linwood Holton noted, “Massive resistance … served mostly to exacerbate emotions arrayed in a lost cause.”  Republicans would do well to ponder the wisdom in that observation.

1,677 thoughts on “Massive Resistance and the Government Shutdown”

  1. “Fruit of the Rancid Tree……. We find out this morning from Mother Jones that the Tea Party challenger to Sen. Thad Cochran (Pretty Damned Conservative-MS) attended a pro-Confederate, pro-Secessionist event recently. For the Mississippi GOP this isn’t as unusual as it might sound. What got my attention though is that he’s being supported by the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth. The former of course is the spawn of now-Heritage Foundation sachem and former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint. The picture comes very into focus. Calhounite, neo-Confederate, revanchist. ” Talking Points Memo

    1. “No, you will cease and desist. Agreement is irrelevant.”

      And why is that Nicky?

  4. Tony, Piling on? MikeS took a backhanded swipe @ DavidM saying he was only slightly smarter than convicted felons. David is pretty smart, but I pointed out 2 bank burglars that in @ least some intelligences, were almost certainly smarter than anyone here. You know people who committed robberies out of desperation, not out of greed. The family and friends you know who use SNAP do not commit fraud. I get it. And, I’ll say again, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I do wish I could live in TonyCville, it sounds a lot better than the world in which I reside.

    1. “Tony, Piling on? MikeS took a backhanded swipe @ DavidM saying he was only slightly smarter than convicted felons.”

      Somehow I don’t think that Tony C. and I have been working together on this thread and our approaches to DavidM are very different. Why are we being conflated?

  7. Nick: Greed can be a motivation for crime; anecdotes of particular criminals engaged in crime for greed prove nothing; they are not representative of the population any more than particular millionaires are representative of us.

    As shallowly as you analyze everything, I don’t trust your anecdotal evidence in the least. I know a fair number of people that have served time in prison, and well over half served time for reasons other than greed. A robbery to get the money to avoid foreclosure on your house does not count as “greed.” I don’t think greed is #1 or #2.

    Funny how you say we can agree to disagree, but then pile on with posts trying to prove me wrong.

  9. School-to-Prison Pipeline
    https://www.aclu.org/school-prison-pipeline

    Excerpt:
    The ACLU is committed to challenging the “school to prison pipeline,” a disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished and pushed out. “Zero-tolerance” policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in school lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline.

  10. Blouise: How do you propose we address this cultural difficulty

    (First, I admit I haven’t given that question much thought…)

    Much the way we are, I suppose. Exposure, integration, civil rights, the information revolution, widespread integration in popular entertainment, may not have achieved racial equality, but don’t you think it has advanced it significantly since the 1960’s?

    Part of the problem is in waiting for our generation (and older) to die! Racial attitudes are often set hard by experiences in childhood and teens, but the power to change society and law is achieved in their gray years, their fifties and sixties (and seventies and eighties). Some of us were lucky to be raised in mixed neighborhoods, others are good enough to reject the bigotry learned in childhood, but most retain what they picked up from their childhood authorities as near gospel.

    So our generation born in the 40’s and 50’s have an attitudinal legacy from the 60’s and 70’s. On that front, we were just born into the transition to full equality, which I think is still taking place; it is just that the fundamental changes we want to see from those in power (corporate or political) lag the cultural changes led by the young by about 30 or 40 years, because the changes are effected by the same cohort of people.

    What is happening now is in many ways the civil rights of homosexuals, with gay marriage in half the states (roughly) and some basic recognition of gay rights. Maybe in another twenty years homosexuality will be an unremarkable non-event.

  11. In this country, greedy Wall Street banksters who crashed our economy are not treated as criminals and continue living the high life…while some working class folk who may have incurred debts or unpaid fines end up in jail.

    *****

    The Rise of “Debtors’ Prisons” in the US
    http://jonathanturley.org/2013/04/07/the-rise-of-debtors-prisons-in-the-us/

    Excerpt:
    In October of 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report titled In for a Penny: The Rise of America’s New Debtors’ Prisons. The ACLU had found that debtors’ prisons were “flourishing” in this country, “more than two decades after the Supreme Court prohibited imprisoning those who are too poor to pay their legal debts.” In 2011, Huffington Post reported that debtors’ prisons were legal in more than one-third of the states in this country.

    According to the ACLU report, some state and local governments “have turned aggressively to using the threat and reality of imprisonment to squeeze revenue out of the poorest defendants who appear in their courts. These modern-day debtors’ prisons impose devastating human costs, waste taxpayer money and resources, undermine our criminal justice system, are racially skewed, and create a two-tiered system of justice.”

    *****
    On the topic of privatized juvenile prisons:

    Private Prison Empire Rises Despite Startling Record Of Juvenile Abuse
    By Chris Kirkham
    October 22, 2013
    http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit

    Excerpt:
    From a glance at his background, one might assume that James F. Slattery would have a difficult time convincing any state in America to entrust him with the supervision of its lawbreaking youth.

    Over the past quarter century, Slattery’s for-profit prison enterprises have run afoul of the Justice Department and authorities in New York, Florida, Maryland, Nevada and Texas for alleged offenses ranging from condoning abuse of inmates to plying politicians with undisclosed gifts while seeking to secure state contracts.

    In 2001, an 18-year-old committed to a Texas boot camp operated by one of Slattery’s previous companies, Correctional Services Corp., came down with pneumonia and pleaded to see a doctor as he struggled to breathe. Guards accused the teen of faking it and forced him to do pushups in his own vomit, according to Texas law enforcement reports. After nine days of medical neglect, he died.

    That same year, auditors in Maryland found that staff at one of Slattery’s juvenile facilities coaxed inmates to fight on Saturday mornings as a way to settle disputes from earlier in the week. In recent years, the company has failed to report riots, assaults and claims of sexual abuse at its juvenile prisons in Florida, according to a review of state records and accounts from former employees and inmates.

    Despite that history, Slattery’s current company, Youth Services International, has retained and even expanded its contracts to operate juvenile prisons in several states. The company has capitalized on budgetary strains across the country as governments embrace privatization in pursuit of cost savings. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s juvenile delinquents are today committed to private facilities, according to the most recent federal data from 2011, up from about 33 percent twelve years earlier.

    Over the past two decades, more than 40,000 boys and girls in 16 states have gone through one of Slattery’s prisons, boot camps or detention centers, according to a Huffington Post analysis of juvenile facility data.

    The private prison industry has long fueled its growth on the proposition that it is a boon to taxpayers, delivering better outcomes at lower costs than state facilities. But significant evidence undermines that argument: the tendency of young people to return to crime once they get out, for example, and long-term contracts that can leave states obligated to fill prison beds. The harsh conditions confronting youth inside YSI’s facilities, moreover, show the serious problems that can arise when government hands over social services to private contractors and essentially walks away.

    Those held at YSI facilities across the country have frequently faced beatings, neglect, sexual abuse and unsanitary food over the past two decades, according to a HuffPost investigation that included interviews with 14 former employees and a review of thousands of pages of state audits, lawsuits, local police reports and probes by state and federal agencies. Out of more than 300 institutions surveyed, a YSI detention center in Georgia had the highest rate of youth alleging sexual assaults in the country, according to a recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

  14. Had a pair of bank burglars @ Leavenworth. They would burglarize a bank on the weekend and no one would know until Monday. These guys were smart as hell and cooler than the other side of the pillow. They were greedy. That’s what did them in. Those seven deadly sins!!

  17. TonyC, We’ll just have to disagree. But, I worked in a maximum security prison, was a probation officer, and worked for a prosecutors office. I have a little experience w/ criminals and what motivates them. I did read and love Freakanomics. Criminals lie.

  18. “I think profits earned by harming people or creating misery or shortening lives are criminal” (Tony C)

    I read your post, October 23, 2013 at 10:39 am, and pulled out the above quote simply to direct your thoughts towards the cultural aspect within this society that must be overcome in order to implement the “Norwegian” model.

    I’m referring, of course, to our culture where upon the majority of wealth was firmly built on firstly, Constitutionally legal slave labor and after the Civil War on illegal slave labor which continues today in the form of using illegal immigrant labor.

    From what I read, Norway is dealing with cultural xenophobic attitudes showing up in debates, social media, and political parties which reflect an “Islamisation of Norway that must be stopped”. But that cultural attitude is not as deeply ingrained within their cultural as slave labor is in ours.

    How do you propose we address this cultural difficulty for, in my opinion, any version of the Norway Model you put forward will not meet with success until that cultural problem is overcome.

  19. hskiprob: I am not writing a book.

    The government makes it better than it was, but the government is corrupt and was hijacked by corporations after World War II. It is a for-profit enterprise now, and the disregard for citizens and their rights flows downhill, from Congress to the states and counties. From where I stand, it looks to me like corporations are within about one generation of complete control. It is a pity, it was a good experiment while it lasted, but I believe (in retrospect) that the USA was lost upon Kennedy’s assassination.

  20. Nick says: Desperation is way down the list of reasons people commit crime. Greed is number 1, 2 and 3.

    I do not believe you. The primary reason the poor commit crimes is not “greed” but because they are oppressed and can’t earn money in other ways. The typical street corner drug dealer in Chicago takes home less than minimum wage; according to one study (Levitt) that interviewed several dozen of them. They commit crime because they can’t get even minimum wage jobs to support themselves.

    Crimes to get money to pay for food, shelter and health care or family support and survival are not properly classified as “greed,” they are properly classified as crimes of “desperation.”

    Typically drug abuse is a result of a psychological need for relief, and one of the things that causes that is poverty with no apparent route to escape, which is indeed a component of the existential desperation I am talking about. Providing subsistence and the right to schooling (and if needed daycare for children) that can give one marketable skills is a viable and obvious route to escape poverty, and if we made that exist we would reduce substance abuse, and the crime that results from substance abuse.

Comments are closed.