He is a closet-socialist.  He said redistribution of wealth, right here!

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy and the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples…but the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted and I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court focused. I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that. [...]

You know, maybe i am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way. Just look at the very rare examples where during the desegregation era, the court was willing to, for example, order changes that cost money to a local school district and the court was very uncomfortable with it. It was hard to manage. It was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that is essentially administrative and take a lot of time. The court is not very good at it and politically it is hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally, you know, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts. I think that as a practical matter, our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.

See!  He’s a socialist!  He said redistribution like 5 times!  And he was talking about crazy redistributive things like funding schools in poor districts with some of other people’s money!  Let those poor folks pay for their own schools, dammit!  I want my school in my rich neighborhood to have a turf football field and chandeliers, while those lazy poor kids learn math without math books!  But worst of all, he’s arguing…against(?)…judicial activism.  And he wants us to enact these socialist policies through…um…democratic institutions…like the legislature…which we kind of already did…a little…whatever.  He’s still a socialist!

Btw, on a more serious note, this interview displays the more serious side of Obama-as-constitutional-law-scholar, which is a whole side of him that you rarely see on the campaign trail (it’s elitist to know a lot about constitutional law).  As a law junkie, I love it.  I mean, can you imagine Bush or McCain speaking substantively about the role of the Warren Court in the segregation era?  Yeah.  Thought so.

Tags: Barack Obama, politics, wingnuts

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Some Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.