YouTube Transcription: Rollback Explained
Cristobal Joshua Alex: …but it’s an honor to be back here at my alma mater, the University of Washington, and to be invited to join a panel of such distinguished individuals, and as Michelle mentioned, I work with the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights… and what we are, we’re a collection of about 100 different progressive civil rights organizations that are working to educate the public about the civil rights rollback that are resulting from the right wing takeover of our courts. And, aside from educating the public about the rollback we also work to build a movement to stop the rollback, using the media, the courts, and the legislature… and I want to just start off by emphasizing what a crucial role the courts have, not only in protecting civil rights, but really in, in fashioning a more just vision of our society. The founding fathers recognized that the judiciary is the least democratic branch of our government, but access to courts is a real necessary requirement for a true functioning democracy. The courts were designed to protect the minority from the majority, and the courts, the way they’re supposed to work, are often times a last resort for folks to vindicate their rights. But in recent years we’ve seen a drastic shift in the courts to the right… and the result of that is the courthouse doors are being closed to many important civil right claims, and we have to get back to working on owning the courts, and…let me just also point out really quickly that this is going to be a very brief overview of the rollback, so my apologies to many of the lawyers here and other folks, and especially to those in the room who are doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this area. We’re just going to barely touch on some of these issues today… beginning with the contextual barriers to the enforcement of rights, and the inability to be able to get into courts. And as a lot of you know, starting around the 80’s with Ronald Regan coming in, there was a shift in politics, a shift in media, and really the right wing point of view started to take over… and that spilled over into our legal services. These are the groups that provide civil legal aid to poor folks. Their funding was slashed, they were saddle with numerous restrictions, and at the same time the right started to fund think tanks and anti-social justice law firms that were quite successful and have been quite successful in litigation. You used to be able to rely on the agencies, the federal agencies, and the offices of civil rights to help with enforcement… no more, because the federal government is going in a completely different direction now. And then of course the most drastic and scary part of this is there’s been a major seat change in the makeup of our courts. There’s been really a stealth campaign to stack the courts with folks from the right wing, and the result of that is a gutting of many of our most important civil rights protections. So, how do we get to this…
How did all this start? Many date it to 1964, Barry Goldwater, a Republican candidate from the extreme right…
Barry Goldwater: I will remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Goldwater lost in a landslide, but his defeat galvanized ultra-conservatives. They didn’t get that far with their agenda though, until 1980. They moved aggressively under Reagan, led by people like attorney general Edwin Meese, and young lawyers like Samuel Alito. If there was every any doubt about what they planned, that disappeared in 2002, when law professor Dawn Johnsen exposed documents that made it crystal clear.
Prof. Dawn Johnsen: The Reagan-Meese memos were issued by the Department of Justice in the 1980’s to set forth a blueprint for radically moving constitutional law to the right, by overruling a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions on all the great issues of the day.
Meese didn’t act alone. Ultra-conservatives had partners on the outside. Big business and big money. They poured millions into law schools, into think tanks, into non-profit law firms, and into a group called the Federalist Society. It began as a forum for debate, it turned into a way to groom lawyers for high-government office and the federal bench. And there were more allies. Allies on the religious right. They said to change the law, you had to change the courts.
Unnamed: And what you saw, beginning in the early 1980’s, was really a coming-together of conservative ideas, conservative intellectuals, conservative lawyers, and conservative money, all pointing in one direction… and the direction was let’s get the people we want on the courts.
Cristobal Joshua Alex: And they’ve been extremely successful at getting the people that they want on the courts. The Federalist Society, a key part of that… a great majority of recent appointments to the federal bench have been society members. And not only the federal courts…excuse me… but also the Department of Justice. If you look at the different circuits around the country, 11 of the 13 are Republican majority circuit; in fact 7 of the circuits are 2 to 1 majority. A lot of folks don’t understand that with the way the rhetoric in Washington is framed, they think it’s the other way around. The result of that court stacking… well, there’s a couple of things that have come out of it, but let me just show you this…
We no longer have candid revolutionary efforts the change the American constitution as we know it; we rather have a stealth revolution.
“I believe the constitution protects the right to privacy.”
“You’re not suggesting that there wasn’t any discussion…”
“I cannot…um, Senator, I cannot remember personally engaging in those discussions.”
Unnamed: Justice Thomas, when asked about Roe against Wade, said he had never talked about it… to anyone. And the of course when he gets on the bench he makes his position absolutely plain from the get-go.
“I don’t have, um, any objection or basis to object, or at this point any quarrel with the way the court has interpreted the Interstate Commerce Clause.”