Taking White-Out to the Constitution
by Jim Washburn
Remember the piece 60 Minutes ran on Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, wherein he came off as both more personable and more frightening than you might have imagined, and he hadn’t previously left much to the imagination on the latter front? I mean, this is the judge who believes that merely being innocent of the charges you were convicted of is not sufficient grounds for an appeal; and who believes that torture is not cruel and unusual punishment, because, as he sees it, it isn’t punishment unless it’s being meted out as retribution—for example, if you were convicted of a crime—but if your government has you locked up indefinitely without any charges, and tortures you routinely to extract information from you, that’s not punishment, because it lacks a punitive motive. That’s how Scalia interprets American justice.
Scalia’s an adherent of “originalism,” meaning he tries to interpret the Constitution in the context of what the words originally meant to its framers. It’s a view to which his court colleague and friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg takes exception. As she eloquently put it on the 60 Minutes segment, you can’t get past “We the People” without running into problems with originalism, because that meant a very different thing to the framers, since those then allowed to participate in our fledgling democracy were white, male landowners.
America is perhaps on the brink of electing is first black president, which would seem to lend weight to the argument that the Constitution is a living, breathing document, intended to be continually reinterpreted in the context of the present.
But, hold on a minute, because there are some stones in Obama’s pathway to the White House, and they have a lot to do with “We the People” meaning much of what it did in 1776.
I recommend you check out “Block the Vote” by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Oct. 30, 2008 Rolling Stone, or some light reading by one or both of them here or here about the Bush administration-led attempt to disenfranchise millions of voters in this election cycle. Palast is the US-born BBC reporter who broke one of the most significant and underreported stories of the 2000 election: how Jeb Bush and Kathryn Harris had hired a right-wing firm to scrub the felons from Florida’s voter lists. They did such a good job that tens of thousands of valid voters—with similar names, etc., and mostly poor and black—were also excluded from voting.
Palast and Kennedy report on efforts to challenge voters in the current election cycle, such as some states where if your voting information is at all at variance with that on state records—meaning that if someone at the DMV missed a hyphen in your name—you may be prevented from voting. You can read the article for some of the other methods.
The ones that caught my attention are where they’re doing vote caging: sending mail to voters registered in low-income, presumably Democratic-leaning, neighborhoods, and if the mail comes back as undeliverable, submitting that name to be purged from the lists (even though in many instances the mail couldn’t be delivered because the addressee was over serving in Iraq). And to add insult to injury, in Michigan and other parts of the country, they report, Republicans have been going through foreclosure lists, so that they might challenge the former homeowners at the polling places, since they no longer reside at those addresses.
The result? An America that’s looking a lot more like the “We the People” of 1976, where if you’re not part of the landed gentry, and probably white, you may not be the “We” that gets a say in your country.
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