How Low Will the Clinton Camp Go?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

15 February 16

 

ongressman John Lewis has shamed himself. Long a hero to now-aging activists, he sullied his long-expected endorsement of Hillary Clinton by disparaging her opponent Bernie Sanders’ well-documented participation in the civil rights struggle as a student at the University of Chicago.

After announcing that the Congressional Black Caucus PAC was backing Clinton, Lewis answered a reporter’s question about Sanders: “I never saw him. I never met him. I chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years from 1963 to 1966. I was involved in the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma (Alabama) to Montgomery and directed the voter education project for six years. I met Hillary Clinton, I met President Clinton.”

Others of us know young Bernie’s work and still speak highly of his student activism for peace and civil rights. We can also point to detailed confirmation in the Chicago Tribune, Rick Pearlstein’s profile of Sanders in The University of Chicago Magazine, and Mother Jones, which thoughtfully reproduced pages from old editions of the student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon.

Bernie’s biggest success came as a leader of the campus chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), when he spearheaded a lengthy campaign against landlords of university-owned buildings in Hyde Park for refusing to rent off-campus housing to black students. “We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the University cannot live together in university owned apartments,” Sanders told The Maroon in January 1962. As picketers left one of the residences, people yelled, “Go back to your jungles.”

Bernie’s agitation led to a 15-day sit-in in the reception room of the office of university president George Beadle, followed by continued protests and negotiations that finally forced the university to desegregate its housing. Sanders also led pickets against a local Howard Johnson’s after the arrest of 12 CORE demonstrators for trying to eat at a HoJo’s in North Carolina. He was arrested and fined for resisting arrest in a protest against school segregation on Chicago’s south side, and he went with several comrades to the giant March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Bernie was clearly a leader,” recalled Mike Edelstein, who served on campus CORE’s executive committee at the time. “He was taken seriously. You couldn’t take him for anything else because, like now, his humor is not his foremost trait.”

He was “very smart and very policy oriented,” said classmate Mike Parker, who is now in his 70s and – with Bernie’s support – is leading a fight to close down a polluting Chevron refinery in Richmond, California. “Knowing someone like him was part of the inspiration for what we’re doing here.”

Less well known, Parker and some of Bernie’s other comrades went to graduate school at Berkeley and helped shape the Free Speech Movement, which was largely about the right to advocate and organize on campus for civil rights demonstrations in neighboring Oakland and San Francisco.

This is how progressive movements for social change take on a life of their own, and to belittle Bernie’s role insults a whole generation of activists, black and white, who worked where we were to do what we could, all at a time that Hillary Clinton was still a Goldwater Girl. Hillary changed, and Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are now pushing her to change even more. But that gives her campaign no license to let John Lewis bear false witness against Bernie to shore up black support in South Carolina and beyond.

Hillary Rodham, circa 1964.

What makes all this even sadder is that Lewis knows firsthand the sting of dirty politics at the highest level. Back in August 1963, when I was still a grad student at the University of Michigan, John came to speak at a meeting of our local Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He was scheduled to be the youngest speaker the following week at the March on Washington, and he was testing the bombshell he intended to drop.

“In good conscience,” he planned to say, “we cannot support wholeheartedly the [Kennedy] administration’s civil rights bill, for it is too little and too late. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality. This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations.”

“You tell us to wait,” he went on. “We cannot be patient. We want our freedom, and we want it now.”

“If we don’t see meaningful progress here today,” he concluded, “there will come a day when we will not confine our marching to the South. We will be forced to march through the South the way Sherman did – nonviolently.”

Thrilled by John’s presentation at Ann Arbor, a group of us from SDS stood right by the Lincoln Memorial waiting eagerly for him to give his speech. What we did not know, and what John learned only hours before, is that some of Kennedy’s backers refused to appear on the podium with John if he insisted on giving the speech he had written. In the end, Kennedy’s people forced him to say what they wanted, a story SNCC leader James Forman tells in The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Lewis confirmed most of the details to The Washington Post.

In the end, John’s attack on Bernie may not have much impact, and could well backfire the way that Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright’s remarks ended up hurting Hillary with young feminists. Several black leaders and activists are already endorsing Bernie as the candidate who best embodies the moral imperative of our time, and John Lewis has only demeaned himself to score a few cheap political points. But common decency and a proper regard for our shared history demand that Hillary disavow his comments and that they go beyond sterile apologies and both set the record straight.

---

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Results in Key Cases Could Change With Scalia's Death

By Mark Sherman, Associated Press

15 February 16

 

he Supreme Court abhors even numbers. But that's just what the court will have to deal with, perhaps for many months, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Eight justices will decide what to do, creating the prospect of 4-4 ties.

Here are some questions and answers about the effect on the court of the death of its conservative icon and longest-serving justice:

Q. What happens to cases in which Scalia cast a vote or drafted an opinion, but no decision has been publicly announced?

A. It may sound harsh, but Scalia's votes and draft opinions in pending cases no longer matter. Veteran Supreme Court lawyer Roy Englert says that "the vote of a deceased justice does not count." Nothing is final at the court until it is released publicly and, while it is rare, justices have flipped their votes and the outcomes in some cases.

Q. What happens if there is a tie?

A. The justices have two options. They can vote to hear the case a second time when a new colleague joins them or they can hand down a one-sentence opinion that upholds the result reached in the lower court without setting a nationwide rule. When confirmation of a new justice is expected to happen quickly, re-argument is more likely. In this political environment, the vacancy could last into 2017.

Q. Why doesn't the court like tie votes?

A. A major function of the Supreme Court is to resolve disputes among lower courts and establish legal precedents for the entire country. Tie votes frustrate those goals and they essentially waste the court's time.

Q. How does Scalia's death affect specific cases?

A. It deprives conservatives of a key vote and probably will derail some anticipated conservative victories in major Supreme Court cases, including one in which labor unions appeared headed for a big defeat. Next month's Supreme Court clash over contraceptives, religious liberty and President Barack Obama's health care law also now seems more likely to favor the Obama administration.

Q. Unions have suffered a string of defeats at the Supreme Court. Is that likely to change?

A. Yes, at least in the short term. Many of the cases involving organized labor were decided on 5-4 votes, with the conservative justices lining up against the unions and the liberal justices in support. The pending case seemed like more of the same. Public sector labor unions had been bracing for a stinging defeat in a lawsuit over whether they can collect fees from government workers who choose not to join the union. The case affects more than 5 million workers in 23 states and Washington, D.C., and seeks to overturn a nearly 40-year-old Supreme Court decision.

Now, what seemed like a certain 5-4 split, with the conservatives in the majority and the liberals in dissent, instead looks like a tie that would be resolved in favor of the unions, because they won in the lower courts.

Q. What other pending cases could be affected?

A. A challenge to the way governments have drawn electoral districts for 50 years now appears to have little chance of finding a court majority. The court heard arguments in December in a case from Texas on the meaning of the principle of "one person, one vote," which the court has said requires that political districts be roughly equal in population.

But it has left open the question of whether states must count all residents, including noncitizens and children, or only eligible voters in drawing district lines.

Q. What will happen in the upcoming case over the Obama health care overhaul?

A. The Supreme Court will be looking at the health care law for the fourth time since its 2010 enactment. This time, the focus is on the arrangement the Obama administration worked out to spare faith-based hospitals, colleges and charities from paying for contraceptives for women covered under their health plans, while still ensuring that those women can obtain birth control at no extra cost as the law requires.

The faith-based groups argue that the accommodation still makes them complicit in providing contraception to which they have religious objections.

A tie vote here would sow rather than alleviate confusion because the appellate courts that have looked at the issue have not all come out the same way.

That prospect suggests that Justice Anthony Kennedy will join the court's four liberal justices to uphold the arrangement, Supreme Court lawyer Thomas Goldstein said.

Q. Are there cases in which a tie would be a loss for the Obama administration?

A. The administration's plan to shield up to 5 million people from deportation was struck down by lower courts and a Supreme Court tie would leave that ruling in place. On abortion, the administration is backing a challenge to Texas' strict new regulations for abortion clinics. A federal appeals court upheld the regulations.