STATES RIGHT, SUPREME COURT, AND DRED SCOTT

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.

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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