Moral Monday Coming to Georgia January 13th

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/georgia-not-as-red-as-you-think-97580099833

Janice L. Mathis was interviewed on All In with Chris Hayes about Moral Monday coming to Georgia, food aid for school children and Medicaid expansion.

Gettysburg - Seven Score and a Decade Ago

July 5, 2013

The Civil War matters because the nation is more deeply divided than at any time since 1860. The Voting Rights Act is in peril because it is insufficiently deferential to States Rights. How the nation regards and treats nonwhites is at the core of the division. The fact that this Civil War is cold means that the lives sacrificed to it are ignored rather than commemorated as they were at Gettysburg. Disparities in health care, education, jobs, life expectancy, criminal justice are dismissed as individuals failing, genetic inferiority or cultural inevitability with little serious analysis of the role of intentional public policy. We need a third Reconstruction (the second was roughly 1954 to 1970) that addresses structural discrimination. We should attend to the recommendations of the UN Commission on the Elimination of Race Discrimination. We need a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. We urge the Egyptian regime to listen to protestors, but nary a word to Rick Perry ranting that state house demonstrations in Texas amount to terrorism. Had Lincoln survived the Civil War we might have had benign Reconstruction and genuine reconciliation. The lessons of Gettysburg are profound and timely.

Supreme Court and Judicial Activism on Health Care

Methink they doth protest too much. President called the Supreme Court Justices who are contemplating overturning Obamacare “judicial activists.” One definition of judicial activism is the usurpation of the power of the elected branches of government or appointed agencies, damaging the rule of law and democracy.
If they overturn the individual mandate, the Justices will render an opinion that will likely fly in the face of 60 years of broad interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause. It is not a coincidence that the Commerce Clause was the legal architecture used to strike down the scaffolding of private commercial segregation across the Jim Crow South during the 1950’s. There are even whispers among the extreme right about legislative amendments to the Commerce Clause, in order to narrow its reach. This is strange talk from folk who also purport to believe in unfettered capitalism. There is an inherent and growing tension between the Commerce Clause and the 10th (State’s Rights) Amendment.
It was right-wing Republicans who coined and promulgated the phrase judicial activist to denigrate judges whose judicial philosophy differs from their own. Judicial activism is in the eye of the beholder. The Fifth Circuit, which complained today about the President’s remarks, is more conservative than most of the federal circuits and sits in President Obama’s enemy territory, the deep red south.
Bravo for the President. Obamacare is the foundation of the political challenge he faces in November, whoever the candidate is. How many times have Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich indicated that Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan is so similar to Obamacare that it disqualifies him as the GOP’s nominee? The GOP and the Tea Party have taken dead aim at Obamacare as the centerpiece of their electoral strategy. The five jurists who may vote to strike down the individual mandate are all conservative Republican appointees. Are we to believe that they have no partisan leanings? That they were purged of all political thoughts on the day of confirmation? This is philosophically the same Court that decided the 2000 Presidential election, by stopping the vote count and delivering the White House to George Bush II in an opinion so partisan that the Justices themselves warned not to view it as a precedent for future decisions. Let’s not kid ourselves, the President’s political opponents
on the Supreme Court want to overturn Obamacare and the President has a right to defend it…and us.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote,
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.
If the President is not “feeling” the Justices, he has every right to say so. The right wingers are protesting and seek to graft onto the Presidency a prohibition against commenting on judicial philosophy of sitting jurists. There is no such prohibition. Judges may not comment on cases before they reach the court – to avoid the appearance of partiality. But the President is a partisan and a citizen and labors under no such constraint. On the contrary, if he believes the Court means to act in a way to harm the American people, the separation of the Executive from the Judiciary means he has a duty to speak.

States Rights Redux

States Rights is code for discrimination. A century and a half ago, some states asserted the right to leave the union. As any first year law student knows, partnerships are destroyed when partners withdraw. To avoid destroying the union, we fought the nation’s bloodiest conflict and admitted traitors back into the country on generous terms. After all, Southern dead paid in blood for their defense of the peculiar institution.
Fifty years ago, all Americans were free, but blacks were routinely denied the ballot and women had held the franchise for only a generation. Some states blocked access to the ballot with the same ferocity and on the same grounds that they stood in school house doors with ax handles – states rights. Denial of the ballot was premised on the right of states to control all election processes and procedures.
By eradicating widespread disenfranchisement in Dixie and in urban areas outside the Old South, the Voting Rights Act proved to be one of the most effective pieces of federal legislation ever enacted. It ranks with the 14th Amendment and the Commerce clause in changing the lives of Americans everywhere – for the better.
Like any new device, it took time for blacks and progressive whites to fully utilize the Voting Rights Act. Section V is a powerful tool and a near-anomaly in the law, requiring prior Department of Justice approval before states or other covered jurisdictions can make changes to voting processes and procedures. But its power derives from the circumstances surrounding its implementation. Some jurisdictions were so determined to deny minority groups the right to vote that they could not be trusted to manage their own elections. Eventually, the Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988 ushered in a new era of black political participation with thousands of black elected officials suing to create single-member districts where minority voting strength could be felt and breaking down the barriers to voter registration.
Motor Voter was an important milestone in the march toward full enfranchisement. Gone were the last vestiges of voter intimidation and courthouse-only registration. Potential voters could register at the public library, in school, at public agency offices and in door-to-door campaigns mounted by activists. And they could document their citizenship and residency in dozens of ways: utility bills, passports, birth certificates, student i.d. cards were all acceptable forms of identification.
But now, frightened by the country’s demographic realities and emboldened by a rightwing federal judiciary leftover from the Reagan-Bush era, some radical conservatives are raising the terrible visages of voter suppression and states’ rights once again. The battlefields are familiar, yet different this time around. All-white enclaves that surround Atlanta are seceding from Fulton County to avoid black political power. Republican-controlled legislatures are packing black voters into segregated districts to create even more partisan influence, with an avowed aim of running whites completely out of the Democratic Party. More than thirty states, led by Georgia, have enacted draconian voter i.d. laws, despite miniscule evidence of voter impersonation fraud. Industrial states are punishing union members to break the most reliable source of progressive organizational and economic clout.
Thirty-five years ago Earth Wind and Fire sang, “When Will We Ever Learn?” When it comes to states rights vs. minority voting rights, apparently the answer is “never.” Fortunately, coalitions of conscience are coming together across the nation. Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan are refusing to allow voter suppression to push our nation quietly back into the bad old days of minority rule. Blacks, Latinos, women and labor union members are no longer junior associates – they are senior partners in the American experience.

Thoughts on McDonald v. Chicago

I am disappointed at the Supreme Court’s decision to expand gun ownership in Chicago and across the nation. The McDonald v. Chicago ruling calls into question the right of U.S. citizens to enact sensible gun regulation and may gut reasonable gun control. Supreme Court decisions always have broad application. We would do well to remember that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of the people to form militias, not vigilante squads.

Ironically, the ultimate losers may be gun owners, many of whom will lose their lives or the life of a loved one with the guns they cherish. Gun manufacturers win, funeral parlors win. Emergency rooms will be more crowded. Where are the limits to this sweeping ruling protecting the right to bear arms? Apparently assault weapons are now legal. What about a howitzer? It is more important now than ever before to do everything we can to prevent gun violence. Other nations without widespread gun ownership are safer and less violent than the U.S. Guns must be kept out of the hand of felons, gun traffickers, domestic violence offenders, mentally ill individuals, and youth.

In a weird turn, Justice Thomas traced the origins of gun control to post-Reconstruction terrorism in the South propped up by Black Codes prohibiting blacks from owning weapons. It was wrong for the Klan and other terrorists to intimidate blacks in 1880 and it is wrong now to assume that guns can make us safer in 2010. Now, the states and locales are free to enact legislation as mindless as the new Georgia statute permitting concealed weapons at airport check points and in churches. At a time when state and local budgets to hire and train police are constrained, the Court has authorized putting millions more guns on the nation’s streets. This is short-sighted, unwise public policy. For months, I have been calling for an urban policy. I had in mind jobs and education, not more guns and more violence.