Fewer and fewer judges believe that their
function is to uphold the Constitution based on history and precedent or
“original intent.”
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The 1896 Supreme Court Plessy decision, which gave us “separate but equal” is widely considered today to be incorrect. Legal scholars maintain that the private railroad company violated the Constitution by separating people in railway cars on the basis of race. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent–“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens”–is almost universally considered correct.
How can it be, then, that the same legal scholars who damn the Plessy decision support the 1896 Supreme Court’s Plessy reasoning when they uphold the right of private media to divide people into classes based on belief and to discriminate on the basis of opinion? TV, print, radio, and social media all discriminate against those who dissent from the official narratives. If the railway company’s policy was in violation of the 14th Amendment, most certainly media’s policy of censorship and “cancelling” is in violation of the 1st Amendment.
Law schools have never looked seriously at Justice Harlan’s famous claim that the Constitution “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” It most certainly does. The same railway company that provided different railway cars for different races provided different railway cars for different classes. People were, and still are today, segregated by economic class. A second class ticket is no good in a first class car.