Cynthia Tucker, AJC: 'Must filibuster Justice Brown'

Must filibuster Justice Brown
By Cynthia Tucker
> Published on: 05/01/05

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Though most Americans support Social Security and the other workers' protections that grew out of the New Deal, Brown holds to a peculiar constitutional view that dismisses the New Deal as "the triumph of our own socialist revolution."

Speaking to the Chicago chapter of the Federalist Society five years ago, she said, "The New Deal . . . inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document."

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Brown has every right to be an ultraconservative. That's what the civil rights movement was all about — giving black Americans the opportunity to live as they desired, choosing the neighborhoods, schools, churches and political philosophies that best suit them.

So I will honor Brown by judging her no differently from the way I would a white man with the same extremist views: She has no business on the federal bench. Her nomination is among the strongest arguments for keeping the filibuster alive.

—Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tucker/2005/050105.html#

Before FDR's great legislative initiatives, the principle of "freedom of contract" was the conservative jurists' defense to attempts to equalize the playing field between labor and capital, and to regulate the relationship between corporations and consumers. It was based on the ideological myth that corporations and individuals were free to bargain at arms length over the quality of goods (such as milk), wages, and working conditions. Therefore, there was no need for labor laws or market regulations. If your child died from unadulterated milk or if underage workers died working in a dangerous mine or factory this was no problem, the "unseen hand" of the market would take care of it. This was fabrication of the imagination just as communism is in its ideal form.

Now the new corporate judicial ideology is "strict constructionism." An ideological approach to law which undertakes to itself the exposition of dogma about the true intent of the framers. This usually involves a reinterpretation of history akin to the role of historians in a totalitarian state. History must support policy. It's the same policy the "unseen hand." The "free market" will solve all.

Some "persons" are more equal than others. They are legal fictions called corporations. They aren't persons really they are institutions with great power available relative to the individual. It is the government's role to regulate them to protect liberty (property). If they don't corporations will take the individual citizens' livelihood and property for their own. They, just like the power of an unchecked government, would take your person, your property, your water, your children and even your air, if they were left free to do so.

This is another form of "collectivism" called fascism. It is the "collectivism of corporations" over individual human rights which takes place when government abandons its historical role in regulating property rights and merely takes up the ideological cause of corporations.

Property is the relationship of people to a thing. Taxes are the ultimate regulation of property. It has always been the governments role to regulate property. Interests in land and water are the classic examples. Regulations have always existed in organized government in one form or another. The failure to regulate property is insane and not be in the interest of a government which was designed to provide for the general welfare of its people.

Especially about "collectivism of corporations" = fascism. It's obvious that the aforementioned ideology is skewed toward things (or the ones "with the most toys") and not towards simple human need.

There is more said about the filibuster fight sometimes than the extreme ideology that should not be allowed advancement.