The Supreme Court – and the Court of Public Opinion
by Errington C. Thompson, MD –
President Obama and the rest of his White House staffers must be walking around pinching themselves.
I’m not sure that in their wildest dreams did they ever imagine they would get the Supreme Court of the United States to uphold the Affordable Care Act, gay marriage, and honest redistricting—and on three successive days!
Affordable Care—at last
The Affordable Care Act is really helping Americans. It is successful, and it is constitutional. It is not a job-killer, and there are no death panels. It has made health insurance available and affordable to at least 8 million Americans who were denied coverage or couldn’t afford it before the ACA.
The ACA—“Obamacare”—is not perfect. It’s underfunded (thanks to its opponents), and doctors and hospitals need to be better reimbursed. We need to figure out ways to truly control medical costs, including the right to negotiate the price of drugs. We need to make premiums even more affordable. Most importantly, we need to continually improve the care the medical community is delivering to patients. But Obamacare is the law of the land, and it is a success that will go down in history with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Marriage for all—at last
“Gay marriage,” to me, was a no-brainer—though let’s call it what it is: marriage equality for all people. Equal rights as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, which states, in part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor … deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
In other words, plain and simple, the state should not discriminate amongst its citizens. Not only “should not”: no state is permitted to discriminate among or against its citizens. And, clearly, “abridging the privilege” of any citizen to form a legal contract of marriage, along with all the benefits thereof, with the person of his or her choice, is discrimination. Withholding “equal protection of the laws” from one class of citizens and not another is discrimination.
Money is one of those privileges: inheritance rights for a spouse, Social Security and survivors’ benefits, and more than a thousand tax preferences that married couples are eligible for. Legal rights are another: who gets to decide on medical treatment for an ailing spouse, choosing a school for a child, and scores of other rights husbands and wives take for granted—like the privilege that a husband may not be forced to testify against his wife in court, and vice versa.
The response from conservatives was very predictable. Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and current Republican presidential candidate, used the word “tyranny” and called for active defiance. In an echo of George Wallace and Lester Maddox “standing in the schoolhouse door,” Huckabee (like other candidates) wants to defy the Supreme Court, two centuries of federal jurisprudence (see Marbury v. Madison, 1803), and the rule of law itself.
When progressives lose a major ruling from the Supreme Court, such as Citizens United, we call for legislators to use the legislative process to overturn the ruling. There’s a big difference.
Redistricting
Probably one of the most important decisions that the Supreme Court handed down over the last several weeks has to do with redistricting. Currently, redistricting—setting district lines for state and federal offices following the census every ten years—is a farce. Instead of the voters choosing their representatives, the “representatives” choose their voters.
While both sides try to bend the rules as much as possible so that they stack the cards in their favor, the Republicans who took over North Carolina in 2010 have gone overboard: it now takes three times as many Democrats’ votes as Republican ones to elect an official, which is why, in North Carolina elections in 2014, 10 of 13 House seats (77%) went to Republicans even though they got only 57% of the vote; Democrats, with 43% of the vote, got 23% of the seats. Nationally, Democrats actually got 1.5 million more votes than Republicans in U.S. House races, but Republicans gained a huge majority in the House.
If we are truly going to have a democracy in the United States we have to fix this redistricting problem. Going to vote in a gerrymandered district is almost a waste of time if you are in the minority. This is a subject that is near and dear to the hearts of many in North Carolina. And to almost everyone’s surprise, the Supreme Court ruled that an independent commission voted for by referendum in the Arizona case is an extension of the legislature and therefore is constitutional: it will be free to develop a redistricting plan without the primary concern of politicians: protecting their own interests.
Grace under fire
President Obama traveled to South Carolina on June 26 to give the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney and eight fellow worshipers who died at the hands of a white supremacist. It was one of Obama’s best speeches. The eulogy itself was fabulous, and the president spent a lot of time talking about grace, God’s grace.
Typically, the mainstream media focused on the fact that the president ended his eulogy by singing the first verse of “Amazing Grace.” Now some of us know that singing from the pulpit, gradually accompanied by the organ or piano (or both), is a typical practice in many black churches, but apparently it’s completely new and bewildering to most white reporters. And if that’s all the media takes from his speech, they’ve missed his point. So let me clarify that what President Obama spoke about was our coming together as a nation.
For background, one of the big questions that continues to plague me is, why did we fight the Civil War only to allow Jim Crow to crush freedom and liberty for millions? Over 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War … for what? So that a misguided boy can walk into a prayer service in South Carolina and kill nine people? The whole thing is so sad, made worse by his adoration of the battle flag used by Gen. Robert E. Lee in his fight against the union.
If anything does not bring us together as a nation, it is the Confederate battle flag. I understand that there are some Southerners who embrace the “stars and bars” as a symbol of bravery and honor, and no one doubts that there were some in the Confederate army who exhibited those qualities. But it is also a symbol of defiance against the federal government and a refusal to admit with good grace that the South lost its war against the nation.
The true Civil War
A lot of Americans are still confused—or in denial—about the Civil War. Among the most confusing topics is what the war was all about. Some Americans will answer, “States Rights.” But let’s be clear, and let’s be honest. The Civil War was about only two particular “states’ rights”: the right to own slaves, and the right to force escaped slaves—runaway property—to be returned to their proprietors.
Anyone who reads the official declarations by the elected representatives of the seceding states cannot deny the ugly truth: the Civil War was about slavery.
Declarations of the States
From the declarations of the states justifying going to war.
Georgia: “The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of [the northern Republican party] … The majority of the people of the North in 1860 decided it in their own favor. We refuse to submit to that judgment….”
Mississippi: “In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world… A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
South Carolina: [Under the Constitution] the right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights… The non-slaveholding States … have denied the rights of property; … denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; … encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and have … incited [them] to servile insurrection.
There also seems to be some confusion over who started the Civil War. On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Before he was able to take office on March 4, 1861, South Carolina voted, in December 1860, to secede from the Union.
One could argue that this vote was the start of the Civil War. You might also argue that John Brown, the abolitionist, who attacked Harpers Ferry Armory in 1859, started the war. Or you can argue that the Civil War began in earnest when Confederate troops fired mortars on Union troops at Fort Sumter, SC in April 1861. But you cannot argue, as some conservatives have, that President Abraham Lincoln started the Civil War. This is simply wrong.
After the war ended, we as a nation made many mistakes that avoided addressing the race question. Although slavery was dead, so was equality. Barely a dozen years after the war—when Rutherford B. Hayes lost the 1876 election but was named the winner by a special “commission”—he ended Reconstruction, and white-supremacist southern Democrats took power again. The Ku Klux Klan was born in 1865, and by the turn of the century Jim Crow laws, establishing both de facto and de jure segregation throughout the country, were solidly in place.
In fact, it wasn’t until after World War II that we began to address racial inequality in the United States. And the nation owes great thanks to Missouri-born President Harry Truman for taking the first bold step of integrating the Army—80 years after General Lee surrendered at Appomattox.
Symbol and substance
Partly in response to Truman’s action and the growing civil rights movement, S.C. Democrat Strom Thurmond ran for president as a “Dixiecrat” on a platform of segregation. Once again the Confederate battle flag reared its head as his party standard, and pro-segregation southerners have adopted it as their own ever since. In 1962 the state legislature even passed a law requiring that it be flown over the state capitol—a flag representing war against the United States. And only now, half a century later, is there the possibility that it will be retired.
If we are going to fly a flag on state grounds, shouldn’t it be a symbol that unites all of us instead of dividing us? Shouldn’t it be a symbol that embraces our “better angels”? Shouldn’t it represent our best hopes, our highest aspirations, and our faith in each other as “one nation under God”?
Personally, I think that our strength as a nation comes from our diversity.
The best news about the worst people?
Here’s some more good news for rational, caring people everywhere.
A couple of weeks ago, billionaire Donald Trump announced that he is running for president. During his rambling announcement he labeled the majority of Mexican immigrants as either drug dealers or rapists. Very quickly Univision, which televised the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants in Spanish, severed ties with Donald Trump; so did Macy’s, which carried his clothing line; and so did NBC Universal, which not only carried his “reality” shows but paid him as a television host.
Just six or seven years ago Sarah Palin was on top of the world. Sure, she had lost her vice-presidential bid. She also resigned as governor of Alaska, but she signed a lucrative, $1 million-per-year contract with Fox News. Large numbers of tea-party conservatives simply couldn’t get enough of Sarah Palin—the more strident she sounded, the more they loved her. She wrote a book that sold millions of copies and brought her millions more dollars. Last week, Fox News severed ties with Sarah Palin.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Irony and hypocrisy
That same Mr. Trump likes to promote himself as a great job creator and brilliant, successful businessman—but he’s really just a deadbeat who has declared bankruptcy four separate times, walking away from hundreds of millions in debts he ran up and leaving his creditors high and dry—and broke.
One of Mrs. Palin’s “values” is traditional marriage and families. Her daughter, a single mother, earned $262,000 in one year as an abstinence ambassador for The Candie’s Foundation teen pregnancy prevention campaign, preaching about the need to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy. In late June, she announced that she is pregnant, again—out of wedlock, again. You have to wonder if she’ll have to give the money back.
And the conservatives’ favorite justice, Antonin Scalia, in dissenting from upholding the Affordable Care Act—who has always insisted that “laws must always be read in the context of the whole”—demanded that the 900-page ACA be thrown out, based on four out-of-context words that were, in effect, a typo.
You just have to admire these people’s chutzpah.
