The Smithian

May 18th, 2013

Zoom

The Roberts court has aggressively recalibrated the nation’s laws in the areas of race, guns and political speech—three of the four cases that form the core of…Coyle’s “The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution.”

more.

The Roberts court has aggressively recalibrated the nation’s laws in the areas of race, guns and political speech—three of the four cases that form the core of…Coyle’s “The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution.”

more.

April 29th, 2013

thesmithian

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting words” those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942

The fighting words doctrine has been tested numerous times over the last 70 years, losing power with each new decision.

April 3rd, 2013

thesmithian

'Any delays in instituting the law can—and likely will—be magnified into a media narrative about the administration’s broken promises; but it shouldn’t bare the brunt of the blame. The orchestrated Republican effort to deny ACA’s health care benefits is largely responsible. The GOP may have failed in its effort to repeal Obamacare in Congress, lost at the Supreme Court in June and the ballot box in November, but the party isn’t backing down from trying to dismantle or delay the law.'

March 20th, 2013

thesmithian

I don’t think the GOP is in that much trouble. (And, twice in 20 years now, we’ve seen how deftly they can disrupt the administrations of the people who beat them.) They’ve locked up the House for the foreseeable future. They’re getting all kinds of laws past in the states that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. They’ve stacked the courts to the point where the DC circuit can rule against recess appointments, and where it looks like the teeth of the Voting Rights Act are about to be pulled. The entire economic debate is being fought out on ground only a smidge to the left of their own choosing. Sensible gun control turns out to be DOA, at least in part because Democratic politicians are afraid of mighty Republican ad buys in contestable states. Campaign finance is a a dead parrot, and the system in situ is vastly to their advantage. Real action on climate change is utterly stalled. So, with all that, the RNC does a little examination of conscience about why they’ve lost the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections, and everybody goes into high-sterics, as my mother used to say.

Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire

March 6th, 2013

thesmithian

…the majority of the Supreme Court hoped that the Dred Scott decision would mark the end of antislavery agitation. Instead, the decision increased antislavery sentiment in the North…

it was today, in 1857, that the Court ruled.

March 6th, 2013

thesmithian

'...the bill that recently passed the Arizona senate targets a method of voting that is likely to be unusually common among Latino voters. In other words, the law likely has the “effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color,” and thus is unlikely to survive review under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—unless, of course, the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5.'

March 4th, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

…an advocate whose greatest legacy…may be in the cases that [Ruth Bader Ginsburg] argued before what was then an all-male Supreme Court—and won.

more.

February 28th, 2013

thesmithian

For a quarter-century, Antonin Scalia has been the reigning bully of the Supreme Court, but finally a couple of justices are willing to face him down…the court’s newest members, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

more. and more.

For a quarter-century, Antonin Scalia has been the reigning bully of the Supreme Court, but finally a couple of justices are willing to face him down…the court’s newest members, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

more. and more.

February 27th, 2013

thesmithian

…In the past he’s backed states’ rights by referencing post-Civil War racial exclusion laws. He’s noted that he would have dissented had he been on the Supreme Court when it ruled unanimously for desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education. And then there was his dissent with the majority in a case just last year, Arizona v. United States, in which he argued against federal supremacy in immigration law…he favored Arizona’s having the right to control immigration based on what post-Civil War states of the former Confederacy did to restrict the movement of millions of blacks who had been held as slaves just a few years previously. Quite the precedent.

more.

…In the past he’s backed states’ rights by referencing post-Civil War racial exclusion laws. He’s noted that he would have dissented had he been on the Supreme Court when it ruled unanimously for desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education. And then there was his dissent with the majority in a case just last year, Arizona v. United States, in which he argued against federal supremacy in immigration law…he favored Arizona’s having the right to control immigration based on what post-Civil War states of the former Confederacy did to restrict the movement of millions of blacks who had been held as slaves just a few years previously. Quite the precedent.

more.

February 27th, 2013

thesmithian

'The elimination of Section V will gut the effective protections of the Voting Rights Act, and you will be amazed at how quickly Republicans legislatures and Republican governors will rush to place new barriers in front of the voters they'd rather not see casting ballots. People will affect surprise. After all, this is the 21st century. We're past all that. There will be a general amazement because, in this country, it is never about race, but it is always about race, over and over again.'

February 27th, 2013

thesmithian

… [a] perpetuation of racial entitlement.

Justice Antonin Scalia, [offering] his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

February 15th, 2013

thesmithian

…the Alabama Legislature is moving to grant posthumous pardons to the Scottsboro Boys—the nine black teenagers arrested…in 1931 and convicted by all-white juries of raping two white women. The trials were feverish displays of American racism and injustice that stirred a lynch mob…The travesty…eventually resulted in landmark Supreme Court rulings on the right to adequate counsel and prohibiting the exclusion of black people from juries. The case consumed the lives of the nine men, even after the rape accusation was recanted by one of the women and the testimony of other witnesses fell apart in a series of retrials and appeals. All but one defendant were sentenced to death, and though none was executed, all served time.

more.

…the Alabama Legislature is moving to grant posthumous pardons to the Scottsboro Boys—the nine black teenagers arrested…in 1931 and convicted by all-white juries of raping two white women. The trials were feverish displays of American racism and injustice that stirred a lynch mob…The travesty…eventually resulted in landmark Supreme Court rulings on the right to adequate counsel and prohibiting the exclusion of black people from juries. The case consumed the lives of the nine men, even after the rape accusation was recanted by one of the women and the testimony of other witnesses fell apart in a series of retrials and appeals. All but one defendant were sentenced to death, and though none was executed, all served time.

more.

February 9th, 2013

thesmithian

‘the bipartisan consensus that supported the Voting Rights Act for nearly fifty years has collapsed…’

…and conservatives are challenging the law as never before. Last November, three days after a presidential election in which voter suppression played a starring role, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Section 5 of the VRA, which compels parts or all of sixteen states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election-related changes with the federal government. The case will be heard on February 27. The lawsuit, originating in Shelby County, Alabama, is backed by leading operatives and funders in the conservative movement, along with Republican attorneys general in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. Shelby County’s brief claims that “Section 5’s federalism cost is too great” and that the statute has “accomplished [its] mission.” The current campaign against the VRA is the result of three key factors: a whiter, more Southern, more conservative GOP that has responded to demographic change by trying to suppress an increasingly diverse electorate; a twenty-five-year effort to gut the VRA by conservative intellectuals, who in recent years have received millions of dollars from top right-wing funders, including Charles Koch; and a reactionary Supreme Court that does not support remedies to racial discrimination.

more.