Guest Post from my life partner on the recent Supreme Court decision, Turner v. Rogers et al.
Have you noticed our constitutional rights are slowly coming to an end? That may seem a melodramatic statement, but based on the Supreme Court’s recent decision that state’s rights supersede citizen rights (rawstory), it seems that our Constitution is continuing to slowly erode.
Specifically, the Court ruled that,
The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause does not automatically require the State to provide counsel at civil contempt proceedings to an indigent noncustodial parent who is subject to a child support order, even if that individual faces incarceration.
(
Turner v. Rogers et al)
This case comes 150 years after the infamous “Dred Scott Decision” that ruled 1) slaves were not protected by the Constitution, 2) as non-citizens slaves could not sue in court, and 3) that as property, slaves could not be taken from their masters without due process. Ironically, it was the Fourteenth Amendment that later overruled part of the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision.
The Due Process Clause (Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1) states,
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The Supreme Court Case that defined the extent of due process was in
1873 and did define “concurrent citizenship” at both the state and federal levels. However, pay attention to the last line of this opinion (emphasis mine):
The next observation is more important in view of the arguments of counsel in the present case. It is, that the distinction between citizenship of the United States and citizenship of a state is clearly recognized and established. . . .
It is quite clear, then, that there is a citizenship of the United States, and a citizenship of a state, which are distinct from each other, and which depend upon different characteristics or circumstances in the individual.
We think this distinction and its explicit recognition in this Amendment of great weight in this argument, because the next paragraph of this same section, which is the one mainly relied on by the plaintiffs in error, speaks only of privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, and does not speak of those of citizens of the several states. The argument, however, in favor of the plaintiffs, rests wholly on the assumption that the citizenship is the same and the privileges and immunities guaranteed by the clause are the same.
—Slaughterhouse Cases: 83 U.S. 36, 73-74 (1873)
After dipping my toes into all of this information, there are two points that concern me. The first is the apparent backwards nature of the Supreme Court, meaning that our current Court is not making headway on civil rights issues. Today’s ruling in Turner v. Rodgers et al seems more similar to the earlier Dred Scott v. Sanford than it does the later Slaughterhouse Cases.
Additionally, it took the Civil War (1861-1865) to help move us from Dred Scott (1857) to Slaughterhouse (1873). I certainly hope that we don’t need anything as drastic to move our current society forward.