Why We Can't Have Nice Things Part III: The Anti-Federalist Papers

By Publius XVI
of the Board of Editors

We've been away.  Any news?

We don't know much about Sensitive Compartmented Intelligence, having been kicked out of a CIA briefing in 1982, so we'll leave all the learned commentary on the latest felonies of the Tangerine-Faced Grifter to those qualified to speak to it, on the one hand, and to his remaining media shills and co-conspirators, on the other.  

Instead, we have some thoughts about one deeply buried news item that caught our eye:

The face of federalism

Gov. Tate Reeves on Wednesday said he’s “pushing back on the left” by pulling Mississippi out of a federal pandemic rental assistance program and plans to send any unspent dollars back to Washington....

Advocates who help people with rental assistance said Reeves’ decision will hurt Mississippians — many of whom are working but struggling to pay all of their living expenses.

“This is not a good day,” said Gwen Bouie-Haynes, the executive director of the National Association of Social Workers-Mississippi Chapter, which has helped residents sign up for the program. “… This will result in more people living on the street in Jackson and across the state of Mississippi.”

Reeves’s office said the program has about $130 million remaining....

In February, Mississippi Today reported, based on information provided by the Home Corporation, that 66% of the applicants approved to receive funds through the program were employed, and the majority are Black and female.

The latest U.S. Census data available, for the week ending July 11, showed that 44.5% of adult Mississippians surveyed reported being behind on their rent or mortgage, with eviction or foreclosure in the next two months being either very likely or somewhat likely.

At the same time period last year, 60.5% reported eviction or foreclosure as likely. At times during the pandemic, Mississippi led the nation in the percentage of people reporting likelihood of eviction or foreclosure.

So, to sum up: a white Republican is turning down free Federal money to punish and immiserate his poor constituents, many of them Black and most of them working for poverty wages.

How could this happen?  We've talked about the obvious answer: racism.  But there's another, less obvious answer: federalism.

Hey, where you going?  Federalism may sound boring, but if you're a poor Mississippi family evicted and living in a tent, not so much!

Now in most countries, when the nation decides that it needs to give poor people money to pay their rent, it does so.  But in our glorious republic, we have an entirely separate and sovereign layer of government, called “states.” 

Those of you who live in states like California, Texas, or Florida may not even notice,  But if you have tried to move from state to state and practice your profession or drive a car, you have.  And it was a moderate to gigantic pain in the ass, for no gain to you or your country.  

So why do we have these idiotic states?  We'll offer two answers: one, we always have; and, two, it serves the interests of rich white male racists.

Let's start with Mississippi Governor Alfred E. Neuman on steroids.  Who is this guy?  He's the latest in a long line of white Republican racist stooges installed by the local white elite to keep poor people in their place.  (Tossing poor Mississippians into the streets instead of accepting free money being just one example. )

You'll be shocked, shocked to learn that he doesn't think racism is a systemic problem in America, or in his Old Confederacy:

She...asks Reeves to weigh in.

He gives the correct response, in the sense that a Republican speaking to Laura Ingraham on Fox News is expected to give a particular response: There is no systemic racism in America.

Reeves has had a pretty good week. In addition to his Fox News appearance, he got Monday off since it was a state holiday: Confederate Memorial Day. In fact, he was speaking to Fox at the tail end of what he on April 7 declared to be Confederate Heritage Month. April, according to the proclamation obtained by the Mississippi Free Press, should be a period in which Mississippians “honor all who lost their lives in this war” and to “come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage.”

Coming back soon

There will be people who argue that this holiday [is] an effort to learn from the past, they might say, not an endorsement of it. One might claim that there's nothing inherently racist about celebrations of the Confederacy (which this obviously is), perhaps because they view the Civil War as being centered not on slavery but on, say, states' rights.

That particular argument is undercut fairly robustly by the fact that Mississippi state law mandates the holiday, one of three Confederacy-related state holidays on the calendar. It is clear that the system in Mississippi encourages a generous view of the Confederacy, a rebellion against the United States that was predicated on the enslavement of Black people. 

It's almost like the whole structure of states' rights was invented to keep the national government from protecting its Black citizens from continuing racism and discrimination, as indeed was the case from 1876 through 1964.

But federalism isn't only a matter of screwing Black people for no reason other than racist vindictiveness (remember, this was federal money Mississippi refused to dole out).  Thanks to six bent Republicans, including two sex offenders, on the Supreme Court, your state of residence can mean the difference between life and freedom or death and carrying your rapist's child. 

A woman who is ten weeks pregnant in Kansas City, Kansas can obtain a safe, legal medication abortion.  Thanks to Smarmy Sam Alito and his henchmen, another woman who lives a mile away in Kansas City, Missouri, can be tried and convicted for that same safe easy medical procedure.  Or she could start to miscarry and die of sepsis before Missouri would permit a life-saving abortion.  That's federalism, at least according to our current Supreme Court.

Or worse.

The white male slaveholders who dominated the Constitutional Convention of 1787 inserted a clause designed in large part to give slave states the power to reach into free states and get their property, which we thought of as human beings, back.

According to Article IV, Section 2:

A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.

So let's say our unfortunate Missouri resident flees the state one step ahead of the law and arrives safely in Massachusetts. Having been charged with a crime by Missouri, the courts of Massachusetts have no choice but to lock her up (sound familiar) and ship her back to Missouri.

But wait, there's more!

The forced-birth states are busily passing laws outlawing assisting a woman in obtaining an abortion, even if that assistance comes from out of state.  There is nothing to prevent the creative minds of legislators in those states from making such assistance a criminal offense.  When that happens, under the current Supreme Court's understanding of federalism, there is nothing to prevent Missouri from indicting a doctor or clinic in Massachusetts that mails abortion pills into Missouri, and then demanding that the doctor be “delivered up.”

What is to be done?  We can't very well get rid of states, as much as we would like.  But from 1937 through about 2000, it was commonly understood that the Fourteenth Amendment, passed following a Civil War started and prosecuted by slave states asserting their supposed right to make war on the United States, protected us from the worst excesses of federalism.

Under that understanding, certain rights, even if not explicitly stated in the general terms of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, were held safe from state interference.  And the federal government was allowed to tell states what they had to do to get federal dollars (like pass along housing assistance to poor Mississippians). That all changed thanks to the Republican-nobbled Supreme Court.

But what a nobbled bent Court can do, a reconstituted Court can undo.  And if we get just a few more Democratic Senators, we can unpack and unbend the Court and put the states back in their bottles.

All we have to do give a f***.