Rosa Parks and Scalito

I’ve been thinking for some time of the remarkable co-occurrence of the death of Rosa Parks and the nomination of Antonin Alito to the US. Supreme Court. Ms. Parks would have gone to jail for sitting on a bus when a white man had to stand. But for the Supreme Court, it might still be illegal for blacks to sit in white-only seats on the buses of Montgomery, Alabama.

Justices Thomas, Scalia, Renquist, and Alito claim they stick strictly to the Constitution, and interpret it the way the original framers intended. The Constitution, of course, does not give the federal government the right to regulate buses. It does not ever use the phrase “civil rights.” And no one can possibly argue that the original framers, half of whom owned slaves, intended for blacks and whites to be treated equally. But the so-called “liberal court” of the 1950s interpreted a sentence from the 14th Amendment, “No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” and issued a ruling overturning the duly enacted laws of legislatures in states across the country.

It was the right thing to do. Time and again in our history, our elected leaders have lacked the courage to do the right thing. Legislators, by their nature, respond to majorities, not minorities. But we had the wisdom to enshrine in our Constitution the essential principles by which we want our government to operate, and we empowered the courts to protect those principles. It was, ironically, what the original framers intended. Alito does not see value in these principles, and therefore should be rejected.