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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- A court seat for privilege...By Derrick Z. Jackson Boston Globe January 14, 2005 Amazing amnesia. How sweet the white privilege. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Right on time for the King holiday, America is elevating yet another man to lifetime power on the claim of sincere ignorance of his association with racism and sexism. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito was repeatedly asked in this week's hearings about his membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. The group lasted from 1972, the year Alito graduated from Princeton, to the mid-1980s. The group whined in its writings that increased numbers of "women and minorities will largely vitiate the alumni body of the future." In the dictionary, "vitiate" means, "1. To reduce the value or impair the quality; 2. To corrupt morally; 3. To make ineffective." Alito claimed membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton when he applied for a promotion in the Reagan administration in 1985. Alito said, "I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." There is no evidence Alito was active with the group. But his exploitive tie is a critical window into his mind that shatters all these claims of his intellectual honesty. In 1985, he used his membership in the group to boost his career with the right wing. This week, to assure his seat on the high court, he claimed he knew nothing about the group's bigotry. During the hearings, Alito said of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton: "I don't remember this organization." "I have wracked my memory about this issue, and I really have no specific recollection of that organization." None of this is of consequence in a nation where President Bush won reelection on the strength of his white vote. It was a vote that thrived on ignorant fears, fears that allowed Bush to get away with an agenda that resulted in such things as going to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the attack on affirmative action, even though white women have always been its chief beneficiaries, and the assault on gay marriage despite absolutely no proof that it damages the values of our society. The agenda is now almost complete. On a Capitol Hill with Bush's Republican Party in charge, Alito will get his seat and the right wing will have its chance to reverse the gains of the King era, gains which were extended from black people to Latinos, to white women to gay and lesbian people, to the physically challenged. Alito will join the pantheon of modern white power brokers who continue to determine the laws of this country despite their flirtations with bigotry and romancing the segregated past. In his convenient amnesia and his vigorous support of Ronald Reagan's attempt to roll back rights, Alito mimics the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Rehnquist wrote in 1952 that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding segregation was "right and should be reaffirmed." He owned not one but two homes with restrictive covenants against selling them to black people or Jews. Yet he said in his 1986 confirmation hearings to be chief justice, "I simply can't answer whether I read through the deed." Alito's memory loss mirrors that of Trent Lott, who is still a powerful Mississippi senator despite three speeches to the post-Klan Council of Concerned Citizens and despite claiming "no firsthand knowledge" of the group's racism. It echoes John Ashcroft, Bush's first attorney general, who praised Confederate leaders in the racist publication "Southern Partisan" and then claimed in his confirmation hearings, "I can't say that I knew very much about the magazine." Memory is irrelevant in a nation that accepts a president who spoke during the 2000 presidential campaign at Bob Jones University despite its nationally known racial and anti-Catholic bigotry. Bush defended his appearance until pressure from Catholics forced him to apologize to the late Cardinal John O'Connor. "On reflection I should have been more clear in disassociating myself from anti-Catholic sentiments and racial prejudice," Bush wrote. Bush made it very clear what forces he wanted to associate with in 2003. The week before that King holiday, Bush threw the weight of the White House behind the white students who wanted to destroy affirmative action at the University of Michigan. Bush will soon have a Supreme Court that can kill it in all programs, along with a woman's right to choose. No one can claim sincere ignorance about the vitiation of rights and the national division to follow. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/14/a_court_seat_for_privilege/ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The New York Times January 15, 2006 Editorial The Imperial Presidency at Work You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the first opportunity. Mr. Bush made a grand show of inviting Mr. McCain into the Oval Office last month to announce his support for a bill to require humane treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons run by the American military and intelligence agencies. He seemed to have managed to get Vice President Dick Cheney to stop trying to kill the proposed Congressional ban on torture of prisoners. The White House also endorsed a bargain between Mr. Levin and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, which tempered somewhat a noxious proposal by Mr. Graham to deny a court hearing to anyone the president declares to be an "unlawful enemy combatant." The bargain with Mr. Levin removed language that stripped away cases already before the courts, which would have been an egregious usurpation of power by one branch of government, and it made clear that those cases should remain in the courts. Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous "signing statement" on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program. Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military tribunals invented by Mr. Bush's morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to pose any threat. Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right. The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15sun2.html * Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company _______________________________________________________ portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. 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CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/";>ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
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