Tag: the constitution

How the Supreme Court Rewrote the Constitution Part VII: Concentration Camps and the End

This is the last installment in a series on the nadir, or low point, of the U.S. Supreme Court. This was the period from 1937 to 1944, when the court stopped protecting the Constitution’s limits on the federal government. Our Constitution has never fully recovered.

The first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments related to how the justices initially tried to balance the demands of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal with the Constitution’s rules. In 1937, however, Roosevelt began to replace sitting justices with New Deal enthusiasts who had no prior judicial credentials. The remodeled bench successively discarded limits on federal spending, federal property ownership, and federal economic regulation. In at least one case, it abandoned habeas corpus and the right to a trial by jury.

This final installment addresses the court’s role in what was, aside from slavery, the most egregious violation of civil rights in U.S. history. It adds some observations on how the court’s abysmal record from 1937 to 1944 continues to affect us today.

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Mystal: U.S. Constitution Is ‘Trash’ Written by Slave-Owning ‘White People’

The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal said Friday on ABC’s “The View” that the United States Constitution is “trash” written by slave-owning white people.

Discussing his new book “Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution,” Mystal said, “Republicans are obviously trying to manipulate those laws, particularly the rights of minorities, women, and the LGBTQ communities, and I explain it in ways we can understand so we can fight them.”

Co-host Ana Navarro said, “I live in Florida, so I’m, like, on ground zero of where all of this is happening. I’m out of my mind about the bills banning conversations about race and ethnicity and LGBTQ, just even mentioning gender identity in primary schools…Are you arguing for throwing out the Constitution? Should the Constitution be thrown out? What do we do? Is it a living document, or is it a sacred document?”

Mystal said, “It’s certainly not sacred. Let’s start there. The Constitution is kind of trash. Again, let’s just talk as adults for a second.”

Co-host Joy Behar said, “What did you say?”

Mystal said, “It’s kind of trash. It was written by slavers and colonists and white people willing to make deals with slavers and colonists. They didn’t ask anybody who looked like me what they thought about the Constitution.”

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Political science professor claims in Politico essay that Constitution is enemy of Democracy

The day prior to the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, Politico magazine ran a guest column by a political science professor who argued the U.S. Constitution has become a threat to democracy.

Corey Robin, a professor at Brooklyn College and the City of New York Graduate Center, wrote a piece titled “Republicans Are Moving Rapidly to Cement Minority Rule. Blame the Constitution.” 

In the piece, he argues the modern Republican Party and the Constitution are preventing the “national majority,” meaning the Democratic Party, from legislating effectively.

“Driving the initiatives of the Republicans and the inertia of the Democrats are two forces,” Robin writes. “The first is the right’s project, decades in the making, to legally limit the scope and reach of democracy. The second is the Constitution, which makes it difficult for the national majority to act and easy for local minorities to rule.” 

In the essay, Robin also criticizes constitutional facets of the American electoral process including the Electoral College and the Senate, all for the purpose of repeatedly leveling anti-Democratic accusations against the GOP.

“Democracy is not just the enemy of the Republican Party. It is also the enemy of the Constitution,” he writes. “Americans associate the Constitution with popular liberties such as due process and freedom of speech. They overlook its architecture of state power, which erects formidable barriers to equal representation and majority rule in all three branches of government.”

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It’s Constitution Day 2021 — Is There Anything Left to Actually Celebrate?

Friday, September 17th marks 234 years since the founding fathers ratified the Constitution of the United States in Independence Hall, Philadelphia. In present-day America, on what should be a joyous day for celebrating our Liberty and independence, both are wholly absent. The harsh reality is our founding document has never been more worthless.

Upon reading such a phrase, nationalists are sure to get their knickers in a bunch. Aghast at the utterance of such blasphemies, but ask yourself — is it wrong? Is such a statement factually inaccurate in any capacity? Name one so-called freedom you have that isn’t taxed, regulated, licensed, or downright illegal. You can’t.

So what makes us free? If we take a look at the Bill of Rights in contrast of the current state of the American Empire; every freedom guaranteed to the people by the framers has been torn asunder by expansion and overreaches of federal power the likes of which could never have been imagined.

The dastardly machinations of statism have given rise to a prolifically wicked entity presuming control over the lives of the masses. In truth, the Constitution has been eviscerated.

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Constitution, Declaration Of Independence Now Have ‘Trigger Warnings’ On National Archives Site

Digital copies of America’s founding documents — as well as other historical documents in the National Archives’ online catalog — now feature “trigger warnings” alerting readers that they may contain “harmful language,” and the change appears to follow the release of a “little-noticed” report from a National Archives racism task force that suggested the agency provide “context” for its historical materials.

Digital copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, most notably, now feature a “Harmful Language Alert,” which appears at the top of the page, and directs users to a National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) statement on “potentially harmful content.”

The NARA does not specify why the Constitution, Declaration, or Bill of Rights received the warning, but the NARA statement indicates that documents and historical materials are marked as having “harmful language” when they:

  • reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes;
  • be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more;
  • include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters and more;
  • demonstrate bias and exclusion in institutional collecting and digitization policies.

Trigger warnings are listed as just one of a number of solutions to the problem of providing historical documents to an increasingly “diverse community,” the NARA notes, and are part of an “institutional commitment” to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

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National Archives ‘Task Force’ Suggests Racism “Trigger Warnings” For Constitution, Bill Of Rights

A National Archives ‘task force’ on racism has suggested placing trigger warnings around the building housing founding documents including the U.S. constitution, as well as declaring that the historical portrayal of the founding fathers has previously been “too positive”.

Fox News reports that the group has proclaimed the National Archives’ Rotunda building, which houses the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as an example of “structural racism”.

The task force has decreed that the building lauds “wealthy White men in the nation’s founding” and that documents on display contain “legacy descriptions that use racial slurs and harmful language to describe BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color] communities,” as well as other offensive terms including “elderly,” “handicapped” and “illegal alien.”

The group wants new descriptions added to exhibits to “contextualize the records,” and notes placed to “forewarn audiences of content that may cause intense physiological and psychological symptoms.”

It also suggests creating “safe spaces” where those who cannot handle the exhibits dedicated to the nation’s founding can retreat and mentally stabilise themselves.

The report also states that events should be staged such as “dance or performance art in the space that invites dialogue about the ways that the United States has mythologized the founding era.”

The task force had a particular suggestion for how to portray the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, noting that he is “described in this sample lesson plan as a ‘visionary’ who took ‘vigorous action’ to strengthen the ‘will of the nation to expand westward.”

It continues, “The plan does not mention that his policy of westward expansion forced Native Americans off their ancestral land, encouraged ongoing colonial violence, and laid the groundwork for further atrocities like the Trail of Tears.”

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