Barnard "I'm a Soul Man" Woods just wants to kill black babies.
Posted on 07/02/2022 10:44:12 PM PDT by NoLibZone
The conservative supermajority has weaponized this harmful judicial philosophy as a way to embrace a racist, patriarchal narrowing of political rights.
Even as the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court was sworn in Thursday, the slate of rulings from the newly empowered, right-wing and originalist court majority this term has made it clearer than ever that the court is motivated by a reliance on the white supremacist patriarchy of the Constitution’s framers.
With Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade last week, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court has signaled its desire to “make America great again” using 18th and 19th century standards to address modern problems. Specifically, these rulings rely heavily on a judicial philosophy called originalism, which argues that in interpreting the Constitution, we must hold the intent — i.e., the thought processes of the framers — above all else.
Originalist judges express a belief that we should interpret the U.S. Constitution according to the legal opinions of 18th century white men. In other words, in those decisions, originalist judges express a belief that we should interpret the U.S. Constitution according to the legal opinions of 18th century white men — the same white men who denied the right to vote or own property to anyone but themselves.
But I would submit that the reason that such a judicial view is not only possible, but also predominant, among our highest jurists is because so few of us white men (and increasingly, white women) have been willing, over these last centuries, to question our inheritance of historic American privilege.
Originalism is patriarchal white supremacy.
The debates surrounding the framing of the Constitution reveal fraught compromises between the rich white men balancing the interests of the states with the interests of the union. The delegates from my home state of South Carolina, for example, used a tortured, self-serving rationale to justify their continued importation of enslaved people from Africa.
“If Slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world,” Charles Pinckney, a Revolutionary War hero and a member of South Carolina’s delegation to the convention — and a slaveholder — said, per a New York Times account. “An attempt to take away the right, as proposed, will produce serious objections to the Constitution.”
The framers ultimately reached a compromise where the importation of enslaved people would face a sunset clause, but would not be immediately outlawed. And thus the domestic trade in enslaved people — and the political empowerment of those who enslaved them — was enshrined in the nation’s founding document.
My family traced some genealogical connection to Pinckney and taught me to be proud that I had descended from someone at the Constitutional Convention. But when I see his words, I can feel nothing but shame and revulsion.
Originalists feel no such shame. When the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, we no longer had to consider what the framers said about the issue, the originalists argue, because the amendment superseded the original intent.
But it is impossible to sever a man like Pinckney’s thoughts on slavery from the rest of his worldview — especially someone who grew up in a place like Charleston, a onetime heart of the nation’s slave trade, and on a plantation surrounded by people over whom his family exacted absolute control in order to extract absolute value.
But it is impossible to sever a man like Pinckney’s thoughts on slavery from the rest of his worldview. Even if we allow that the Constitution was eventually amended to undo Pinckney’s monstrous beliefs about who was a human, it is hard to trust any argument that relies on his or his contemporaries' intent, none of whom could have envisioned Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Though Justice Clarence Thomas is also descended from those enslaved by the founders, he has long been one of the court’s most staunch originalists — though now, following then-President Donald Trump’s appointees, he has a lot more competition.
In the court’s ruling on Dobbs, the majority highlighted its originalist bent, saying a woman’s right to abortion was not protected because it was not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Of course, there were no women in the Constitutional Convention, or in other positions of power at the time. That does not mean there were no abortions.
But in his concordance, Thomas took this rationale further, signaling the need to “correct” other precedent that strayed from the intent of the framers. In effect, Thomas argues that rights that were “unenumerated” in the Constitution are not necessarily legitimate, specifically taking aim at the principle of substantive due process, which was a bedrock of the decisions protecting same-sex marriage and contraception.
Unfortunately, originalism is far from the court’s only problem, as its decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency made clear. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, the majority decision in West Virginia v. EPA seems to abandon the textualist basis of the originalist doctrine espoused in Dobbs.
“The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it,” Kagan wrote. “When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get out-of-text-free cards.”
Notably, Thomas voted in the majority here.
The purpose of environmental regulation is to prevent those with power from harming all of those without it. The court’s decision, which dovetails with mainstream conservative thought, privileges once again the so-called freedoms of the white patriarchy over all else, with a particular disdain for regulations designed protect marginalized communities or, in this case, the planet.
When Charles Pinckney argued that South Carolina would not join the new nation if they could not continue to import, torture, rape and brutalize other human beings, he was articulating the same philosophy espoused by those who seek to destroy the administrative state.
The attempt to return to a white supremacist patriarchal state links the desire to dismantle the administrative state with the constitutional originalism of the court’s new majority. And both, like white supremacy and patriarchy, dress up a naked grab for power in the rhetoric of principle and legal logic.
Originalism is not simply a neutral judicial philosophy. When weaponized, as it has been by this Supreme Court, it is transformed into a political tactic and a serious-sounding way to embrace a white supremacist, patriarchal narrowing of the political rights exercised by many Americans.
You know what, they have the foundation in place right now to bring us back to 1930. It’s startling how quickly they are destroying our economic viability.
Are here is no such thing as a supermajority on the Supreme Court. A 5-4 decision has the same power as a 9-0 decision. I wonder what is behind the left’s recent and frequent usage of the word “supermajority” in reference to the court.
Knowing how badly they screw things up when they have good intentions, I shudder to think what they’ll cause with bad intentions.
Continued control of Congress and the Senate. Gotta have the Dems replace a few of those conservative justices.
The person who wrote this, the editor who approved it and all employees who work at the company that published this article hate you and I and would rather us enslaved or dead than free.
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That is exactly what we’re facing, and we need to go on offense asap before it’s too late.
Trump remains an existential threat to politics as usual which have failed us all for far too long.
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And no other potential candidate comes close Trump in that regard, including Gov. DeSantis, for whom I have the utmost respect. Anyone who wants to see the continuation of our Constitutional Republic and declines to vote for President Trump is simply out of touch with reality.
There’s one woke celebrity sitting in Russian jail begging and trying to shame the US through her privileged media connections to get her back to the land of the free and home of the brave.
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I hope the “woke celebrity” skank spends the rest of her life in that Russian lockup.
we need to elect people who will slap them so hard their dead grandmothers will feel it and never let them up
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I like the way you think!
Strange that NBC News chose to publish an attack on the constitution during the 4th of July weekend.
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NBC? /What’s strange is that they waited so long to do so!
Barnard "I'm a Soul Man" Woods just wants to kill black babies.
Baynard
Pathetic, weak, gay and dumb to hang his family clothing out to dry.
So the logical conclusion is that killing babies is a BIPOC thing? Are they sure that’s where they want to go with this?
I know what you mean.
McCarthy looks better every single day.
I don’t approve of some of the things he did, but look at this
place. He may not have had the fix, but he sure saw the
problem.
For your information/enlightenment:
Just a thinly disguised stalling tactic. “To fatigue them into compliance,” as the Declaration of Independence complained.
Years ago, I owned a coffee cup covered with bits of office wisdom. One of the sayings was:
“If you can’t be part of the solution, there is good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”
Eventually, CRT, etc. will wear out its welcome (pretty close to that right now) and fall into disfavor. In the meantime, the race mongers and floggers and their enablers and “allies” will get donations and collect their government paychecks.
Yes, in the 1700s it was the white nations that were the seafarers; England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. A thousand years before that, it was England who were fighting the Crusades against the Moors in the Middle East. And 700 years before that it was the Romans (who were white), who were conquering western Europe when Jesus was born.
The history of the world going back 2,000 years was white. Today's progressives need to make their peace with that an move on.
-PJ
Just to correct myself from the above... poor memory, sorry.
Pinckney’s objection of any declaration of equality at birth was not of the Declaration’s use of the term but, later, upon any inclusion of such statement in a bill or rights, as he felt that any assertion of natural rights would require the assertion of equality at birth. As a slave holder, Pinckney felt it better to avoid any such statement, which means, by his own logic, that natural law and slavery are incompatible.
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