“The Silly Season” is a term used for that time in the electoral cycle when candidates start slinging mud. Saturday night in Londonderry, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren redefined “Silly Season” to embrace the whole 2020 New Hampshire Democratic Presidential Primary process when she called for a constitutional amendment to ensure that people have the right to vote.
It seemed to slip the mind of the former Harvard Law professor that there already is one: The Fifteenth.
Her call for amending the constitution was made while standing on a platform, speaking to between 40 and 50 Democrats who filled two small rooms at Rockingham County Democratic Party Headquarters in Londonderry.
Warren told the throng she’d achieved her childhood dream of becoming a school teacher. She said took great pride in having been a teacher to special needs kids, before going to law school. She said that after graduating, she’d served less than an hour in practicing the law before becoming a teacher again.
That was what she most identified as, as a teacher, she told those mostly enthusiastic voters sitting and standing in the muggy rooms, as they saw rain falling outside the windows behind her. She told them she was a teacher quite often.
As a teacher, and a distinguished one at that, it’s hard to believe that former Professor Elizabeth Warren doesn’t know about the 15th Amendment, that states:
Section 1. 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.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Apparently, constitutional law was an elective, not a required course for graduation at the University of Oklahoma Law School, Warren’s alma mater.
The 15th Amendment ensured the right to vote, when the franchise consisted of males over the age of 21. The franchise was expanded to women in 1919 upon ratification of the 18th Amendment, and to 18, 19 and 20 year olds when the 26th Amendment was ratified in 1971.
The guarantor of the right of everyone to vote has been in the U.S. Constitution since the first U.S. Grant administration. The sesquicentennial of the 15th Amendment will be in 2020, the same year Warren hopes to win the presidency.
Civil Rights Amendments
Perhaps Elizabeth Warren skipped seeing Steven Spielberg’s movie starring Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, which came out in October 2012, during her first campaign for the U.S. Senate. She was very busy then, in her quest to defeat Scott Brown. It was a come-from-behind victory, Warren defying the polling numbers to surge ahead and beat the incumbent by seven points, as she reminisced on a rainy night in Londonderry.
Spielberg’s movie dealt with Abraham Lincoln’s own quest to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, making his Emancipation Proclamation the rule of the law throughout the land. The 13th was the first of the three so-called “Reconstruction Amendments,” as the country had to be reconstructed after being torn apart by what the post-Civil War official history called “The War of the Rebellion.”
Written and ratified when abolitionist Radical Republicans still were a major power in Lincoln’s Grand Old Party,” the Reconstruction Amendments endowed citizenship on African Americans, along with the right to vote for adult males and equal protection under the laws for all persons of color. They could have been called the “Civil Rights Amendments.”
Because the “Rebel States” upon seceding had withdrawn their Senators and Representatives from Congress during the course of The Rebellion, the Republicans dominated the House and Senate. The Republicans controlled most state legislatures, including those in the military-occupied South.
The GOP’s huge majorities in Congress enabled them to pass Civil Rights Acts in 1866, 1870 and 1875. It also passed three “Reconstruction Acts” in 1867 and 1868 to control the reintegration of the South into the United States. Enacted by overriding the vetoes of President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s racist successor who had Southern sympathies, the legislation spelled out the path Rebel States had to take before their representatives and senators were officially readmitted to Congress.
Passage of the 14th Amendment by the Rebel States was mandatory, for readmission.
The Key Amendment
The 14th Amendment became the most important vehicle for promoting civil rights in the post-World War II era, and not just for African Americans. Moribund for decades, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren used it to incorporate the protections of the Bill of Rights to the states. Controversially, the 14th was used to ensure the rights of criminal defendants to a fair trial and to expand free speech rights.
When I was attending Boston University in the late 1970s, a dirty book store in the Combat Zone, Boston’s red light district, was called “The 14th Amendment.” The 14th Amendment made possible the revolution in pornography.
Even more controversially, the 14th Amendment was the engine propelling the revolution in civil rights down the tracks of equality in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. The doctrine of one man, one vote enshrined by Baker v. Car (1962) was based on the 14th. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most meaningful federal civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction period, were made effective via the 14th Amendment.
It was hated by conservatives, such as those put on the Supreme Court by Republican presidents as part of the backlash against the liberal Warren Court. Skepticisim of the 14th was a litmus test for conservative justices is much as Roe v. Wade is. It was the 14th that gave Roe, and American women, the right to an abortion.
Protecting women’s reproductive rights was the last question, offered by the audience, that Elizabeth Warren responded to in Londonderry.
The borked Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork hated the way the Warren Court used the 14th Amendment to expand the rights of groups and individuals. He didn’t make it onto the Court, but Antonin Scalia die. He hated the 14th too.
The hated 14th was used by Scalia and the 14th Amendment haters to deliver the presidency to the Republicans in Bush v. Gore (2000). The 14th was used to prevent the the violation of the civil rights of George W. Bush, individual, and the voters in Rebel State Florida, as a group.
The 14th is the guarantor of the guarantees of the 15th. There is no way for Elizabeth Warren not to know this. She was a professor at Harvard Law School, one of the most prestigious law schools in the world.
As Warren said to the Londonderry Democrats, her law school specialty was corporations, corporate law and finance. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was used to incorporate civil rights to corporations, under the legal fiction that they are people.
The great irony of the 14th was that, in the first 80-odd years after The Rebellion, the Supreme Court let this critical Civil War Civil Rights amendment become moribund in the way the Radical Republicans had meant it to be applied to the Freedman, while using it to bolster the civil rights of corporations.
In the realm of African Americans’ rights, High Court decisions undermined the equality of African Americans, while using the 14th the to create a shield protecting fictional persons acting as corporations from government.
The High Court Justices ruled that while the original intent of Congress was to protect citizens of “African origin,” the sentiment for protecting due process rightsn was universal. Thus, the 14th did not just apply to people of African Americans. It covered every person, real and fictional.
Supreme Court decisions on the 14th veered farther and farther away from the inent of those who created it. In Plessy v. Fergunson (1893), the original intent was jettisoned, and segregation was enshrined as constitutional law, until the Warren Court had something different to say 61 years later.
The Supremes further fiddled with the 14th during the Progressive Era to protect corporations from government interference. An amendment designed to ensure the freedom of former slaves and free blacks, essentially evolved into a license permitting governments to disenfranchise and allow the murder of black folk, but forbide governments from regulating companies to protect the health and safety of workers, or provide them with fair wages.
An amendment to ensure the equality of real people wound up giving a whip hand over real people and the real people of their elected governments to the fictional people known as corporations.
Even now, the 14th Amendment affects corporate and contract law, which Elizabeth Warren told the Londonderry Dems was her specialty. So, why is Elizabeth Warren calling for a constitutional amendment to ensure the right of everybody to vote when it’s been in the Constitution all along?
Teachers of Children
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
–W.B Yeats, “Among School Children”
There’s a dynamic between teachers and students. Students are always inferior to teachers, as when you no longer need a teacher, you are no longer a student.
The Rockingham Democrat who introduced Elizabeth Warren Saturday night told a story about a campaign worker who would not get his last credit to graduate, as that ensured he would always be able to go back to Harvard to hear Warren lecture. Hearing this story, Warren laughed upon moving into the room. I took a note to myself, “Bull……”
One doesn’t work their a$$ off to get into the most competitive law school, aside from Yale with its much smaller class, for the privilege of spending a Trump-sized pot of money for the privilege of working your a$$ for another three years not to graduate. A Harvard Law degree is a ticket to unlimited earnings power, which is a major factor in going to Harvard in the first place, if just to pay off your student loans.
This was story time. Teachers of children tell stories to children.
Civics courses in the 1960s were made up of safe stories about American history told to school children. We were never told anything harsh or challenging, we were told stories that everybody agreed on, that made American history seem a march of progress.
The civics books told stories about America as the New Jersualem, an enlightened democracy characterized by the American Way of fair play. Superman’s America. Those civics stories didn’t jibe with pictures of police riots against black women and children in Selma, Alabama and the carnage of Vietnam televised nightly on The Tube.
The dynamic of Elizabeth Warren speaking with her audience, on display in Londonderry, was one of a teacher of children telling stories to school children. Everyone was reading from the same civics book. Everyone was on the same page.
Listening to her, there’s no doubt Elizabeth Warren is brilliant. Listening to her, you’re struck by her brilliance.
Her own true story of coming up from the genteel poverty of the lower working class to become one of the most respected professors in the field of corporate law and winning a hard fought contest to become a U.S. Senator is truly amazing. That Elizabeth Warren embodies the American Dream.
I wrote about Warren during her 2012 campaign. I fell in love with her then, so much so that in 2016, I created a “Write-In Elizabeth Warren for President” Facebook page.
At the time, I marveled at how wonderful Warren was in-person, and how different she was from her media personality. During the 2012 campaign, she struck me as having a slightly goofy personality, like the great 1930s screwball comedienne Carole Lombard, or Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. (For those of you who don’t know screwball comedy, it’s the woman who’s always right, no matter how absurd the situation, and running against Scott Brown had many aspects of absurdity.)
She was a teacher then, too. I felt she came across in her TV appearances and in her TV ads like the great teacher you had heard about when you were a college freshman. Someone with an august title like “University Professor,“ about whom upper classmen told stories. A real academic superstar.
It was part of the legend that the University Professor’s class was super hard to get into. A real challenge, like the great challenges of life that you’d face from now on, in college, in graudate school, n life. Getting in, let alone flourishing, was a mark of success.
You wanted to get in to the class, and you didn’t. You yearned to be her student, but you were afraid. One look or cutting remark, and you’d s— your pants. And think about the final! How could you measure up when pitting yourself against genius?
During the 2012 Senate campaign, I thought how great it would be if she can get her real personality across, the one I saw when she was on the hustings, such as with one of my heroes, U.S. Senator Max Cleland.
After Londonderry, I don’t know what Elizabeth Warren’s real personality is. I was thinking, while sitting as one of the audience, “Relax. You need to relax.” Trying to will her to relax.
Warren came across as strident as her appearance stretched towards the one-hour mark. It seemed more like two.
When it came to socio-economic issues before the “AOC Wave,” that tsunami created by the shock of Donald Trump that lifted the Democratic Party off its feet and deposited in Bernieland, I felt closer to her than any other candidate.
In Londonderry last Saturday night, Liz Warren was doing Bernie Sanders. And I thought, Bernie does it so much better.
The persona of Elizabeth Warren the fear-inducing University Professor came across the airwaves in 2012. In 2019, she’s using a narrative strategy about teaching schoolchildren rather than law school students, but she really is the great University Professor. She knows more than we do.
Yeah, she knows more than we do. Feel-good stories about teaching kids in public school won’t hide the real Elizabeth Warren. She is brilliant. She knows her stuff. And she can be strident, because of her surety in her own intellect that got her so far.
So, why then, why this ridiculous rhetoric of the need for a superfluous constitutional amendment?
And why, when speaking of the need for bipartisanship on the environment, as AOC’s red hot Green New Deal has been incorporated into her spiel, did she tell Londonderry Democrats a story? It was a story, set in a time not so long ago, when Republicans and Democrats agreed on the environment, such as the need for higher fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles.
In fact, John Kerry, alongside whom she served in the Senate, was brutally attacked by Republicans when he argued for boosting fuel efficiency during the George W. Bush years. During a floor debate, Kerry memorably backed down when Republicans charged him with being un-American, on the grounds that he wanted to deny Americans their right of free choice to buy any vehicle they wanted, including big gas guzzlers.
That was the reality in the U.S. Senate nearly a generation ago, absurd partisan combat, not bipartisanship.
Elizabeth Warren, who has made “Teacher” her main campaign trope at the moment, is telling stories. This teacher seemingly feels that Democratic presidential primary voter are not of the caliber of her law school students, who knew about the 15th Amendment, but are school children to be soothed with stories out of a public school civics primer for 5th graders.
I expected better from her.
My car had been parked at a nearby church. On the walk back from the headquarters building where Liz Warren, Teacher, had schooled the Democratic voters, I mused about the Church’s name: St. Jude.
St. Jude, celestial champion of lost causes, will wind up the patron saint of the Elizabeth Warren for President 2020 campaign if the candidate doesn’t decide on who the real Elizabeth Warren is.
