Skip to main content

The Decider



We saw Justice Roberts make the pivotal decision on "Obamacare" last year.  This year it is Justice Kennedy who proves to be the pivotal judge on two fateful decisions.  Kennedy is now the hero of the gay community, having been the deciding vote in overturning DOMA, but the goat among minority voters, who saw him vote to repeal a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  So, who is Anthony Kennedy, which Time magazine has dubbed "The Decider?"

If you have access to Time, which I don't, you can read its cover story.  Reading this story in Salon, it is easier to see how Kennedy may have reconciled his seemingly contradictory opinions, as he saw DOMA as "bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group."  He probably also saw Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act in the same light, as it explicitly singled out Southern states.

His decision on DOMA also seems to have opened up an ugly wound in the Supreme Court, which saw him very much at odds with Antonin Scalia, who wrote a scathing dissent opinion in which he took exception to Kennedy's views on the separation of federal and state powers.  This is an age old argument, and one conservatives cling to in defending some of the most nefarious state laws, notably the Jim Crow laws that existed in the Southern states for much of last century.

I think few could argue that DOMA wasn't a bad law, which Bill Clinton had no business signing into law, especially after campaigning so heavily in gay communities in 1992.  One could also argue that the Voting Rights Act needs to be revisited, but can we honestly expect a deeply divided Congress to do so.  It seems to me that Kennedy should have taken a more humanist approach to the Voting Rights Act, as he seemed to do on DOMA.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!