The crises of economic depression and world war probably would have induced Americans to support some constitutional alterations if they had been asked. The most that can be said is that people voted for candidates, some of whom sought the change. Other than the nine justices, no one voted on this change. This time the outcome was different, largely because the Supreme Court refused to defend the Constitution.Īs many scholars have recognized, the justices’ dereliction of duty essentially amended the Constitution without following amendment procedures. But America previously had undergone similar crises without altering her form of government. The change occurred against the backdrop of economic depression and world war. This series focuses on a central cause-perhaps the central cause: the conscious abdication of responsibility by a handful of Supreme Court justices, primarily between the years 19. Major changes always have multiple causes. So how did it happen that federal functionaries now regulate nearly every aspect of our lives? How did a government designed to protect freedom become arbitrary and authoritarian? When did it start to incentivize bad behavior, both among officials and the people at large? Why does it run deficits every year, and why do those deficits keep getting bigger? It was a frugal institution, designed to “preserve the blessings of Liberty” and to bring out the best in human beings. The Constitution created a relatively small federal government, with powers limited to certain listed subjects. Because the entire series is now in one place, transitional material between installments has become unnecessary and it has been removed. But to make the series easier to read, it is combined and reproduced here. It explains a central event in the conversion of the federal government from the relatively small version created by the Constitution to the dysfunctional, overreaching “monster state” of today: the refusal, by a packed and unprincipled Supreme Court, to enforce constitutional limits on federal politicians.Įach installment was posted to this website. The Epoch Times published this seven-part series from January 17 to February 4, 2022. None had any significant judicial experience before being appointed to the highest tribunal in the nation. Left to right (including both rows): Reed, Byrnes, Roberts, Douglas, Stone (C.J.), Murphy, Black, Jackson, Frankfurter. He also insisted that the law’s purpose was not simply to separate riders but to degrade blacks.Above: SCOTUS in 1942-possibly the weakest Supreme Court ever. Tourgée thought the fact that Plessy could easily have passed for white demonstrated the absurdity of attempting to write racial classifications into law and empowering train conductors to determine a passenger’s race. With financial assistance from a local railroad company - which disliked the expense of separate cars, since there were often few if any black passengers - the Citizens’ Committee arranged for the light-skinned Homer Plessy to enter a whites-only coach and for the conductor to have him arrested when he refused an order to leave. Luxenberg reminds us that campaigns for the right to travel without facing humiliating discrimination long preceded the Civil War and took place in the North as well as the South. Tourgée, who as a judge fought the Ku Klux Klan in Reconstruction North Carolina and argued the case before the court Henry Billings Brown, a scion of the New England elite who wrote the 7-to-1 decision John Marshall Harlan, the slave-owning Kentuckian who fought for the Union in the Civil War and became the lone dissenter in Plessy and members of the Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans, descendants of the city’s prewar mixed-race free black community, who initiated the campaign to overturn the Separate Car Act.Īs Steve Luxenberg makes clear in “Separate,” which tells the story of the Plessy case, blacks saw the law first and foremost as an affront to their rights as citizens, which, in their view, included equal treatment in places of public accommodation and entertainment, such as hotels, restaurants and theaters, and by transportation companies. But few Americans know much about the cast of characters central to the case. Board of Education, which overruled it with regard to public education, Plessy is undoubtedly the most widely known of a series of late-19th-century Supreme Court decisions that eviscerated what Republican leader Carl Schurz called the “constitutional revolution” after the Civil War - the three amendments that ended slavery and sought to establish the legal foundations for equal citizenship regardless of race. Thanks to the iconic status achieved six decades later byīrown v.
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