#Eric Foner, "The New Party Bosses," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021 - "And if you think our current moment of hypertension, political polarization, abusive language, widespread efforts to suppress the vote, and violet clashes over electoral outcomes is unprecedented, think again. As far back as the 1790s, opponents called George Washington a British agent, and Thomas Jefferson, a lackey of revolutionary France." "The founders considered unrestrained democracy as dangerous as tyranny." "Instead, Grinspan [Jan, author of 'The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy.' (Bloomsburg) ] argues that Gilded Age political campaigns, subordinated substance to mass spectacle with large nightly parades of touch-bearing partisans, incessant political rallies, and spellbinding oratory laced with scurrilous attacks on opponents."
"The election of 1876, remembered today for the compromise that made Rutherford B. Hayes president, and ended Reconstruction, brought to the polls 82 percent of eligible voters, the highest participation rate in American history." During the 1870s, New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden headed a commission that sought to do precisely this: It proposed a new charter for New York City that imposed a hefty property qualification to take part in elections for the Board of Finance."
"The changes were most extreme in the South, where white supremacist Democrats disenfranchised nearly all Black voters, as well as a substantial number of poorer white ones, via poll taxes, literacy tests, and 'good character' requirements."
"In 1910, only 4 percent of adult Black Georgians were registered to vote." "By 1924, for the first time in American history, fewer than half the eligible voter cast ballots."
#Elie Mystal, "For the Sake of Justice," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021. -"To be seen to retire 'in order' to let Biden pick his successor would betray [Justice] Breyer's own career-long objective of making decisions based on what is right for the country, not for one party." "Where I [Mystal] see a court that is 6-3 in favor of conservatives, Breyer likely sees nine individuals trying to noodle things out the best they can." "In reality, the court is divided by partisan politics, whether the justices wear their MAGA gear underneath their robes or not." "Breyer can live in a world of wishes, rainbows, and unicorns, where consensus-building is a thing, but I submit those of us who have some of our human rights on the line do not have the luxury of watching Breyer tilt at windmills while he plays chicken with death."
"The truth is that lifetime appointments are an absurd way to staff a federal judiciary in a country that shrugged off monarchy two and a half centuries ago."
#David Cole, "On Principle," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021. In New York City's lawyer, Michael Ratney's lawsuit on behalf of enemy combatants, 'Rasul v. Bush,' after losing in the lower courts, won in the Supreme Court, and was the first of several landmark rulings rejecting the Bush administration's claims of unchecked power in the 'war on terror.' The case ensured that Guantanamo detainees could challenge their detentions -- and helped create the pressure that forced the Bush administration to release more than 500 of the men detained there.
#Kali Holloway, :The Century-Long Fight," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021. - "A 2001 Associated Press investigation found that 406 Black landowners, through unscrupulous means and white terror, 'lost more than 24,000 acres' that are today 'owned by whites or corporations' and are worth tens of millions of dollars."
"During the early 1900s, in places across America, white vigilante mobs committed anti-Black pogroms and then seized Back-owned properties for themselves." "From the 1950s onward, roughly 15 million acres --a staggering 90 percent of Black-owned farmland -- was lost, largely seized by the US Department of Agriculture to settle debts owned by Black farmers as a result of the department's racist lending practices."
#Saree Makolisi, "The Nakba Is Now," The Nation, 6.14 - 21.2021. - "Mobs of Jewish supremacists sometimes protected and sometimes actively assisted by state security forces, have been terrorizing Palestinian citizens of the state: smashing their shops, breaking into their homes, dragging them from their cars and beating them savagely in the street. Such events are routine in the West Bank, where settler violence against Palestinian residents is protected by the Israeli army and invariably goes unpunished." "But the spectacle of racial violence that has swept through cities from Acre and Jerusalem does not just look uncannily like Israel's primal scene; it also reminds us just where we have been all along."
"As in countless other areas across the land, a group of Jewish setters have been using legal proceedings (or to be precise, the proceedings enabled by the Israel's legal system, which are totally at odds with the requirements of international law) to try to take over Palestinian homes and turn their occupants, already refugees, into refugees twice over." "The removal of Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish settlers has been going on, sometimes on a large scale, sometimes on a smaller one, for more than 70 years."
"While the Israeli courts and the Israeli state routinely enable the establishment of new settlements on Palestinian land, there is no mechanism in the Israeli legal system for a Palestinian family to reclaim the land or property forcibly taken from them by the Zionist National Fund." The stark reality is there for all to see: the hideous spectacle of a once apparently formidable state project unraveling into the elementary racial violence out of which it was born."
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