When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written--the one that had established a federal government manned by the people's own elected representatives, charged with protecting...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Bibliographische Detailangaben

1. Verfasser:	Magnet, Myron (VerfasserIn)
Format:	Buch
Sprache:	English
Veröffentlicht:	New York ; London Encounter Books 2019
Ausgabe:	First American edition
Schlagworte:	Thomas, Clarence / 1948- United States / Supreme Court / Officials and employees / Biography United States / Supreme Court USA > Supreme Court Originalism African American judges / Biography Constitutional law / United States African American judges Constitutional law Employees Schwarze Amtsrichter Verfassungsrecht United States Biografie
Zusammenfassung:	When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written--the one that had established a federal government manned by the people's own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens' inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people's representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan "experts," an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson's dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR's batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers' vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves.
Beschreibung:	153 Seiten 24 cm
ISBN:	9781641770521