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.
It does indeed help to have the patience of a chopping block, OS.
The “massive resistance” of yore regarding segregation has proven a lost cause for its adherents. Not that they have given up racism, mind you, because racism is still rampant. However, those whose self image is so poor they must have somebody or something to look down on and be against, have new targets for hate and discrimination. We all know those targets. We don’t have to look any further than stories on this blog. For example, the reaction and comments of the bigots to almost any story about LGBT people. Authoritarians, bullies and bigots have been with us from time immemorial. They always end up losing the battle in the end, but in the meantime they are a plague on the body politic.
Nick,
“gbk, Then maybe we should create a Peace Corps like agency and recruit people, of all ages. Then, like the Peace Corps, have them live in foreign countries and teach people just what an oppressive country the US is and to never consider coming here to live. I think Castro would even allow this agency in because damn, his people will do ANYTHING to come here. And, they have universal healthcare.”
Sure thing, ganja boy.
“I guess I don’t see the value in correcting the myth of how it used to be . . .”
The myth is not how it used to be.
The myth is in ignoring the details of our history for the convenient remembrance of jingoistic platitudes expressed long after the fact.
gbk, Then maybe we should create a Peace Corps like agency and recruit people, of all ages. Then, like the Peace Corps, have them live in foreign countries and teach people just what an oppressive country the US is and to never consider coming here to live. I think Castro would even allow this agency in because damn, his people will do ANYTHING to come here. And, they have universal healthcare.
“They are vampires.”
I love hyperbole as much as the next, but I love consistency more.
Given this, shouldn’t your phrase of, “should gag a vulture,” be “would gag a vulture.”
@nick,
Because it takes generations for myths to change, if ever.
Why do people risk their lives trying to get here? I guess they’re just not aware what a horrible country we are.
Blouise: I think I am less worried about whatever mythology they believe and more worried about how to get enough of them to do the right thing now.
It doesn’t matter what they believe about the myth of where money came from if we convince them those days are gone and the money has fallen into the hands of thieves, frauds and cruel and inhumane people NOW.
The truth may be it was always in such hands, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the people with the money now are not the deserving and benevolent people they think they are, they didn’t earn the big money the same way us working class folks earn money, and they aren’t providing a benefit for this big money, they are just vampires on every transaction we make, if they don’t take it from us in banks and credit cards they take it from us by manipulating the tax code and evading their responsibility by heaping it on us; if they don’t steal our retirement and medical care, they overcharge us for insurance and then deny our valid claims. If they aren’t overworking us, or cutting our ours to deny us benefits, then they are stealing our pensions and purposely looting and bankrupting the companies we work for and shipping our jobs to cheap near slave labor in China and India; if they aren’t polluting our seas and destroying the environment with Fracking they are overcharging us for energy and rewriting the laws to make anything they want to do entirely legal and subsidized by taxpayers. That should not be a hard sell for us, it is all true. They are vampires.
I guess I don’t see the value in correcting the myth of how it used to be, when the present should gag a vulture.
RTC,
“Bron: You threw me with the word, epistemology. Could you please explain what you mean by that.”
It’s a word that Bron uses out of context many times. It’s best to look up the meaning.
Then, of course, we have this; from DavidM at 8:29 am today:
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/08/17/bigotry-denialism-2/#comment-682953
——————————————————-
“Barnassey Thomas wrote: ‘I tend to encounter a lot of casual racism…’
“How do you define racism? Do you define it as a prejudice that one race is superior or inferior to another race, or would a racist also just be someone who recognized differences between the races?”
“A person can acknowledge differences between races and still believe that the law should apply equally to all races. I would not consider that person to be racist. In my mind, a person would be racist if he were white and believed it should be legal to lynch a black man but not a white man. However, he would not be racist if he believed black families tended to be headed up by single moms, or that black men tended to commit more crimes than white men.”
——————————————————-
So, as long as you don’t lynch a “black man,” while culturally denying access to educational, economic, and judicial equality one is not racist?
This is of course, ignoring the fact that “race” is non-existent from a genetic perspective and is solely attributable to culture.
This a low bar of argument, is it not?
gbk wrote: “So, as long as you don’t lynch a “black man,” while culturally denying access to educational, economic, and judicial equality one is not racist?”
Not sure I appreciate the cross-posting from another thread. By the way, I posted that yesterday morning, not today as you said.
The examples you offer fall under legal inequality, so those examples also would represent racism.
gbk wrote: “This is of course, ignoring the fact that “race” is non-existent from a genetic perspective and is solely attributable to culture.”
The political move to declare that human race has no genetic component, or that human races are culturally determined is not based in science. It is an objection caused by Darwin’s analysis of the black race based upon his theory of Natural Selection. With the political win of Evolution by Natural Selection in our government educational system, they have to have some way to negate what happens when students actually read Darwin’s Origin of the Species instead of just listen to what they are taught by their teachers about it.
The truth is that there is a genetic difference between blacks and whites. Anybody who suggests that there is no genetic differences between blacks and whites is living in fantasy land without any grasp upon the science of genetics. While the politicians and lawyers and liberal educators might want to deny a genetic basis to human races, a biologist generally has no problem recognizing it. As time goes forward, however, the races intermix even more, and it becomes much less useful to talk about human races because their genetics become more mixed.
In a hurry, saw this board was still drawing posts and made a quick scan.
David,
“RTC wrote: “You have repeatedly said, on this board and elsewhere, that you have no problem with giving aid to “deserving” people.”
I have NEVER said this. Why do you make up this stuff? I have repeatedly said that we should help the poor whether they deserve it or not.”
Ugh. I don’t have time to wade through your screeds right now. The world Series is starting and I just became a Cardinals fan after a lifetime of aiting for the Cubs. You know fully well that my claim is true and accurate. I’ll deal with you later on that.
As for Fox lies, start with social security. The Congressional Budget Office creates a Goldilocks trio of projections: best case, worst case, and middling way. The repub noise machine has seaized on the middling estimate, projecting a shortage developing by 2035 and used it an excuse to pull every fire alarm in the country. These CBO has been putting out projections for generations and a study of their accuracy was conducted a few years back which showed that for nearly the last 50 years, the actual performance of SS has turned out to be closer to CBO’s best case predictions. Every time. Yet Fox continues to push the notion that not only will SS implode, but will take the entire country down with it. Want more? How about anything to do with climate change – It’s happening and we’re causing it. The growing deficit under Obama – it’s been shrinking. Iraq (Bush years). Afghanistan (Bush years). Polling numbers leading up to elections. George Tiller, baby killer. You’ll probably try to equivocate by claiming that much of what ‘s broadcast on Fox is commentary, not journalism. That would be horsecrap. Fox pundits pass their views off as informed, verified and proven cold, hard facts in order to convince gullible sociopathic people like you to buy into the noise machine’s agenda. And their “mistakes” always seem to be mistakes of convenience, like identifying a republican congressman caught diddling pages as a Democrat. Fox News lie? Please, when do they tell the truth?
Bron: You threw me with the word, epistemology. Could you please explain what you mean by that.
Hskiprob: This topic has had some amazing participation. I, for one, appreciate your contribution, even though I think you’re way off base. I did notice that you recycled a post about abortion on another topic elsewhere on this blog. Interesting, I’ve never seen anyone do that before, particularly one as long as that. Some people might call it lazy, but let’s go with innovative. I mean, if you believe strongly enough in a topic, why not.
RTC wrote: “As for Fox lies, start with social security. The Congressional Budget Office creates a Goldilocks trio of projections: best case, worst case, and middling way. The repub noise machine has seaized [sic] on the middling estimate, projecting a shortage developing by 2035 and used it an excuse to pull every fire alarm in the country. These CBO has been putting out projections for generations and a study of their accuracy was conducted a few years back which showed that for nearly the last 50 years, the actual performance of SS has turned out to be closer to CBO’s best case predictions. Every time. Yet Fox continues to push the notion that not only will SS implode, but will take the entire country down with it.”
I asked for one Fox News lie, your best case. I guess this is it. Problem is that I don’t see any Fox News lie presented here. I don’t even see a link to a Fox News statement that SS will implode and take the entire country down with it.
Fox News doesn’t even take a monolithic stand on issues like this. Fox News presents guests, many of whom are experts on these matters. These guests differ in how they interpret data. Often these guests are presented at the same time so that they can rebut each other.
Following is a link to the CBO report:
http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43648
Excerpt from this article:
“Under current law, the DI trust fund will be exhausted in 2016, and the OASI trust fund will be exhausted in 2038. It is a common analytical convention to consider the DI and OASI trust funds in combination. CBO projects that, if legislation to shift resources from the OASI trust fund to the DI trust fund was enacted as has been done in the past, the combined trust funds would be exhausted in 2034. However, considerable uncertainty surrounds the various factors that affect the program’s revenues and outlays, and thus the date at which the trust funds would be exhausted.”
I encourage you to look at the link within this web page to the pdf report and look at Exhibit 7 and Exhibit 8. The graph shown in Exhibit 7 is very disconcerting. They write the following about it:
“The year in which the trust funds are exhausted
could differ significantly from CBO’s projection,
however. In CBO’s simulations, in which most of
the key demographic and economic factors in the
analysis were varied on the basis of historical patterns,
the trust funds are exhausted in 2029 or
earlier 10 percent of the time and in 2045 or later
10 percent of the time, (The shaded area in the figure
shows the 80 percent range of uncertainty. The
intersection between the shaded area and the horizontal
line at zero, spanning the years between
2029 and 2045, corresponds to the 80 percent
range of uncertainty about the year in which the
trust funds will become exhausted.) The negative
balances represent CBO’s estimates of the cumulative
amount of scheduled benefits that cannot be
paid from the program’s current-law revenues
(expressed as a ratio to outlays in each year).”
I have no problem with a News Agency reporting this CBO information to its audience. It certainly is not lying. It is up to each individual to determine what needs to be done about it. I guess your perspective is that we don’t need to do anything about Social Security?
David, my understanding is that the social security trust fund is already exhausted. It’s funded with new revenues as they come in. With less people paying and more people collecting, this is what the project.
Mike A.,
Great stuff!
Mike Appleton,
“The central issue before the Supreme Court was whether education was of such importance that the funding formula should be subject to strict scrutiny.”
Well, at least I understood the above upon my reading of the case.
“A three-judge panel in Rodriguez held that Texas’ funding formula for public schools violated the 14th Amendment because it resulted in a huge funding disparity between poor and wealthy school districts (in fact, the way the formula worked meant that property owners in poor districts actually paid a higher tax rate than property owners in wealthy districts).”
Thank you for pointing this out, as I was not aware of this detail.
“It was pretty clear from the opinion, in my view at least, that the [SCOTUS] majority was principally concerned with the ramifications of a contrary ruling on state and local control over educational policy.”
Thank you. Your perspective will help immensely as I read the history and legal opinions of this case again.
gbk,
Which eventually led to the South’s downfall which is another thing the myth tries to disguise … just ask any “States Rights” supporter. 😉
Blouise,
This can be most easily appreciated when one considers that in 1860 the value of the slaves held by southern states was estimated to be $3.25 billion dollars, a “value equal to the total value of all farmland and farm buildings in the South.”
The holding of slaves became as much a source of wealth to the large planters as their land.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/ransom.civil.war.us
gbk:
It was interesting because I was on the law review at the time, and one of my editorial functions was to pore over advance sheets (soft bound copies of court decisions published before the hard bound volume comes out) for cases that might be of interest for notes or comments in the review. The district court decisions in Rodriguez and Roe v. Wade came out within a year and a half of each other, generating a great deal of interest. (I kept the Roe case for myself and published a note on it.) Keep in mind that this was during the heady days of civil rights litigation and the emergence of a new focus on the rights of women. I had a personal interest for several reasons. I came of age living in El Paso, a bi-lingual, bi-cultural town, and I had many Mexican-American friends. I was well aware of the historic prejudice against Mexican-Americans throughout Texas and their relative poverty. I had also attended a Jesuit high school and had been steeped in Catholic theology on social justice. And I had studied philosophy under John Rawls in college and had been exposed to many of his ideas on justice before he published his (in my opinion) masterwork.
A three-judge panel in Rodriguez held that Texas’ funding formula for public schools violated the 14th Amendment because it resulted in a huge funding disparity between poor and wealthy school districts (in fact, the way the formula worked meant that property owners in poor districts actually paid a higher tax rate than property owners in wealthy districts). The central issue before the Supreme Court was whether education was of such importance that the funding formula should be subject to strict scrutiny. The Supreme Court said no in a 5-4 decision. It was pretty clear from the opinion, in my view at least, that the majority was principally concerned with the ramifications of a contrary ruling on state and local control over educational policy.
gbk,
Hey … we get it
” … that it’s easy to get rich when you don’t have to pay anyone …” (gbk)
just ask Wal-Mart.
“But I think the real issue is not how the wealth was gained” (Tony C)
But that, Tony, is exactly where the myth begins. The lies about how the wealth was built is the problem when it comes to the cultural myths that impede the progressive plans that the Norwegian Model represents.
Oh sure, then the wealth was inherited (slaves built the wealth of tobacco, rice, indigo, sugar, cotton and then, themselves, became part of the inherited wealth) but the myth about how the wealth was built is what must be tackled if we are to move into a legitimate progressive society.
Who built the early infrastructure that enabled all the goods to travel … the roads, the bridges, the dams … some band of forward thinking engineers? Good lord no … slaves then enslaved immigrants.
No, I’m not talking about money influencing politics, I’m talking about the myth so many Americans believe thus allowing money to so influence their politics.
“I’m talking about the myth so many Americans believe thus allowing money to so influence their politics.”
Blouise Amen,
It is always the “myths” that are most important in forming peoples attitudes and they prevent their believers from seeing the context of the problem. This country was built upon slavery, indentured servitude and class privilege. To change it those myths of rugged individualism must be exposed.
Blouise,
The timing is off for me today.
Your post of 6:48 pm occurred while I was typing my post of 6:50 pm.
“The West was not built by a bunch of plucky farmers … those farmers wouldn’t have lasted a year if the Army hadn’t wiped out the natives.”
They were “settlers,” haven’t you heard?
I’ll never forget the black curator of a small museum in Natchez, Mississippi, who stated to me (paraphrasing) that it’s easy to get rich when you don’t have to pay anyone.
Blouise,
Quoting myself:
“This is rhetorical, yes?”
This was rhetorical, yes? 😉