ustxtxb_obs_2003_08_01_50_00038-00000_000.pdf

Supreme Court, continued from page 5 party monopoly. The Supreme Court has allowed the major parties to determine who is electable and therefore worthy of an invitation to debateand even more importantly, a place on the ballot. Forbes is a right-wing crank. But what became of the notion, Raskin asks, of citizens determining which candidates are electable by electing them? To make his case against the Supreme Court, Raskin begins with the case that made George W. Bush president. In Supreme Injustice, Alan Dershowitz went straight at the dishonesty and judicial bad faith underlying the Court’s Bush v. Gore decision. Raskin is more circumspect. He gives the justices credit for consistency and describes the majority decision as consistent with the Rehnquist Court’s history of anti-democratic jurisprudence. Previous courts, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s court in particular, gradually created a constitutional imperative of universal suffrage. The Rehnquist court has steadfastly worked to undermine that imperative. Raskin allows that you might be offended by the Bush v. Gore decision. But no one who has been paying close attention should be surprised by the 5-4 vote to stop the counting of votes in Florida in 2000. What might be surprising, however, is one line in the majority opinion: “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States…” That statement might be inconsistent with the long history of high court case law that extended constitutional protection of voter’s rights. But the majority on the current court doesn’t let previous case law stand in their way. Raskin proposes a constitutional amendment that would establish a right that most Americans assume we already have: the constitutional right to vote. While we wait for a voting-rights amendment, there remains the issue of a right-wing federal bench averse to the workings of a participatory democracy. Raskin supports Senate Democrats standing in opposition to the extremists George Bush has named to lifetime appointments on the federal bench. And he dismisses the dishonest claims that liberal groups are “Borking” Mississippi federal District Judge Charles Pickering. Bush has now resubmitted Pickering’s appointment to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals along with that of Texas Supreme Court Associate Justice Priscilla Owen. The two nominations are a prelude to Bush’s anticipated appointment to the Supreme Court, and they are not being Borked. Judge Robert Bork was an unreconstructed right-wing ideologue who pretended to a certain kind of confirmation conversion before being rejected by the biggest bipartisan vote in the history of the Senate’s consideration of Supreme Court nominees. Unlike Lani Guinier, for example, or the 35 percent of President Clinton’s judicial nominees between 1995 and 2000 who never received a vote on the floor of the Senate, Judge Bork had a full and fair hearing in the Judiciary Committee, where he discussed his belligerent views for hours on end, and then a fullblown debate and vote on the floor of the Senate. If Borking means thoroughly exploring the records and views of right-wing judicial appointees, then the Democrats should bring it on. We can only hope. Raskin also casts a cold eye on the Rehnquist Court’s turning back the clock on the desegregation of the nation’s public schools. The Supreme Court, he observes, is running as far as possible from the desegregation mandates spelled out in Brown v. Board of Educationa decision won over the course of several decades “by the methodical litigation strategies of Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the NAACP.” De facto segregation caused by white flight has been ruled acceptable. And school districts that demonstrate good-faith efforts to integrate are freed from court mandates, regardless of whether schools are actually integrated. “As the de jure The Supreme Court has allowed the major parties to determine who is electable and therefore worthy of an invitation to debateand even more importantly, a place on the ballot. What become of the notion, Raskin asks, of citizens determining which candidates are electable by electing them? violation becomes more remote in time and these demographic changes intervene, it becomes less likely that a current racial imbalance in a school district is a vestige of a de jure system,” Justice Kennedy wrote in 1992. “The causal link between current conditions and the proof of violation is even more attenuated if the school district has demonstrated its good faith.” While Kennedy opposes integration, one of his colleagues on the bench makes the case for segregation. Justice Clarence Thomas, the second AfricanAmerican to sit on the High Court, is almost always over the top when it comes to issues related to race. After the Supreme Court overturned a comprehensive program that used capital improvements, course enrichment, and extracurricular enhancements to meet a federal district court mandate ordering Kansas City schools to improve education for African-American children, Thomas couldn’t resist piling on. He attacked the district court for “taking it upon itself to experiment with the education of … black youth.” Thomas even dismissed the theory “that black students suffer an unspecified psychological harm from segregation that retards their mental and edu 38 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 8/1/03