Our Federal Court System

I’m biased, I admit. I grew up in a time when the sea wall against the flood of fascism was our federal court system. In Mississippi in the 1960s, the state had lost its mind over the end of segregation. Officials declared federal law null and void inside Mississippi. According to this myth, anything the state did in response to the suggestion white people not stomp all over Black folk was legal—the constitution couldn’t say otherwise. The Supreme Court put a stop to that nonsense, and I came to revere our brave federal court system.

Those were dark days, the shadow of which are spreading across our land again. You want smaller government? See no place for the federal Department of Education? Trust the states to do what’s right by those who don’t have the love and political power of the majority? How has that worked for us in the past?

I don’t even have to return to the 1960s to see the failures of erasing federal oversight. In the last several years, Mississippi experienced one of the biggest welfare fraud scandals in the history of the nation, thanks to federal block grants. This funding approach trusts states to determine how best to spend the money to lift poverty. Instead, it produced pigs-at-the-trough level fraud and corruption.

Of course, before our federal court system declared white supremacy unconstitutional, they declared it legal. The US Supreme Court struck down the original civil rights laws passed after the Civil War which were intended to implement the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Now, in today’s world, we are returning to this type of privilege-oriented Supreme Court. Do I really want the majority of these justices to establish the morals for all of our states?

No. I want our federal court system to again care about the equality we enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Equality by race. By gender. Ability. Sexual preference. Ethnicity. Country of origin. Equality by all the things. To quit ruling America is the people who are willing to shout, You’re not as good as me!

We’ll come back from this, I have to believe we will. We did it before. Surely we can do it again.