Roberts court steps backward
Toolbox
Published: October 12, 2009
The U.S. Supreme Court has opened for business and Republicans will be watching Justice Sotomayor for signs of “empathy” for women, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and members of other groups which, historically, may have been less successful than white males. God forbid.
The Republican-appointed justices who constitute the “five” in “five-to-four” decisions reserve their empathy for the government and for multinational corporations. Their attitude towards the above-mentioned “minorities” is one of antipathy. That seems to them appropriate.
In a recent case, a woman had been discriminated against by her employer in that, over the period of her employment, she had systematically been paid less than her male counterparts who performed the same work. When she found out about this abuse, she filed a claim under a federal statute prohibiting the practice. In a decision worthy of Alice in Wonderland, the “five” ruled that she had no status to file her claim. The six-month window for filing the claim started not when she learned about the law violation, but rather at the time years earlier when her employers conspired against her.
One of the “five,” Clarence Thomas, manifests such a consistent animus towards other African-Americans that were Dred Scott to appear before the Supreme Court today, he would receive the same judgment from Clarence Thomas that he received in 1857. Once a slave, always a slave.
It seems to have been little noted that in 2007 the Roberts court effectively overturned “Brown v. Board of Ed. Topeka.” In 1954, the court unanimously ruled that to educate white children and black children separately was unconstitutional. Many years later, two school boards, one in Seattle and another in Ohio, found that schools in their district lacked racial diversity. That is to say, the black children and the white children were being educated separately.
When the boards tried to remedy this, they were taken to court. In a bizarre perversion of the 14th Amendment, the court ruled that while a school district might aspire to racial diversity in their schools, they could not use race in selecting the students to be transferred among the schools to achieve a more just balance. In the 1950s and into the 1970s, school integration was accomplished by enrolling black students in heretofore all white schools. The Roberts court won’t permit that anymore.
HOWARD HANSON
Rutland
34