Things that Robert Bork thought are not unconstitutional

Restaurants, hotels etc excluding blacks (he called it a “departure from the freedom of the individual to decide with whom he will deal”).

Racially restrictive covenants in property deeds.

Banning gay sex: “We would find it impossible to conclude that a right to homosexual conduct is ‘fundamental’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ unless any and all private sexual behavior falls within those categories, a conclusion we are unwilling to draw.” Indeed, the right of the majority to legislate morality is “the very predicate of democratic government”.

Banning married people buying contraceptives.

Regulating artistic speech (he thought the 1st Amendment mostly just applied to political speech).

Prosecuting people (Martin Luther King Jr comes to mind) advocating violating the law.

Prosecuting flag-burners.

Involuntary sterilization of inmates.

A chemical company ordering its female employees to get sterilized.

The president ordering wiretaps without a warrant.

The president excluding foreigners from the country.

Applying the 14th Amendment to anything other than race: “The bare concept of equality provides no guide for courts. All law discriminates and therefore creates inequality.”

For example, the establishment of different drinking ages for men and women.

Poll taxes.

Oh, and banning abortion, of course.

And he only got worse after his nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected in 1987. I wrote in 2005, “Bork is living proof that one can also be driven mad by lack of power.”

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Today -100: December 19, 1912: Of tuberculosis incubators and wirelesses

South Carolina Gov. Coleman Blease says that if the state penitentiary’s hosiery mill, which he calls a “tuberculosis incubator,” isn’t shut down, he’ll resort to mass pardons.

A Marconi wireless operator on a ship overhears a conversation which is part of a test of “wireless telephones” between Catalina Island and the mainland. He even heard a record playing in the background. Say, do you think there’s some sort of use for this ability to transmit voices and music over radio waves?

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Today -100: December 18, 1912: Of pilgrimages

Three (I think) women’s suffragists are engaged in a march, or pilgrimage, from New York City to Albany. If that doesn’t convince the Legislature, nothing will.

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Today -100: December 17, 1912: Of glaring, ethnic cleansing, and pardons

At the Balkan War peace negotiations under way in London, the allies demand that Turkey surrender Adrianople and other places by the end of the week or the war will resume. (LAT headline: “Peace Delegates Meet, Glare At One Another.”)

Whites in northern Georgia are driving blacks out of the region through terror, as was the custom. “So many negroes have fled that the wives and daughters of prominent planters are forced to cook, wash clothes and do other manual labor.”

Arkansas’s outgoing Gov. George Donaghey will pardon 360 prisoners, because of his opposition to the practice of convicts being leased out as laborers to contractors. He couldn’t get the legislature to abolish the practice, so he’s going to empty out the convict camps this way. (The Legislature will abolish the practice in February).

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Today -100: December 16, 1912: Of whooping emperors and dashed airmen

Headline of the Day -100: “Emperor Has Whooping Cough.” China’s (former) emperor.

Dashing Headline of the Day -100: “Two British Airmen Dashed to Death.” You just never hear of anyone being dashed to death anymore.

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The more realistic discussion

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) comes out against gun control following the Newtown shootings: “That’s certainly the lowest common denominator. What is the more realistic discussion is, how do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?”

Rep. Rogers has bravely come out in favor of doing something about people who massacre children AFTER they massacre children.

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Today -100: December 15, 1912: Of elephant paté and other stuff

The Terra Nova sails to the South Pole to pick up Capt. Scott’s expedition or, you know, not.

Parisian restaurants do love their novelties, but this year’s speciality, elephant paté, is the result of the showman who owned an elephant named Agra having him killed after he got out of his cage and ran amok in Paris on several occasions. The NYT says “The paté is said to have a delicious flavor, but its digestive qualities are not insisted on, and this suggested that Agra’s devastating influence may not have ceased with death.”

A public hearing will discuss whether NYC and New Jersey should be connected by a tunnel or by a bridge.

Titanic Butt Headline of the Day -100: “Painting for Butt Fund.” Oh how we’ve missed you, Titanic Butt headlines.

A federal judge has ordered the release of Mexican Gen. David de la Fuente and Col. Pasqual Orozco, Sr. The latter is, I assume, the father of the leader of the short-lived Orozco Rebellion of earlier this year, who is himself currently hiding out somewhere in the US. The Taft administration had claimed power to order them detained without trial to prevent violations of the Neutrality Acts, but the judge disagreed.

The Mexican military has been leaving dead rebels hanging from trees. Someone counted 60 on the road between Los Cruces and Tomasoaltepect yesterday.

Name of the Day -100: Cornelius Amory Pugsley, a banker who NY bankers think should be Wilson’s treasury secretary, presumably because he has the bankerest name ever.

Kaiser Wilhelm has a movie theater installed in the Potsdam Palace. What movies does he like to see? Newsreels of himself.

Headline of the Day -100: “Four Devoured By Wolves.” Four hapless villagers are killed by wolves in Portugal, as was the custom.

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Regardless of the politics

Obama reacts to the old story repeated in Newtown: “each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would -- as a parent.” Well, it’s certainly true that he has yet to actually react as a president, which I believe is his fucking job.

(Okay, I have to interrupt here to suggest that Obama badly needs to purge his vocabulary of the word “too.” Just in this statement are these insanely inappropriate too’s: “We’ve endured too many of these tragedies”; “their children’s innocence has been torn away from them too early”; “As a country, we have been through this too many times.”)

“And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” The only meaningful action he specifically says he will be taking is hugging his children. Regardless of the politics.

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What we really need in this country

is better mental health care. Start with the Supreme Court justices who said there’s an individual right to guns.

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The purging of the Lieberdouches

Holy Joe Lieberman: gone.

Unholy Avigdor Lieberman: gone.

Let us never speak of them again.

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Today -100: December 14, 1912: Of flying white slavers

Headline of the Day -100: “White Slavers Fly London.” In fear of the just-passed White Slave Traffic Act, which includes a provision for flogging on a second conviction.

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Today -100: December 13, 1912: Also, shame-eating. Lots of shame-eating.

President Taft lays out his post-presidential plans: he’ll take up a professorship of law at Yale next fall, and then go on a year-long around-the-world tour.

Rep. Charles Calvin Bowman (R-PA) is declared unseated by the House due to corrupt practices in his election in 1910 (anyway, he was defeated in the 1912 election). But the House refuses a motion to give the seat for the remainder of the 62nd Congress to his Democratic opponent in the 1910 election, who evidently did the same things.

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Woof

The House of Lords voted to decriminalize the use of “insulting” language.

My two favorite bits in the Guardian story:

1) For delightful British absurdity:

Kyle Little, a 16-year-old from Newcastle, was fined £50 with £150 costs for saying “woof” to a labrador dog in front of police officers.

The conviction was quashed.

2) Because I am a child:

“Section five is a useful and important tool to respond to and prevent deeply offensive homophobic language frequently targeted at one in eight gay people a year” said Sam Dick, head of policy [for gay-rights group Stonewall].

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Today -100: December 12, 1912: Of miscegenation and juries

On the House floor, Rep. Seaborn Roddenbery (D-Georgia) denounces the marriage of black boxer Jack Johnson to a white woman, and proposes a Constitutional amendment banning interracial marriages. He opposes the legal ability of “a brown-hued, black-skinned, thick-lipped, brutal-hearted African” to “walk into an office of the law and demand an edict guaranteeing him legal wedlock to a white woman.” He says a Southern girl would sooner commit suicide than marry a negro.

Here’s the kind of funny part: his lengthy diatribe prevented a bill coming to a vote requiring a literacy test for some immigrants.

Oregon’s attorney general decides that last month’s victory for women’s suffrage does not entitle women to sit on juries.

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Today -100: December 11, 1912: Of premature presidential picks

The National Progressive Party conference in Chicago nominates Theodore Roosevelt for president for 1916.

President Taft will be going down to tour the Panama Canal zone, but what was the object spotted being moved from Taft’s personal yacht to the battleship Arkansas, the ship that will take him to Panama? If you guessed “jumbo bathtub,” you guessed correctly.

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Today -100: December 10, 1912: Of armistices, blind congresscritters, and no peace

Theodore Roosevelt gives his first speech since the election, promising that the Bull Moosers will continue fighting the Republican Party, an “organization of such a character that no honest man can be in it.” He refuses to say if he’ll run for president in 1916.

The armistice didn’t last long: Montenegrin and Turkish forces are fighting again.

In addition to blind Sen. Gore, the 63rd Congress will have blind Rep. Sanford Kirkpatrick (D-Iowa), a Civil War vet whose eyes were, in his words, “almost literally shot out by moonshiners” in 1890 when he was a Revenooer in North Carolina.

The Nobel committee says no one deserves a Peace Prize this year.

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Today -100: December 9, 1912: Of junket, dead aviators, socialist peers, and Smocks

President Taft offers Woodrow Wilson the use of a warship if he wants to visit the Panama Canal before being sworn in. Wilson doesn’t want.

An aviator, Dr. Jules Constantin, died while dropping bombs on Turks for the Bulgarian army, shot by a rifle.

Britain gets its first socialist member of the House of Lords, the 2nd Earl Russell (the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s brother). In 1901 Russell was tried (by the House of Lords, as lords were tried in those days, jury of your peers you know) for bigamy, since English law didn’t recognize his Reno divorce.

Name of the Day -100: a committee member of the Bull Moose Party in Idaho: P. Monroe Smock. A newspaper in Idaho is being prosecuted for printing remarks made by Roosevelt in a campaign speech criticizing an Idaho Supreme Court decision keeping Bull Moose Party electors off the state ballot.

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Today -100: December 8, 1912: A higher law than the Constitution

Interviewed by the NYT, South Carolina Gov. Coleman Blease says he was misrepresented (but not misquoted) regarding his “To hell with the Constitution” line. “[W]here black men commit crimes against white women, and are lynched for it, I declare Constitutions do not apply. For that, there is a higher law than the Constitution.”

The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy is renewed.

Finally, an explanation of Greece’s failure to join the armistice that makes sense to me: it was pre-arranged with the other 3 Balkan League states that Greece would stay out so it could continue to enforce a naval blockade of Turkey (as well as snarf up some islands it wants).

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Today -100: December 7, 1912: Hisses are the applause of geese

At the conference of governors, Gov. Emmet O’Neal of Alabama proposes resolutions calling for law ‘n’ order rather than lynching and repudiating the remarks of, ahem, any governor advocating mob violence. SC Gov. Coleman Blease responds that he was quoted yesterday as saying “To hell with the Constitution,” and what he actually meant to say was “To hell with the Constitution.” And that when the other governors had gone into political oblivion, he would be representing SC in the US Senate (spoiler alert: sigh). “So I am hissed, am I? Hisses are the applause of geese.”

The Scandinavian Anti-Vivisection Society is protesting the awarding of the Nobel Prize in medicine to Dr. Alexis Carrel because of his vivisection practices. Carrel developed vascular suturing techniques which were later used in transplant operations. He also believed in miraculous healing at Lourdes and eugenics, and his death in 1944 probably saved him from a trial for collaboration.

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Today -100: December 6, 1912: To hell with the Constitution

At the governors’ conference, South Carolina Gov. Coleman Blease brags that SC is the only state in which divorce is not legal (indeed, SC does not recognize divorces granted by other states, or allow the “illegitimate” children of subsequent marriages to inherit).

Blease says that if negroes could vote in South Carolina, 75-90% of them would definitely vote for him, even though he’s against educating them and for lynching them. But “we cannot apply the same rules to this inferior race that we do to the superior race.” He goes on to defend lynching black people in “defense of the virtue” of white women. Gov. Carey of Wyoming interrupts to ask Blease if he hadn’t taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of SC and if those didn’t also apply to negroes. Blease replies, naturally, “To hell with the Constitution!” Many women leave the hall on hearing that naughty word (hell, not Constitution). Other governors defend the rule of law, including the governor of North Carolina, who says there hasn’t been a lynching in his state in six whole years.

The conference also discussed whether Woodrow Wilson can run for a second term in 1916, since the Democratic Party platform on which he was elected says he can’t. Some say yes, some that the platform only called for a Constitutional amendment to that effect.

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