================================= The Jim Crow Five and the Coming Political War =================================
Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org
Last night, five Justices of the Supreme Court declared that the 14th Amendment was created to suppress the black vote and protect the white corporate elite's hold on power. In the name of "equal protection", these five Jim Crow Justices sanctified the results of an election where black voting districts often saw as many as 25% of their votes thrown into the trashcan of inaccurate machine counts.
As dissenting Justice Stevens noted, for all the majority worried about possible inconsistencies in hand counts from different counties, they seemed blithely unconcerned about the fact that there was no consistency in the very voting systems used in different counties. Largely poor and black districts were systematically more likely to use the inaccurate punch card voting systems, while richer whiter districts saw their votes protected by more accurate optical scanning systems. Yet the Jim Crow Court majority upheld such county-based inequalities in the name of - get this - "local expertise."
That the Rehnquist majority has thrown away all credibility for their supposed "states rights" federalism jurisprudence is a given. But that basic hypocrisy pales before the obscenity of Chief Justice William Rehnquist's concurring opinion, a decision evoking equal protection by a man who as a law clerk at the time of Brown v. Board of Education argued "I think Plessy v. Ferguson, the legal foundation for mandatory racial segregation, was right and should be re-affirmed." This is a man who would later in the 1950s and 1960s lead GOP efforts at polls in Arizona to harass and disenfranchise black voters using the literacy tests and other tools of Jim Crow voter intimidation. Yet this man had the audacity last night to cite civil rights precedents in overruling the Florida Supreme Court.
Dripping with contempt, Justice Ginsberg decried Rehnquist's "casual citation" of cases overturning state Supreme Court decisions made "in the face of Southern resistance to the civil rights movement" when the situation in Florida was "hardly comparable." Left unsaid was the fact that Rehnquist was aligned with that Southern resistance to civil rights; his citation of those cases was an Orwellian twisting of history to protect the racist disenfranchisement of voters in Florida that those cases were originally meant to stop.
Evidence from the Florida election has continued to show that the old Jim Crow techniques have given way to new, only slightly more sophisticated forms of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement. The NAACP and other groups have documented systematic efforts to block black and latino voting, from police roadblocks to illegal demands for multiple IDs. But the most truly odious addition to the Jim Crow arsenal this election was what some have dubbed "disenfranchisement by database." In Florida, Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a company called Choicepoint, run by a bevy of GOP corporate funders, to produce a blacklist of voters to purge from the voting rolls. These names were supposedly purged because they were felons, but the list was so inaccurate that well over 7000 innocent people - 54% of them black - were illegally stripped of their right to vote by Harris and Choicepoint.
It is this partisan theft of the election through disenfranchisement that Rehnquist and the rest of the Jim Crow Five upheld last night.
One might think that this racist disenfranchisement was an isolated act of opportunism to gain Presidential power. But the disenfranchisement of blacks, latinos and others who are rapidly becoming the new majority in America, is actually the very threat that has driven the GOP to this partisan election theft, from preelection purges of the rolls to the thugs at the Miami-Dade canvassing board to last night's Court decision. The GOP corporate elite sees the coming demographic shift and knows it may very well spell the end of their easy dominance through racial scapegoating.
In their screwed up and conflicted way, the Democrats have been and continue to be the vehicle for the self-empowerment and enfranchisement of a whole range of excluded groups in our society, from the Civil Rights Acts to Motor Voter to the expansion of citizenship for new immigrant groups, and the corporate Right decided that this process needed to be turned back in this election. The corporate Right has only had to look at what's going on in California, as latinos and other non-whites have become the majority and the GOP has been nearly obliterated as a political force, to fear for the future. New pro-union, pro-education and pro-health care policies have been passed by the state legislature and even more radical change in the state is mobilizing in the streets.. The Right tried and failed to stem that political tide in California through anti-immigrant measures like Prop 187 and anti-affirmative action measures like Prop 209. They now justifiably fear the future as the same demographic and political upheaval will extend to other states and across the country.
The fight over who is a citizen, who is enfranchised to vote, and the whole gambit of "electoral profiling" to shut down the voting power of the excluded is the chasm of conflict that has been revealed in this election. And it's not going away. The Jim Crow Five on the Supreme Court felt the need to jump in to stand square against the right to vote. In ringing words, the majority proclaimed that "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States" except at the sufferance of state legislators and, apparently, the United States Supreme Court. And if there is no right to vote, the Court has established the precedent for a whole onslaught of subtle and possibly not-so-subtle attempts to deny that right to vote to all sorts of groups in coming years.
To understand why the Supreme Court majority would so blatantly undermine its credibility as it did in this case, you have to see it as a sacrifice play - trade off credibility on a whole host of other issues in order to try to win on the most fundamental issue and always the issue in our partial democracy - who is a citizen and who shall rule along the color line of corporate America.
But the Court's racist actions are likely to gain little but a delay in the face of rising activism by not only blacks and latinos but allied unions and other progressive forces. By stripping the illusion of impartial legitimacy from the organs of power, the Jim Crow Five will only help progressives organize greater unity in the fact of their attack. Blacks, latinos, the elderly, the disabled - those immediately disenfranchised by this latter-day Jim Crow Court are only the most obvious candidates for questioning the fundamental legitimacy of our whole corporate-dominated system.
In his dissent, Justice Stevens noted the fundamental hole the majority had ripped in the legitimacy of the system: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
With Rehnquist's racist past highlighted by last night's decision, the Supreme Court has shed its aura of neutral protector of authority and been revealed as the pure naked partisan protector of racial and corporate privilege it has become under the Jim Crow Five.
The establishment's loss of confidence will be the gain for progressive forces as we organize against the illegitimate stolen GOP Presidency and against the corporate interests pulling the strings from the shadows. The stealing of this election by the Right is only a temporary thumb in the dike against the progressive forces, embittered by this racist action, that will flood the streets and polls in coming years.
THIS WILL NOT STAND!