Hello, JCJ, isn't the government in a mess with the incoming administration? Hope you are Sugar are well. The
rumor is that Sun will have good earnings! : ) - Mephisto
Bush Cabinet Choices Risk Pitfalls
January 12, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Slavery. The Confederacy. Racism. Words that can stir deep emotions, open old wounds.
Two of President-elect Bush's Cabinet choices, appealing to social and religious conservatives, invoked battle cries of the Civil War while talking up states' rights.
That has pitfalls, legal and academic experts say.
``To take pride in being part of a time of history when we dehumanized black people, that's where all the friction is coming from,'' said Sharon Rush, a constitutional law professor at the University of Florida.
``In the Confederacy period, the states could not be trusted to protect black people,'' she said. ``So today, when people go back to the Confederacy, that brings up horrible, dehumanizing images.''
Attorney General-designate John Ashcroft, courting presidential votes in South Carolina in 1998, hailed Confederate war heroes as ``patriots'' and called it ``revisionist nonsense'' to depict slave-owning early Americans as racists.
Interior Secretary-designate Gale Norton, in a 1996 speech to a conservative think tank in Denver, compared her struggle for states' rights to the cause of the Confederacy and portrayed slavery as ``bad facts'' in an otherwise strong legal case.
Of course, Confederate descendants, reenactors and history buffs say they take pride in their ``heritage,'' whether from kinfolk who took part in a historic struggle or who battled federal encroachment rather than directly enforcing slavery.
But it is possible to talk about states' rights without throwing in the Confederacy, said Neal D. Thigpen, a political scientist at Francis Marion University.
``There's always the danger when you do that of this business of racism, rightfully or wrongfully,'' said Thigpen, a former Republican activist in Florence, S.C.
Matthew Spalding, director of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Center for American Studies, said the Civil War's constitutional questions have to be dealt with carefully since they touch upon slavery.
``Bringing up the question of states' rights in light of the Civil War does not necessarily diminish the war's efforts against slavery,'' he said of the controversy over Ashcroft and Norton. ``What might be a serious discussion is getting caught up in the passion of the moment.''
From the time the Constitution was adopted in 1789, debates have raged about the exact boundary between state and national power. Much of it has focused on the 10th Amendment specifying that powers not granted to the national government are reserved only by the states.
Bush was asked Thursday whether Norton's speech lamenting the undermining of states' rights after the Civil War might indicate an insensitivity to minority rights.
``I'd say that just is a ridiculous interpretation,'' he replied, adding she was not talking about ``the unique values of slavery'' but is a target of special interests in Washington that ``like to tear people down.''
Bush said while campaigning it is not the role of the federal government to tell states how to run programs ranging from welfare to education, and he won support from Confederate flag supporters in South Carolina in the February primary saying it should be left to the state to decide whether to unfurl the banner from above its Statehouse dome.
With his White House victory, states' rights proponents, including members of Congress and other elected leaders, are eager to take on scores of issues from gun rights to abortion.
In recent years, the Supreme Court has carried out what some observers call a states' rights revolution, tilting the federal-state balance toward the states in a series of 5-4 votes, with Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist leading the majority.
Invoking states' rights, the justices struck down a law that made it a federal crime to possess a gun near a school, ruled that rape victims cannot sue their attackers in federal court and shielded state governments from federal age-bias lawsuits filed by their employees.
However, the justices went against that trend in the presidential election case last month when they canceled the hand-recount of votes ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. The justices' 5-4 ruling, which in effect gave the presidency to Bush, was determined by the same five justices who ordinarily support states' rights.
Rush finds irony in talk of the Confederacy given the Florida election outcome.
In Florida, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Thursday opened its two-day hearing investigating voting irregularities. The NAACP and other civil rights groups filed a class action lawsuit Wednesday in federal court on behalf of black Florida residents who say they were denied the right to vote in the Nov. 7 election.
``Many black voters in this state are saying we can't trust Florida to protect our rights to vote,'' she said, noting Bush supports states' rights. ``The irony of that, of course, is that Bush so quickly ran to the Supreme Court to say Florida couldn't manage its election.''
nytimes.com |
