Skip to main content

The Decider

By


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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  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
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more