Justice Tom Parker, a member of the Alabama Supreme Court, has
published a little op-ed with the wingnut fundamentalist
Alliance Defense Fund. According to Justice Parker, the Alabama Supremes should ignore the U.S. Supreme Court's ban on juvenille executions because it is "the unconstitutional opinion of five liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court," and therefore not binding on state courts:
The proper response to such blatant judicial tyranny would have been for the Alabama Supreme Court to decline to follow Roper in the Adams case. By keeping Adams on death row, our Supreme Court would have defended both the U.S. Constitution and Alabama law (thereby upholding their judicial oaths of office) and, at the same time, provided an occasion for the U.S. Supreme Court, with at least two new members, to reconsider the Roper decision.
Before I explain why Justice Parker's op-ed is more wrong as a matter of law than any document since the Torture Memo, let me explain a little about Mr. Tom Parker.
In addition to being a close friend and disciple of disgraced Ten Commandments Justice Roy Moore, Tom Parker is also an avowwed racist. A man not afraid to be photographed proudly displaying the Confederate Flag, Justice Parker also has close ties to two hate groups. The League of the South, and Trent Lott's own Council of Conservative Citizens.
With that background out of the way, on to Parker's legal reasoning.
In the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, an influential southern newspaper published an editorial calling for the states to "interpose" their authority on that of the federal government. The editorial argued that, when the federal government acts in an "unconstitutional" manner, it is the right of the states to act as separate interpreters of the Constitution, and refuse to follow the federal law. Shortly after this editorial was published, 19 Senators and 81 Congressmen joined an infamous statement adopting the same reasoning:
Though there has been no constitutional amendment or act of Congress changing this established legal principle almost a century old, the Supreme Court of the United States, with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.
This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.
With the gravest concern for the explosive and dangerous condition created by this decision and inflamed by outside meddlers:
We reaffirm our reliance on the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land.
We decry the Supreme Court's encroachments on rights reserved to the States and to the people, contrary to established law and to the Constitution.
We commend the motives of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means. . . .
This conflict between federal and southern law came to a head in the Supreme Court case of Cooper v. Aaron. Cooper involved the refusal by the Little Rock School Board to integrate its schools as required by Brown. In a now familar argument, the Arkansas officials argued that they had no obligation to obey a Supreme Court decision they disagreed with. The Court responded with a unanimous opinion, individually signed by all nine Justices:
No state legislator or executive or judicial officer can war against the Constitution without violating his undertaking to support it. Chief Justice Marshall spoke for a unanimous Court in saying that: "If the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery . . . ." A Governor who asserts a power to nullify a federal court order is similarly restrained. If he had such power, said Chief Justice Hughes, in 1932, also for a unanimous Court, "it is manifest that the fiat of a state Governor, and not the Constitution of the United States, would be the supreme law of the land; that the restrictions of the Federal Constitution upon the exercise of state power would be but impotent phrases."
Cooper is no less important than Brown in driving a stake in the heart of Jim Crow. It represents the federal government's declaration that the southern states could no longer flout the Constitution, and that they would face unyielding resolve if they attempted to do so. Shortly after Cooper, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the Court's ruling, and the once impenetrable fortress of segregation finally began to crumble.
When Justice Parker calls for Alabama to interpose its authority on that of the Supreme Court, he not only flouts the Constitution, but he also proclaims his allegiance to the same lawless arguments which drove post-Brown resistence to integration. Given his ties to white supremacy, this shouldn't come as a surprise.
