Joseph Crespino: Lessons on States' Rights
[Joseph Crespino, an associate history professor at Emory University, is the author of “In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution” and co-editor, with Matthew Lassiter, of “The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism.” He is writing a biography of Strom Thurmond.]
Though Republicans in Washington have lost the battle over health care, state GOP leaders are taking up the flag and running with it.
Even before President Barack Obama signed the health care bill into law Tuesday, a group of Republican state attorneys general announced plans to file lawsuits against it as a violation of states’ and individual rights.
Leading this charge is South Carolina’s Henry McMaster, who has vowed to join Florida’s Bill McCollum in a suit to overturn health care mandates as a violation of state sovereignty.
Two white, Southern officials defending state sovereignty inevitably evokes memories of the civil rights era — when “states’ rights” was the catchphrase of Southern segregationists. But states’ rights has long been used as a convenient argument in a wide variety of cases. So it’s worth considering the politics of states’ rights in the civil rights era for what lessons it might offer today.
White Southerners invoked states’ rights to oppose a range of civil rights laws in the past century — anti-lynching measures in the 1930s, fair employment legislation in the ’40s, school desegregation in the ’50s and open housing in the ’60s.
Of course, Southern states’ fulminations against federal interference never stopped them from enjoying the fruits of federal dollars. Some of the most recalcitrant Southern states were the biggest beneficiaries of Washington largesse.
It was this disjunction that led the Kennedy administration to consider measures tying federal funding to civil rights compliance — a provision enshrined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
While states’ rights was always a prized legal strategy, its popularity among the broader white Southern population grew as the civil rights movement reached its peak from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s....
Read entire article at Politico
Though Republicans in Washington have lost the battle over health care, state GOP leaders are taking up the flag and running with it.
Even before President Barack Obama signed the health care bill into law Tuesday, a group of Republican state attorneys general announced plans to file lawsuits against it as a violation of states’ and individual rights.
Leading this charge is South Carolina’s Henry McMaster, who has vowed to join Florida’s Bill McCollum in a suit to overturn health care mandates as a violation of state sovereignty.
Two white, Southern officials defending state sovereignty inevitably evokes memories of the civil rights era — when “states’ rights” was the catchphrase of Southern segregationists. But states’ rights has long been used as a convenient argument in a wide variety of cases. So it’s worth considering the politics of states’ rights in the civil rights era for what lessons it might offer today.
White Southerners invoked states’ rights to oppose a range of civil rights laws in the past century — anti-lynching measures in the 1930s, fair employment legislation in the ’40s, school desegregation in the ’50s and open housing in the ’60s.
Of course, Southern states’ fulminations against federal interference never stopped them from enjoying the fruits of federal dollars. Some of the most recalcitrant Southern states were the biggest beneficiaries of Washington largesse.
It was this disjunction that led the Kennedy administration to consider measures tying federal funding to civil rights compliance — a provision enshrined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
While states’ rights was always a prized legal strategy, its popularity among the broader white Southern population grew as the civil rights movement reached its peak from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s....