OOPS. I did a search previous to writing this to see if someone covered. Sure enough Lauren Sue put it on the front page on the 5th. It’s an excellent piece , and worth reading for people following these SCOTUS issues. Normally I would delete this diary but some of the historical information is different and I think valuable.
So my original diary:
Justice Jackson had some extraordinary things to say, and if you don’t feel like going through the historical context I’m including up front you can skip to the bolded point below. (This context is very important to the diary, but some Kossacks know this history pretty well already.)
The 14th Amendment was passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868. The purpose of it was to grant citizenship to all persons who were born or naturalized in the U. S. , to guarantee equal protection of the law, and to require the states to give all citizens due process rights. Former slaves had immediate citizenship and
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.
constitution.congress.gov/....
But it was also twisted for an entirely different purpose by corrupt SCOTUS justices to solidify the legal status of corporations as persons.
Field nonetheless saw Davis’s erroneous summary as an opportunity. A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.
His gambit worked. In the following years, the case would be cited over and over by courts across the nation, including the Supreme Court, for deciding that corporations had rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.
www.theatlantic.com/...
“Equal protection under the law” was turned 180 degrees around from its original purpose and meaning. It had been perverted in order to facilitate forces of greed and place corporations at the same level with living, breathing humans. On this Senator Warren said in 2012:
No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love and they die. And that matters. That matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people. And that’s why we need Barack Obama.
From The Guardian on Justice Jackson:
For nearly an hour, Edmund LaCour, Alabama’s solicitor general, had been laying out the case for why his state’s congressional map did not discriminate against Black voters. The plaintiffs in the case, Merrill v Milligan, showed it was possible to draw a map with two majority-Black districts instead of one, but LaCour argued that was only possible if a mapmaker went out of their way to consider race. He argued that was inconsistent with the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which guarantees all citizens, regardless of their skin color, are treated equally under the law.
Jackson quickly started taking a scalpel to his argument. She was confused, she said, as to why considering race created a problem under the 14th amendment.
“I don’t think we can assume that just because race is taken into account that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem,” she said. History, she said, showed that the founders and framers adopted the 14th amendment “in a race-conscious way.
“That they were, in fact, trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the freed men in – during the reconstructive – reconstruction period were actually brought equal to everyone else in the society.”
She continued for nearly four minutes uninterrupted, laying out historical evidence and analysis supporting the idea that the 14th amendment was designed to be race-conscious. By the time she finished speaking, it appeared to be one of the longest speeches ever made during an oral argument, according to Adam Feldman, who tracks supreme court statistics at Empirical Scotus. By the end of the argument, the rookie justice had spoken more than any of her colleagues on the bench, Feldman noted.
Today as I read, Justice Jackson’s words reminded me of all the tragic history and imbued me with joy that this has been confronted so clearly at the Supreme Court. “All she did” was remind the Court about the purpose for which the 14th Amendment was passed and ratified. The so called “Originalists” were shown their hypocrisy for choosing to employ that vague and devious originalism only on the cases their partisan extremism demanded of them.
(I’m not trying to imply that I think “corporations are people” will one day be overturned. But this was very nice to hear for its defense of the 14th Amendment.)