“A Moment Of Respect”: Make Time For Memorial Day’s True Purpose
I have no idea where I will be at 3 p.m. Monday, when a national moment of remembrance takes place, but Memorial Day will be very much on my mind.
Monday is the day to pause and give a moment of respect to those who, regardless of race, religion, gender, national origin or sexual orientation, served, fought and died in behalf of our nation.
Hopefully, time to remember can be found in the din of holiday sales pitches.
“Memorial Day returns May 25. Until then, check back daily for more ways to save,” says the Wal-Mart Web site. “7 Memorial Day Sales You Won’t Want to Miss,” reads a headline in U.S. News & World Report’s Money section. “Chevy Memorial Day Sale, 15% off cash back.” “Memorial Day Sales 2015 — Coupons.com.”
And then there are all those cookouts and barbecues. Will there be any time to pay tribute?
Let’s hope so. Because as we bustle about in hot pursuit of those sales and bargains, and as we gather all that food to cook for the family gathering, it’s worth remembering that American men and women are embroiled in wars fought far from our shores. Their lives could be claimed. They could end up in the graves that get decorated next May with flowers and flags. Next year’s prayers could be recited for them. Parades could take place in their honor.
Next summer’s beginning could be marked with their remembrance.
I’m part of a long line of men in my family to have served in the U.S. military. My great-grandfather, Isaiah King of New Bedford, Mass., was with Company D of the 5th Massachusetts (Colored) Cavalry during the Civil War. My uncles, Marshall Colbert and Robert Colbert, were soldiers in World War I and World War II, respectively. My younger brother, Cranston, was an Air Force captain. And I was an active-duty Army officer from 1961 to 1963. My relatives and I aren’t among the countless number of men and women who died in service to their country. But we all proudly wore the uniform, even though the home front wasn’t always very kind.
My great-grandfather enlisted as a Union soldier at the age of 16 to defend against the great rebellion of the South, and he participated in the Siege of Petersburg, which resulted in 2,974 Union and 4,700 Confederate casualties.
He and his fellow black soldiers were paid less than white troops until, after months of protest, they finally got what they were owed. Getting a pension following his release from service was even more difficult.
His physical hardships and the struggle for his retirement benefit are documented in the book “New Bedford’s Civil War” by Earl F. Mulderink III. It took Great-granddaddy King 13 years, but he finally got his pension, which was $75 a month at the time of his death in 1933.
My uncles returned home from military service to a Washington, D.C., that was separate and unequal in nearly every respect. And the bars on my shoulders in the early ’60s weren’t enough to get me seated and served in southern public accommodations.
We were among the thousands of men of color who responded to the call to arms from a nation that demanded loyalty and discipline from us while often forgetting to reciprocate.
But we served. As did many of my Howard University ROTC classmates, some of whom gave their “last full measure of devotion” in Vietnam.
Do you know the formal declaration made by the men and women sworn to defend America? It’s worth remembering and repeating on Memorial Day. This is the Soldier’s Oath of Enlistment:
“I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
We who served will always remember that oath. In return, not just on Monday, but every day, the nation must remember what it owes to its defenders — all of them.
By: Colbert I. King, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist, The Washington Post, May 22, 2015
“The Tea Party Will Never Understand The Constitution”: What The Right Misses About Its Favorite Document
With the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised to get to self-desensitizing — and quick.
Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have already made a fetishized version of the U.S.’s supreme governing document central to their campaign rhetoric; and even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow suit. That’s how American politics functions now, in the era of the NSA, Guantanamo Bay, lethal drone strikes and endless war.
But as that list of questionable policies suggests, there’s an unanswered question lurking behind so much of our happy talk about the Constitution — namely, do we even understand it? As dozens of polls and public surveys will attest, the answer is, not really. And that’s one of the reasons that Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar has decided to write a multi-book series about the Constitution so many Americans claim to love, but so few seem to understand. “The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic,” released earlier this month, is that project’s latest addition.
Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Amar about the Constitution, his books, and why he sees Abraham Lincoln as perhaps the United States’s real founding father. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.
So this book is part of a larger, multi-book project on the Constitution. The first was a biography of the document, the second was about its “unwritten” provisions, and this is the third. What’s your focus this time?
The third book in this project is a geographical slicing of the story; ours is a vast republic of massive diversity, and the Constitution looks a little different in different states and regions. I try to show all of that that through 12 stories … each of which says something general about the United States Constitution but does so through the window of a particular state. It discusses a person or an idea or a case or an event particularly associated with that region that also casts light, more generally, on our Constitutional project.
So how did what you call “brute geography” influence the way we understand the Constitution today?
The very breadth of the American landmass and its distance from the old world were huge elements in the American founding and in the Civil War experience. The idea of creating an indivisible union in the 1780s, the idea of forming a more perfect union, was an idea powerfully influenced by these two geographic factors: a wide moat between the Old World and the New World (known as the Atlantic Ocean) would be able to protect Americans from Old World tyranny in the same way the English Channel protected Britain from much of the militarism of the European Continent…
But in 1787, as Americans looked around the world, they saw that Britain was free, and Britain was free because England and Scotland had merged, had formed an indivisible, perfect union that would protect liberty because they had gotten rid of land borders on the island and only needed a navy to protect themselves. That worked for England and that would work for America even better, because we’d have an English Channel times 50.
This will become manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine; we’ll control our hemisphere and we’ll be protected from Europe … Our Constitution largely succeeds because there’s no major standing army in peacetime for most of American history, and that fact is created by some brute geographic realities.
I’m speaking to you now right around the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. He looms very large in your book; you describe him in some ways as almost prophetic. What made Lincoln’s understanding of the country and the Constitution so profound?
We live in Lincoln’s house. The Framers’ house was divided against itself; and, because of slavery, it fell. That failure is called the Civil War, and Lincoln rebuilt [the country] on a solid anti-slavery foundation, a foundation that would be strengthened after his death by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery everywhere, irrevocably), the Fourteenth Amendment (which promised racial equality) and the Fifteenth Amendment (which promised equal voting rights).
I begin the book with Lincoln because he transformed the Union. He saved it and transformed it and … his story was very much influenced by, literally, where he came from. He has a vision of the Constitution that’s very much influenced by Illinois, in particular, and by the Midwest more generally. He comes from a part of the country that was the Northwest Territory, that was always free soil even before the Constitution, and he has a very free-soil vision.
How so?
The language of the 13th Amendment is borrowed, word-for-word, from the language of the Northwest Ordinance. Lincoln thinks that the nation created the states, which, of course, Robert E. Lee … could never buy into. Robert E. Lee would say that the states created the Union; but the Midwest [perspective] would say … before Illinois was a state, it was a territory; the Union created these new states out of nothing. That’s a very Midwestern perspective on the Constitution.
Lincoln is, far and away, the most important constitutional decision-maker of the last two centuries; and arguably the most important constitutional decision-maker and interpreter ever.
But Lincoln was never a judge nor a constitutional scholar. He was a politician.
Most people are taught in high school that the most important constitutional decision is Marbury v. Madison, but that’s not even the most important constitutional decision of 1803. The Louisiana Purchase was far more important than Marbury v. Madison, because it doubled the landmass of America and made sure that the country would survive. When you understand that, you understand that many important constitutional decisions are made not by judges but by presidents.
The two most important constitutional decisions ever are Lincoln’s decision to resist [the South’s] unilateral secession, and Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which would lead to an end of slavery — that is transformative, and Lincoln made those decisions unilaterally as president. Had these issues reached the U.S. Supreme Court, controlled as it was [during Lincoln’s time] by Roger Taney, a fierce opponent of Lincoln, the Court might very well have tried to invalidate Lincoln’s projects.
We live in a Constitution utterly transformed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and we would have none of those but for Lincoln.
Lincoln aside, though, you also argue that geography has played a big role in the Supreme Court — which, of course, is supposed to be the chief interpreter of the Constitution. How did geography influence the Court’s history?
Let’s take the most infamous judicial ruling of all time, the Dred Scott decision of 1857. It emerges from a Supreme Court that’s profoundly malapportioned: five of the nine justices on the Dred Scott court come from the slave-holding South, even though only a third of the population lives in that region.
Part of that is because entire antebellum system is skewed towards the South because of the three-fifths clause, which gives slave states extra clout in the House of Representatives and therefore the Electoral College. Presidents are picking justices, and the presidency tilts towards the South because of the three-fifths clause; almost all your early presidents are either slave-holding Southerners or “Northern men of Southern sympathies” — that is, pro-slavery Northerners.
If we view the Constitution and American history with more of a focus on the role played by geography, what are some the implications for U.S. politics today and in the near-future?
One of the things I’m trying to tell you in this book is how we can see presidential elections and our political polarization in new ways if we’re attentive to states and regions.
Our parties are polarized geographically; that this is not the first time that’s so (early on, it was the South against the North; Jefferson against Adams). The geographic alignment is remarkably similar to the geographic alignment in Lincoln’s time with this interesting twist: the Democrats have become the party of the North and the coasts and the Republicans have become the party of the former Confederacy. The parties have basically flipped, but it’s the same basic alignment…
One of the other big things I want you to see is how regions and states are hugely important in, for example, presidential politics. I talk about the significance in this book, in particular, of Ohio and Florida in the Electoral College and also of Texas. Is it a coincidence that Marco Rubio comes from Florida? That Jeb Bush is the governor of Florida who was born in Texas and whose father and brother had their political bases in Texas? That Rand Paul was born in Texas and his father ran for president from Texas? That Ted Cruz is from Texas? That Rick Perry is a former governor of Texas?
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, April 21, 2015
“Ted Cruz’s Frightening Gun Fanaticism”: When A Presidential Contender Encourages Armed Insurrection
As incredible as it sounds, there’s an argument going on right now between two Republican senators (and, potentially, two Republican candidates for the presidency) over whether the American citizenry should be ready to fight a war against the federal government. The two senators in question are Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, and they can’t seem to agree whether the Second Amendment serves as bulwark against government “tyranny.”
It all started with a fundraising email Cruz sent making the case that “The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution isn’t for just protecting hunting rights, and it’s not only to safeguard your right to target practice. It is a Constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny — for the protection of liberty.” TPM’s Sahil Kapur asked Graham what he thought of his Texan colleague’s view of the Second Amendment, and the South Carolina senator was not impressed. He even invoked the Civil War, which should make Cruz’s people plenty upset. “Well, we tried that once in South Carolina,” Graham said. “I wouldn’t go down that road again.”
This view of gun rights that casts personal firearm ownership as a check on the abuses of government doesn’t make a great deal of practical sense, and it betrays a lack of faith in our democratic institutions. But it’s become increasingly popular among high-level Republican officials who quite literally scare up votes by telling voters they’re right to keep their Glocks cocked just in case the feds come for them. Iowa’s new Republican senator Joni Ernst famously remarked that she supports the right to carry firearms to defend against “the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”
The obvious question raised by statements like those from Cruz and Ernst is: when does the shooting start? What is the minimum threshold for government “tyranny” that justifies an armed response from the citizenry? In 2014, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy was ready to start a shooting war with the feds to defend his illegal grazing practices, and he garnered the support of top-level Republican officials (they only abandoned him after he started wondering aloud whether black people would be better off as slaves).
It’s an important question because Republicans and conservatives – Ted Cruz included – tend to throw around terms like “tyranny” sort of haphazardly when criticizing policies and politicians they disagree with.
In May 2013, Cruz spoke at a press conference arranged by then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (remember her?) to vent rage at the IRS over its targeting of Tea Party-aligned non-profit groups. Cruz quoted Thomas Jefferson to suggest that the IRS scandal (along with Benghazi and Obamacare and other stuff) was a harbinger of “tyranny” from the federal government: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4534673/cruz-tyranny .
Last January, Cruz said Barack Obama was running the country like a dictator because of his executive orders on immigration and the administration’s delay of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate. “There are countries on this globe where that is how the law works,” Cruz said. “You look at corrupt countries where the rule of law is meaningless, where dictators are in power and they have things they call law. But what does law mean?”
Later that same month he wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed suggesting that Obama’s “lawlessness” was a threat to personal liberty:
That would be wrong—and it is the Obama precedent that is opening the door for future lawlessness. As Montesquieu knew, an imperial presidency threatens the liberty of every citizen. Because when a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, he is no longer a president.
I don’t doubt that Cruz would argue strongly against an armed response to Obama’s immigration orders and tweaks to Obamacare. But at the same time, he’s the one bringing up government “tyranny” and “lawlessness,” and he’s the one bringing up the need to arm oneself in order to preserve one’s liberty. So he should be the one to explain where those two concepts intersect, and when an armed citizen would be justified in committing violence against the government.
By: Simon Maloy, Political Writer, Salon, April 17, 2015
“Promises Not Yet Recognized”: Enshrine The Right To Vote In The Constitution
Flags flew at half mast, schoolchildren recited the “Gettysburg Address” and for a few hours on April 15, America paused to remember that a century and a half ago this country lost its 16th president to an assassin’s bullet.
Now, Americans can finish with the pause and begin to fully honor Lincoln.
The place of beginning is with an embrace of the work of reconstruction that was imagined when Lincoln lived but that is not—even now—complete.
President Obama proclaimed April 15 as a National Day of Remembrance for President Abraham Lincoln, declaring, “Today, we reflect on the extraordinary progress he made possible, and with one voice, we rededicate ourselves to the work of ensuring a Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Obama was right to focus on Lincoln’s great preachment on behalf of American democracy. It directs our attention toward the mission to which small “d” democrats of all partisanships and ideologies must rededicate ourselves.
One hundred and fifty years after the moment when a still young country saw the end of a Civil War and the assassination of a president, the events of April 1865 continue to shape and challenge the American experience.
With Lincoln’s death, an inept and wrongheaded vice president, Andrew Johnson, succeeded to the presidency. Had it been left to Johnson, who vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the progress extending from the great sacrifices of the Civil War would have been imperiled. But the rough outlines for securing the victory were not left to a president. They were enshrined in the US Constitution.
Three amendments to the founding document were enacted during the five-year period from 1865 to 1870. These “Reconstruction Amendments”were transformational statements—even if their promise has yet to be fully recognized or realized.
The first of the amendments addressed the great failure of the founding moment: a “compromise” that recognized—and effectively permitted—human bondage.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution affirmed that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Those words confronted the indefensible “Three-Fifths Compromise,” which was outlined in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution as it was framed in 1787. That paragraph did not speak specifically of slavery, but instead referred to two groups of Americans: “the whole Number of free Persons” and “all other Persons.”
The 13th Amendment was an essential step toward an official embrace of Thomas Jefferson’s “immortal declaration”of 1776—that “all men are created equal.”
But it was not enough.
To the 13th Amendment of 1865 was added the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which confirmed that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The 14th Amendment, remarkable in its clarity and detail, provided for due process and equal protection under the law.
But it was not enough.
To the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 and the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 was added the 15th Amendment of 1870, which avowed that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Congress was given the power to enforce these articles by appropriate legislation.
But that was still not enough, as became obvious with the collapse of Reconstruction and the establishment of “Jim Crow” segregation in states that had been part of the Confederacy. With these ruptures came overt discrimination against voting rights.
It took more than a century of litigation, boycotts, protests and marches to restore the promise of equal protection and voting rights.
But that was not enough.
Despite the protections delineated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (which in 1964 formally banned poll taxes), headlines remind us that the right to vote is “still threatened.” The US Supreme Court has mangled the Voting Rights Act, and the Congress has failed to repair the damage done. The Brennan Center for Justice has determined that at least 83 restrictive bills were introduced in 29 states where legislatures had floor activity in 2014, including proposals to require a photo ID, make voter registration more difficult, reduce early voting opportunities, and make it harder for students to vote.
“The stark and simple truth is this—the right to vote is threatened today—in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,” said President Obama.
The great American process of forming a more perfect union is far from complete. The events of 150 years ago were not the end of anything. They were a pivot point that took the United States in a better direction. But the was incomplete, and insufficient to establish justice. So the process continues.
That is why Congressmen Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, and Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, have proposed to amend the Constitution to declare clearly and unequivocally that
“SECTION 1: Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.
“SECTION 2: Congress shall have the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.”
The Pocan-Ellison amendment will not, in and of itself, form a more perfect union. But it provides a tool for those who understand that we best honor our history by recognizing unmet promises—and seeking, finally, to keep them.
“A core principle of our democracy is the ability for citizens to participate in the election of their representatives,” explains Pocan. “We have seen constant attempts by some states to erode voting rights and make it harder for citizens to vote. This amendment would affirm the principle of equal participation in our democracy for every citizen. As the world’s leading democracy, we must guarantee the right to vote for all.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, April 16, 2015
“Let’s Sort This Out”: Aaron Schock Or Abraham Lincoln? A Handy Guide
Anyone who’s followed the brief career of disgraced congressman Aaron Schock is well aware of the countless, almost eerie similarities between he and fellow Illinoisian Abraham Lincoln. It came as no surprise, therefore, when Schock, who may soon face criminal charges, compared himself to our 16th president during his farewell speech this week. Far from a pathetic attempt at saving face by a profoundly delusional narcissist, Schock’s speech was a soaring, 21st-century version of the Gettysburg Address, but with more grammatical errors.
“Abraham Lincoln held this seat in Congress for one term,” Schock said in remarks that will be transcribed and filed in the Library of Congress where they’ll remain for the life of our republic. “But few faced as many defeats in his personal and public life as he did [nor will we ever know if he, too, would have had his offices decorated like the hit PBS program Downton Abbey because, sadly, his life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet before television could be invented].”
It is not hard to imagine the sound of his colleagues’ audible gasps echoing through that mostly empty chamber like so many newly freed slaves, audibly gasping in a mostly empty chamber.
Yes, Schock and the Great Emancipator are nearly indistinguishable, so I’ve put together this handy chart to help tell these two great Americans apart.
Schock: First name starts with “A”
Lincoln: First name starts with “A”
Schock: First member of Congress born in the 1980s
Lincoln: Dead
Schock: Started a garage-organization business called Garage Tek
Lincoln: Abolished slavery
Schock: Ran a successful write-in campaign for a seat on his local school board
Lincoln: Lost the 1858 Illinois senate race after some debates with Stephen Douglas
Schock: Spent more than $100,000 in public funds on office decorations
Lincoln: Helped establish a national currency
Schock: Criticized for lavish lifestyle
Lincoln: Abolished slavery
Schock: Appeared shirtless on the cover of Men’s Health in 2011
Lincoln: Appeared gaunt and wizened while successfully executing the American Civil War
Schock: Notable quote: “Haters gonna hate.”
Lincoln: Notable quote: “That this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” though, in fairness, he also could have said “haters gonna hate” at some point. Who knows? It’s not impossible.
Schock: Overcharged the government for mileage reimbursements
Lincoln: Suspended habeas corpus, expanded executive powers, and once signed the execution orders for 39 Sioux insurgents
Schock: Publicly supported waterboarding and other torture techniques
Lincoln: Did not do that
Schock: Voted against expanding hate crimes laws to include sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability
Lincoln: Abolished slavery
Schock: Asshat
Lincoln: Top hat
I hope this comparison chart has been helpful. If you’re still confused, remember this rule of thumb: Lincoln was probably the greatest president in American history, while Schock looks like a high school girls’ basketball coach who’s always trying to give the players back massages.
By: Joe Randazzo, The Daily Beast, March 28, 2015
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