What is there about states rights that contribute to
equality? The answer is that there are many things, unfortunately there are
many things that take away from that equality. Apparently, interstate commerce
was one of the motivating reasons for states right inclusion in the Constitution.
Much of our nation was devoted to agriculture and among those, a smaller
numbers, saw the right to own slaves as no more than their right to farm as
they saw fit; therefore, they saw it as an individual right. One of the quirks
of our nation was that one region; the “deep south”, was more agriculturally
oriented than the manufacturing and small business oriented north especially the
northeast. With the westward expansion, so do agriculture; however, with mixed
attitudes toward slavery. Every schoolchild should know this. What they should also know that slavery was
the issue that corrupted our democracy then and still corrupts it. In fact, it came
close to preventing our democracy from forming once and from being maintained
once.
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Just as every schoolchild knows or should know our nations history,
they should also know our political history as well but they do not seem to
know it. The burden of slavery is heavy. At the time of the writing of the Constitution,
there can be little question that the sentiment in the nation as a whole was
against slavery. Even the people who wrote document were internally divided. The
question remains; why did the Constitution declared, “All men are created
equally”, and contained an attached Bill of Rights, but still allowed owning
slaves. The answer is that our ancestors allowed states Rights to trump human rights
for the sake of forming the federations of states. It was only partly a numbers
game; the “number” of people voting verses the “number” of states voting—one
state one vote, which was the result of a devious game of politics.
Our Supreme Court is playing the same game and sadly, the
reason they are doing it is still the same, only a minority of players have successfully
modified that reason beyond easy recognition by a majority. Part of the human “condition”
is hierarchy dominance; a well-conserved genetically embedded trait common to
all biota, which even mindless creature know. We live with the continuous struggle
for hierarchy dominance because it is how we survive in all levels of
societies. People seeking power do not pay much attention to the actual creation
or maintenance of a poor class or class of virtual slaves—even sensitized as we
are by our shameful history of slavery—because popular attention focuses more
on creating a plutocracy, the exact opposite end of the scale: Citizen United
and McCutcheon decisions.
However, that legacy behooves us to look more closely at what
this Court is doing with States Rights; it is unconstitutional, it is changing
our course away from the direction of equality. It is right and proper for the
good citizens of this country to be concerned with #Roberts, #Alito, #Scalia,
and #Thomas conserving States Rights to justify discrimination and calling themselves
strict constructionist. At one time in the darkest days of history of this nation, a slave was counted as
2/3 of a person, now in many situations they, along with a number of poor white
people, cannot vote at all; therefore, they have lost their person-hood just as
justice Rodger Taney’s 1857 Supreme Count Dred Scott ruling said they should.
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