By Rasheed Z Baaith
“They have deeply corrupted themselves, as in the days of Gibeah; therefore he will remember their iniquity, he will visit their sins.”
In his book “ON ACCOUNT OF RACE: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and The Ravaging of African American Voting Rights”, Lawrence Gold-stone wrote “Beginning in 1876, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled both the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment and what seemed to be the right to vote in the Fifteenth.”
He went on to write in that same book, “None of this was done in the shadows-those determined to wrest the vote from Black Americans could not have been more boastful in either intent or execution.” It is the same today. Those determined to abridge our voting rights and so much more are depending upon this Supreme Court to ratify their bigoted intent to diminish our citizenship.
The Supreme Court has always allowed itself to be a tool of those who would oppress, deny and exclude individuals who were “other” than themselves or court petitioners for the sanction of racism. All of the so-called Civil Rights legislation is now under attack. There is belief that Brown vs Board of Education Topeka, Kansas may well be overturned as was the heart of Shelby County vs. Holder. The latter is the legislation which put in place preclearance requirements to insure the voting rights of African American people.
After the recent avalanche of restrictive voting laws recently passed, (250 in at least 20 states), the need for pre-clearance restriction should not be questioned. Nor should the legal precedent be ignored.
Legal precedence has historically been a guideline for sub-sequent cases which involve similar arguments. There seems to be nothing new about cases connected to Roe vs. Wade, yet this Supreme Court has decided to overturn it. And if that be the case, voting rights and so much more are in dan-ger of be either eliminated or severely restricted.
It is clear this Court is directed by politics much more than legal reasoning. Which means their “special justification” as the basis for overturning law they are politically or socially uncomfortable with is totally personal. Not legal.
There is one more legal term we should get familiar with: stare decisis which is Latin for “to stand by things decided.” The term will be considered irrelevant to this present Supreme Court. This court, heavily laden with far-right activist judges is going to do all they can to turn America into an America tyrannical in its governance, restrictive in its citizenry and prepared to be violent to those who oppose their novae terrar.
But it won’t be a new world. It will be the same world Hitler, Stalin, and Bull Conner tried to make.
And this Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, et al, is determined to help build it.
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