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.
He’s not stupid so he must be crazy. They’re all evil, of course.
rafflaw,
Ted Cruz: The Distinguished Wacko Bird from Texas
In less than a year, Texas Republican Ted Cruz has become the most despised man in the U.S. Senate. He’s been likened to Joe McCarthy, accused of behaving like a schoolyard bully, and smeared by senior members of his own party. Is this any way to get ahead in Washington? Well, Cruz is no dummy—just ask him—and his swift rise might prove that it’s the only way
By Jason Zengerle
October 2013
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201310/ted-cruz-republican-senator-october-2013
Excerpt:
It’s hard for Ted Cruz to be humble. Part of the challenge stems from his résumé, which the Texas senator wears like a sandwich board. There’s the Princeton class ring that’s always on his right hand and the crimson gown that, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, he donned when called upon to give a commencement speech earlier this year. (Cruz’s fellow Harvard Law alums Barack Obama and Mitt Romney typically perform their graduation duties in whatever robes they’re given.) Even Cruz’s favorite footwear, a pair of black ostrich-skin cowboy boots, serves as an advertisement for his credentials and connections. “These are my argument boots,” he told me one morning this summer as we rode the subway car beneath the Capitol to a vote on the Senate floor. “When I was Texas solicitor general, I did every argument in these boots. The one court that I was not willing to wear them in was the U.S. Supreme Court, and it was because my former boss and dear friend William Rehnquist was still chief justice. He and I were very close—he was a wonderful man—but he was very much a stickler for attire.”
It was only after Rehnquist died that Cruz felt comfortable wearing his cowboy boots in the Supreme Court—and only then because John Roberts (“a friend for many years”) blessed it. “I saw John shortly after his confirmation,” Cruz said, “and I guess I was feeling a little cheeky, because I took the opportunity to ask, ‘Mr. Chief Justice, do you have any views on the appropriateness of boots as footwear at oral argument?’ And Chief Justice Roberts chuckled and he said, ‘You know, Ted, if you’re representing the state of Texas, they’re not only appropriate, they’re required.’ ”
Cruz, 42, arrived in Washington in January as the ultimate conservative purist, a hero to both salt-of-the-earth Tea Partiers and clubby GOP think-tankers, and since then he has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right—in both senses of the word—than pretty much everyone else in our nation’s capital. That alone isn’t so outrageous for the Senate. “Every one of these guys thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room,” one senior Democratic aide told me. “But Cruz is utterly incapable of cloaking it in any kind of collegiality. He’s just so brazen.”
Little more than a month after Cruz was sworn in, Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, likened him to Joe McCarthy for his conduct during Chuck Hagel’s confirmation for secretary of defense. Without presenting a shred of evidence, Cruz insinuated that Hagel, a fellow Republican, was on the take from America’s enemies. Because Hagel had declined to reveal the source of a $200,000 payment, Cruz suggested, how do we know it didn’t come from the North Korean government? Or Saudi Arabia’s? Even South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, also a Republican, called Cruz’s line of inquiry “out of bounds.”…
Instead of derailing Cruz’s sky-high ambitions, his father’s financial calamity only intensified his drive. In the middle of his junior year, he persuaded his parents to take him out of the high school he was attending—a small evangelical school that met in a former Handy Dan hardware store—and send him to a more academically rigorous Baptist academy.
By then Cruz had already fallen under the spell of a conservative impresario named Rolland Storey, a onetime vaudevillian and retired natural-gas executive who ran a Houston-area think tank called the Free Enterprise Institute. At the institute, Cruz studied right-wing icons Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He also mastered a mnemonic version of the Constitution, which he’d recite, along with four other high school students, for Kiwanis, Rotary, and other civic clubs across Texas. They performed as a troupe called the Constitutional Corroborators.
Princeton turned out to be as alien to Cruz as Austin had been to his father some thirty years earlier: “I did not know anybody there; I didn’t know anybody who had gone there.” Like his father, he needed to earn tuition money. Unlike his father, he didn’t do it by washing dishes. He got a job with the Princeton Review, teaching test-prep classes.
The elite academic circles that Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”*
SWM, Sorry, I did not mean to pry. For your sake, I just hope it’s somewhere more in line w/ your sensibilities than Texas. Odds are in your favor. Good luck and God speed wherever and whenever. Good folks deserve good things. Are you going to have an announcement spectacle like LeBron James?
Bron,
Unless I missed something, I don’t believe anyone said Cruz acted illegally or unconstitutionally. However, there are a lot of things which are legal, but are immoral, unethical, or both.
At the same time, laws have been enacted that make moral and ethical actions illegal. Go figure. In the private sector, we have seen moral and ethical actions punished, as in the cases of the designated driver and the Walmart employee.
nick, The plan changed but I am not saying where I am moving until I actually move in two weeks.
Irish, Italian and Cuban. That’s a big trifecta!
Cruz is not mexican. He is Irish, Italian, and Cuban. He is a southern baptist, and does not have the support of the mainly catholic mexican latino community in Texas.
SWM, I just Googled your favorite Senator, I see he’s Cuban. I didn’t know there were any Cubans in Texas. My bad. I can admit a mistake, but my point still stands, obviously raff is anti Cuban.
Raff, same disclaimer, YOU ARE NOT ANTI-CUBAN. You must hate that he’s Canadian??? I have said and will continue to say, I really don’t like French Canadians.
SWM, Where are you moving to?
rafflaw,
Check out the video/animated cartoon of Ted Cruz (Ann Telnaes animation: The world according to Ted Cruz.) on the page with Dana Milbank’s article about the man.
Ted Cruz, one sore loser
By Dana Milbank
10/16/13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-in-debt-limit-and-shutdown-defeat-ted-cruz-is-one-sore-loser/2013/10/16/d896d180-36b4-11e3-ae46-e4248e75c8ea_story.html
rafflaw:
what has he done that is dirty?
As far as I know what he did was within the limits of the Constitution or am I missing something?
nick, i don’t understand why you are bringing Mexicans into the discussion.
Yeah raff, all those Mexicans are dirty, particularly those Texas Mexicans from coming across the desert.
Now please breathe. I don’t for one second think you’re saying that, or would ever even think that. I just want you to get a feel for how some folks operate flinging the “ist” and “ism” and just how wrong it is when it is just a shoot from the hip accusation. You’re an honorable man, but not all folks are.
Blouise and Swarthmore,
Cruz is dirty, period. His only reason for costing the government over $20 Billion dollars in the shutdown was to fund raise for his presidential aspirations.
Bron, Just staying w/ Jersey politics, Jon Corzine, a classic limo liberal, was CEO OF GOLDMAN SACHS. He’s the crook who put out bully ads about Christie being fat, and got his prissy ass handed to him by the voters. Don’t ever make fun of fat people in Jersey or Wisconsin! They’re a “big” demographic.
SwM,
The Republican party has begun the process of de-sanctifying Cruz. He’s going to be the fall guy so that a better candidate in the line of succession can move forward for the 2016 contest. The Atlantic Wire (out of D.C.) has spotted the trend.
Smom:
that doesnt seem like much of a story. So Cruz is a millionaire, so are some of the people who are progressives.
Grasping a straws.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/10/tea-partier-ted-cruz-forgot-about-his-caribbean-private-equity-firm/70687/ And his wife is a vice president of Goldman Sachs. .. tea party populist?
Elaine,
Noteworthy article from the “hometown” folk. Thanks for the link to the Houston Chronicle’s piece on Cruz.
DavidM and Mike A, Kudos to both of you. There are some good people here who realize this is just a way to discuss topics of interest. It is not the UN. Thankfully!!
Federal workers have always gotten their full pay, creating resentment from those who had to show up for work. Those Fed workers need a union w/ collective bargaining. Oh wait, that’s illegal.