The Supreme Court and jelly beans
1st July 2013 · 0 Comments
A hundred years from now our great-grandchildren will ask how it happened.
More importantly, they will want to know why we let it happen and what we, individually did about it. This period in history will be compared to 1930s Germany, when a handful of people were able to change the lives of millions…because the millions sat and watched.
The culprits will be known by many names, mostly derisive names: the Court of Whores, the Supreme Clowns, the Court of Betrayal, the Court of the New Confederacy.
This is the same court that gave us President George W. Bush, by ordering a halt to the Florida vote count that could have produced a different outcome.
This is the same court that defied the letter, spirit and history of the U.S. Constitution with the Citizens United decision, declaring that a corporation is a person.
This is the same court that allowed Clarence Thomas, former attorney for Monsanto, to actually write the decision that has given that corporation virtually unlimited license to control or shut down smaller farming operations across the country. And the list goes on and on.
The United States Supreme Court is out of control. It is guided neither by the will of the people, the Constitution, common decency nor conscience. It is a racist, partisan court with decisions for sale.
On Tuesday of last week, when the Supreme Court voted to gut the Civil Rights Act by striking down Section 4, they merely sounded an acceleration in the direction they have been moving in for years, an escalation of their efforts to turn back the clock, calendar and sundial of racial justice in the United States. It is now open season on voting rights in particular and civil rights in general.
It is said that the devil’s best, most effective lie is that the devil does not exist. On Tuesday the Supreme Court bought and sold the racists’ greatest lie: that racism no longer exists in the United States. Based on this lie, the Court reasons (to use a term loosely) that there is no longer a need for federal oversight. The idea is that racism is so dead that states like Louisiana and Texas should be allowed to make any voting laws that they choose. Blacks and others in these states do not need any protection of their rights.
This defies belief. In the last presidential election alone, candidate Mitt Romney was allowed to own the actual voting machines in five key states, voting machines that are known to be susceptible to computer manipulation. We saw several states purge voting rolls and enact stricter identification laws, just to eliminate the number of Black, brown and poor voters that might not vote Republican. We saw police harassing Blacks at voting polls and people who were legitimately registered told that their names were not on the rolls. Polling times and locations were altered without notice.
This court had to forget and deny both facts and current data to claim that voter suppression is no longer a threat.
But there are many of us who will not forget. Many are old enough to remember the jelly bean jar, the poll tax, the grandfather clause and the voting test.
Prior to the Voting Rights Act, in several states, Blacks would have to leap hurdles to exercise their right to vote, which had been guaranteed immediately after slavery with the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. You might be asked to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. Your answer was always wrong. You might have to pay an expensive fee/tax. You might have to prove that your grandfather voted. Or you might have to answer questions such as “How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?” or “What was George Washington’s mother-in-law’s maiden name?”
The Supreme Court says that the racism that spawned these measures is dead so there is no need for monitoring or supervision. Nothing could be further from the truth. Within two hours of Tuesday’s decision, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott issued a statement declaring that two voter suppression measures that were rejected last year by federal judges could go into effect immediately now that there was no one to block them. One measure was a voter ID law; the other created voting districts that were obviously designed to neutralize Black voting strength.
Some people will not be satisfied until they see us back in chains. Some of these people, like Justice Clarence Thomas, are Black themselves. And Justice Thomas would be foolish to believe that he wouldn’t be counted in that number, despite him having done their bidding for all these years.
This article originally published in the July 1, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
