Matthews: Current Supreme Court Would Not Have Backed Desegregation, Civil Rights Bill
by Noah Rothman | 6:35 pm, June 25th, 2012
MSNBC Host Chris Matthews took on the Supreme Court’s conservative justices on Monday for being on the wrong side of the landmark judicial cases of post-war America. He accused the conservatives on the Supreme Court of being unwilling to overturn segregation were it the 1950s, of refusing to remove organized prayer from public schools and of overturning civil rights legislation if this were the 1960s and of criminalizing abortions in the 1970s.
Does anyone wonder like I do what this Supreme Court – the one personified by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — would have done with the landmark decisions in the post-World War II era. I wonder if this court would have backed desegregation in the Brown case. I doubt this pack of conservatives, which includes Chief Justice John Roberts, Sam Alito and Anthony Kennedy, would have voted to knock down “separate but equal” in the 1950s.
I doubt this group would have removed organized prayer from public schools back in the 1960s – that decision that ignited the moral majority.
I doubt that this court would have recognized a woman’s right to decide on an abortion in the 1970s.
Let me proffer a tougher judgment: would this court – voting as it does today – have upheld the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, which declared it illegal to refuse access to someone because of race to a restaurant, hotel or a gas station restroom?
Would Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito have approved such a decision, or would they have joined the dissent? Well, maybe Kennedy would have.
The fact is that we have the most conservative court since the early 1930s, and maybe more conservative than that. These justices, led by Scalia, believe in original intent. They want to judge cases the way the Founding Fathers would. Well, the Founding Fathers – need I remind us all – wrote slavery into the Constitution. It took a Civil War and the 13th Amendment to get it out.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/matthews-current-supreme-court-would-not-have-backed-desegregation-civil-rights-bill/
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