My head almost exploded before I realized it was satire...
Obamas quotes from 2008 aren’t satire, and fit in with what Kagen thinks, which John has accurately portrayed. Midway through is good, where he talks about how the courts werent radical enough, and didnt break free from the constraints placed by the Founding Fathers. (”as they are interpreted”!!!) And I pray to God that Obama is losing his chance now.
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If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it Id be okay.
But, Obama said, The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasnt that radical. It didnt break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as its been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states cant do to you, says what the federal government cant do to you, but it doesnt say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasnt shifted.
Obama said one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that.