Tag Archives: Supreme Court

more about voting rights

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I stayed up late two nights ago hoping for news of the resolution to Senator Wendy Davis’s courageous filibuster against current Republican attempts to shut down most of Texas’s abortion clinics. But it was morning before I learned that she had actually succeeded, with the help of a gallery full of supporters. Of course Texas Lieutenant Governor, David Dewhurst, was quick to claim that the solemn proceedings of the august body over which he presides had been disrupted by a mob, and to promise to fight another day (in a new special session already called by Texas Governor Rick Perry).

My Facebook news feed remains full of celebration of Senator Davis and of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, of which more later. But Senator Davis, though she has become a new national celebrity as photos of her pink shoes have gone viral on the Internet, may need to seek other public office than the seat in the Texas Senate she now holds. Voter suppression legislation, that Texas enacted just hours after yesterday’s Supreme Court decision striking down part of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, redraws the Texas Legislative map in a way that effectively destroys Davis’s district.

The predictable Antonin Scalia has been widely noted, as he seemingly felt obliged to vent about his colleagues’ legitimation of “homosexual sodomy.” Declaring that he feels personally (and unfairly) stigmatized by the DOMA decision, Justice Scalia registered his discomfort at being thought a bigot. The very kindest thing that can be said about the good Justice, though, is that he is on the wrong side of this issue and the wrong side of history. Of course, his church is equally on the wrong side and entirely disingenuous in its official expressions of discomfort. Scalia is not disingenuous, just extreme. As a sidebar, the St. Louis Post Dispatch yesterday carried an op-ed piece by St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson again claiming that the Affordable Care Act infringes upon Catholic religious freedom.

I’m not hopeful about the voting rights issues. I do not think Justice Roberts’s claim that race no longer counts in our national politics is naive. I think it is calculated. Justice Roberts is surely aware that his court’s decision to weaken the voting rights act is as blatant an intervention into electoral politics as was Bush v. Gore. He is surely aware as well that present Republican strategy relies heavily upon attempts to disenfranchise minority, female, student, and elderly voters who tend to favor Democratic candidates. Republicans have hardly been secretive about this aim.

The conservative punditry are singing the praises of the voting rights decision, ignoring the fact that voter ID laws, which conservatives favor, aim to destroy the very success they (and Justice Roberts) claim that the Voting Rights act has achieved. Over the past several years voter protection groups, the League of Women Voters, and others have achieved some success in combatting voter suppression through legal means. Now much of this will have to be re-litigated. Reactionary state legislatures, Texas, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, and others are already announcing readiness to enact and/or reaffirm repressive new laws designed to disenfranchise voters who tend to vote for democrats. The Texas law, hurriedly announced by state Attorney General, Greg Abbott, has already been challenged legally. In states outside the South, such as my own state of Missouri, voter suppression has been given a new impetus.

The Roberts argument about race is grounded in the color-blind ideology (so-called) of aversive racism. It will be interesting to see how all these things play out in the next few weeks as the radical right seeks to express its belief in its own entitlement through voter suppression and liberals and progressives attempt to counter it. I don’t, myself, think we’re that far removed these days from the politics of Bull Connor. Blacks, Hispanics, and now people who look Muslim or have Muslim sounding names, are routinely targeted, beaten, and harrassed by police. Race and class-based repression are not localized in the South or directed solely at black people these days, but then they never were. Minorities are routinely subjected to selective law enforcement, including the death penalty. Our incarceration rate remains the highest in the world, with minorities overrepresented among our incarcerated populations. Texas has just completed its 500th execution since 1976, its eighth so far this year, executing Kimberly McCarthy, a black woman convicted by a jury that escaped being all white by including one black member. A good case can be made that we are not only resegregating our country, but rebarbarizing it as well.

drill baby drill!

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4:00 pm: I’ve just learned that a New Orleans judge has granted an injunction lifting the administration’s moratorium on deep water drilling. If the matter goes to the supreme court, and the supreme court agrees to hear it, will that signal a constitutional crisis?

8:00 pm: Now the administration has served notice that it will issue a second order and is appealing the ruling in regard to the first.

Read about it here and here.

yet once more . . .

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Yesterday the Supreme Court began yet another debate about race, this time about whether a test for promotion that favors white candidates may legitimately be used by the Hartford, Connecticut, fire department. White candidates who were denied promotion on the basis of the test had sued, claiming discrimination (i. e. that they were refused promotion because of their race). No black fire fighters passed the Hartford promotion test–it’s not an unfamiliar situation. St. Louis Fire Chief, Sherman George, was fired by Mayor Francis Slay in a similar case.

In the case before the Supreme Court, the arguments quickly took shape around the clichés of the affirmative action debate. Here’s what Robert Barnes reports in The Washington Post as plaintiff’s attorney Gregory S. Coleman’s presentation of the heart of the plaintiff’s case:

Racial classifications are inherently pernicious and, if not checked, lead as they did in New Haven to regrettable and socially destructive racial politics, [Coleman] told the court. He said New Haven officials scuttled the promotions not because they found fault with the test, which they had commissioned from a private company, but because the results caused a political uproar.

The court is sensitive to the perception among some whites that affirmative action programs are unfair to them and seems set to endorse the proposition that racially discriminatory outcomes do not establish a basis for municipalities to reject test results such as the ones at issue in Hartford.

Barnes reports that at one point in the questioning yesterday, Justice Roberts “asked Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler whether he could ‘assure me that the government’s position would be the same’ if the results had been reversed — if black applicants had scored well and no whites were eligible for advancement.” Apparently Justice Roberts did not find Kneedler’s affirmative answer satisfactory, and he is right; though his initial question is wrong and wrong headed.

White racism remains entrenched in American life from top to bottom, the institutional racism of white privilege. It may be that affirmative action programs have done all they can do to change this situation and that what remains must be left to hope and good will as our society evolves. But if the court rules as it seems set to rule and endorses institutional racism, that will be a serious setback to the almost century-old effort to redress racial injustice through the courts, to the legacy of James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, and Thurgood Marshall.

As Barnes puts it:

[These] arguments come as the court has grown more skeptical of [race based] policies, and in the wake of the election of the nation’s first black president, who has urged a new conversation about the effects of past discrimination and the future of race relations.

It will be a truly mournful thing if one consequence of the election of Barack Obama turns out to be an endorsement of white privilege by the United States Supreme Court.

puerile supremes guffaw about strip search

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I am amazed and very seriously troubled by the language and tenor of arguments at the United States Supreme Court in the case of Safford Unified School District v. Redding. I am also outraged at the tone of the reporting of this language by New York Times writer Adam Liptak.

This is the case of Savana Redding, who was strip searched by school officials in Safford, Arizona, looking for an ibuprofen pill and acting on a “tip” from another student. Redding was 13 and in the eighth grade at the time. Both male and female school officials participated in the search, which found no ibuprofen or any other “controlled substance.”

Here is Liptak’s lead:

The United States Supreme Court spent an hour on Tuesday debating what middle school students are apt to put in their underwear and what should be done about it.

After that it’s all downhill. Liptak reports with apparent relish comments from the justices which are vulgar, voyeuristic, and offensive. Apparently, even Redding’s attorney participated in the verbal undressing of his client, commenting at one point that “there’s a certain ick factor to this.”

At another point, compounding the “ick factor,” Justice Breyer offered the following profundity:

In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, . . . We changed for gym, O.K.? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.

After which, according to Liptak, “The courtroom rocked with laughter, and the justice grew a little flustered at having apparently misspoken.”

According to Liptak, “While Supreme Court arguments can often be bone-dry exercises in statutory exegesis and doctrinal refinement, Tuesday’s session was grounded in vivid facts: school snitches, drugs, underwear and body cavities.” At one point, Justice Roberts exclaimed, “The issue here covers the brassiere as well, which doesn’t seem as outlandish as the underpants.” Later, Justice Scalia, with his usual profound confidence, asserted:

You search in the student’s pack, you search the student’s outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs. . . . Don’t you have, after conducting all these other searches, a reasonable suspicion that she has drugs in her underpants . . . ? You’ve searched everywhere else. . . . By God, the drugs must be in her underpants.

This might be funny, if it weren’t so awful. And nowhere in this discourse, not from the attorney for the plaintiff, nor from the federal attorneys arguing as friends of the court, nor from the justices (except for Justice Ginsburg), nor from the reporter, is there any recognition of the obscenity of the violation of this young woman’s privacy, her body, and her person by mindless school officials mindlessly enforcing a mindless zero-tolerance policy.

I’m surprised that Liptak didn’t report Justice Ginsburg’s remarks critical of the strip search, as several bloggers have done. Indeed, Liptak seems eager to join in the boys’ club atmosphere he describes. One blogger notes that

After [Justice] Breyer wondered aloud just “how bad” the search really was, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg interrupted energetically to underscore how bad it was. She said Redding and another student in the case weren’t just told to strip to their underwear. “They were asked to shake their bras out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out.”

The same blogger remarks ruefully that “Ginsburg has said more than once that she feels lonely on the Court as the only woman;” and adds that “this must have been one moment when that loneliness was acute.”

According to Liptak, the court’s mood was summed up when Justice Souter remarked as follows, “My thought process, . . . is I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can’t find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry.” Begging the court and the reporter’s pardon, the insensitivity of this remark is worse than appalling, it is a dishonest appeal to a false choice, and worse still: it is an off-the-rack cliché. It reflects nobody’s actual thinking. It is intellectual junk.

And apparently no thought on anybody’s part, either, that the events at issue occurred in a school, or any concern about what such scenarios teach. Here’s what they teach — that the people who have the power in life can do anything they want to you, and you have no recourse. They teach that to young vulnerable teenagers. I’m glad Savana Redding is fighting back. I hope she wins. I would have no objection to a little jail time for the school officials who molested her.

But if the language of the majority of the justices here noted is an indication of the seriousness with which this case will be adjudicated, I don’t have much hope.