Aug. 5, 2008

On Everything Because It’s All Intertwined. I am rewriting this entry because this computer made the original disappear. On this day I wrote that the world had gone crazy, the election was crazier, and for craziest person of the year I nominated Nancy Pelosi for adjourning Congress and literally turning out the lights while Republicans remained speaking on the floor. She turn off C-SPAN and turned a deaf ear to the American public who want a vote on off shore drilling and other energy legislation to help with the current crisis. I have never watched C-SPAN, but if she would turn it back on I sure would now. A courageous bunch of Republicans continue to speak from the darkened floor of the House, while the rest of the House is on vacation. The Democrats are holding up the business of the country and worse just ONE Democrat—Speaker Pelosi, which brings me to the book I finished that day--The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Death of Reconstruction. This book by Charles Lane is an eerie story. No one who reads this should every feel the same about the security of our liberty in the face of government, especially the judiciary branch.
Basically, free black men in Colfax, Louisiana were murdered on an Easter Sunday morning April 3, 1883. The ensuing investigation revealed that many of the outgunned blacks were shot execution style after they were captured. A courageous U.S. attorney in New Orleans worked tirelessly to bring the case to court only to have the outcome undermined by a Supreme Court justice and then to have the convictions overturned by the same Court. The Supreme Court decision left the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments stripped of their “privileges or immunities” clauses for use in federal civil rights prosecutions (p.261). The case’s precedent is still used today. All the federal civil rights thereafter derived from these amendments come from the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses. Even worse, it left the anti-black Democrats in control of Louisiana, and they are still in control. Remember Hurricane Katrina? It was these same Democrats who were in charge when the hurricane hit and everything fell apart. It is serious food for thought. Where might we be today if this case had had a different outcome? Also it illustrates that the Supreme Court has had many bad moments. Roe v. Wade, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Dread Scot may be the most famous disastrous decisions, but many bad decisions have been made over the years, and the state of the court today is really not very different than as it has been at many other times in the history of our country. These same Democrats are trying to take away our ability to get out from under foreign oil which has all of us enslaved today. They do not change.