When Clarence Thomas is worried, we ought to be really worried.
How Brown vs B. of E. became the end of America.
What began way back in day as a battle about states’ rights, has turned into an all-out assault on American Democracy, an asault so vicious and unrestrained, I’m not sure even the people who started it are in control of it anymore.
Like the proverbial snow ball in a cartoon that starts down a hill and picks up speed and heft until it becomes a behemoth crushing everything in its path.
Brown vs Board of Education. Remember that? It was a landmark Supreme Court decision dismantling segregation in public schools. Lots of folks in the South had a hard time swallowing it, but the law is the law and time passed. Kind of.
Out of that decision grew a vigorous debate about the overreach of federal government. We’ve all heard the main points of it, and we live in a republic, so I’ve always felt there was some things to look at between the federal government and states.
Except somewhere in the last decade or so things began to change. The debate about states rights evolved into an all-out assault on Wisconsin Teachers Union, the United States Postal System, the National Highways System, the National Parks and then became explosive with assaults on the healthcare plans of Americans and the ACA, deregulation of environmental regulations, until where we are now, attacks on the FBI, the CIA, the Congress, the First Amendment, the government actually shut down and the Republican Party turned into soldiers in some kind of protection racket.
Yes, I belivee you can draw a direct line from Brown v Ed, through the writings of one James McGill Buchanan after that landmark decision, through the pale presence of Scott Walker directly onto the ratty toupeee of our favorite authoritarian, President Trump.
There’s a saying that once change starts it’s hard to stop. The academic musings of think tanks like the Cato Institue, and the essays spawned from the Brown vs Board of Education have morphed into an all-powerful Executive Branch ruling by fiat, a cabinet running free of Congressional restraint, a judicial system warped into a partisan attack machine.
It cut loose into looneyville when Mitch McConnell refused to hold a hearing on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, a Constitutional violation so egregious even the taciturn Justice Clarence Thomas chimed in.
“At some point we’re going to have to recognize we’re destroying our institutions.”
And that was before Donald Trump began agressively dismantling every vestige of American Constituional governance and our federal system. You know, the one that said you can’t discriminate against black kids in schools all those years ago.
