The United States is facing an existential crisis. Our Constitution explicitly forbids an insurrectionist from running for office, yet the right-wing dominated Supreme Court may not hold up the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment in the interests of “unity over justice.” Ali Velshi sees our own history as a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks that the worst we can imagine for our democracy can’t happen.
The defeated Confederates — those for whom the Fourteenth Amendment was written — refused to acknowledge democratic elections that placed Black Americans in legislative and executive positions during the Reconstruction Era. Opponents of racial equality worked to disenfranchise Black voters, backed by a Supreme Court who stripped democracy from the American South and attributed those rulings to the doctrine of originalism (also known as strict construction).
Kermit Roosevelt III, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, stresses that this originalist interpretation was not, in fact, interpreting the views of the Constitution’s framers, but instead picking and choosing which views to apply.
“The main thing that originalism is going now is … working as a rhetorical strategy that lets the justices deny responsibility for choices that they’re making.” While what happened on January 6 doesn’t compare in scope to the whole of the Civil War, an armed mob attempted to overthrow election results and install a defeated candidate as the president is an insurrection just the same.
LISTEN: ALI VELSHI AND ROOSEVELT TALK ORIGINALISM AND DEMOCRACY
WATCH: VELSHI’S INTERVIEW WITH KERMIT ROOSEVELT III
