After taking a nearly-month-long hiatus from blogging here about legal issues, and blogging only very lightly about other things, I posted this controversial post last Friday and participated in a lengthy comments thread. The final comment of mine, in reference to some of the preceding comments of others and of mine, reads:
A final point on this subject: Whatever the predominant ethnicity of the brutal “states’ rights” culture of much of the South, an important indication that its core is not ethnicity but instead the defense of the “right” of states to allow slavery, or to allow whatever brutality they want to allow, is that (as I said above) Appalachia itself, which has a very large Scots-Irish population, actually had (I believe) very few plantations. West Virginia, after all, was not a Confederate state, and northern Kentucky had large contingents of soldiers who joined the Union army.
I don’t think this is an ethnicity legacy. I think it’s a plantation-culture political and cultural legacy—one that is at the very essence of the Conservative Legal Movement, whether its adherents are from the South or instead from, say, New Jersey, upstate New York and Northwestern Indiana, or northern California. The attribution of the current, funhouse-bizarre states’-rights legal movement to the alleged “structure” of the Constitution is a pre-Civil War, and therefore pre-Reconstruction Amendments, construct. It should be recognized for the machination of constitutional law that it is.
So much of Conservative Movement constitutional and statutory-interpretation law is really just a kaleidoscope—false statements of fact, sleight-of-hand redefinitions of standard-English words and of earlier-defined legal standards, comedy-routine-caliber the-knee-bone-is-connected-to-the-thigh-bone-which-is-connected-to-the-hip-bone (whether or not it actually is) Dictionary games, malleable-as-needed Court-created legal doctrines, and a deeply institutionalized look-the-other-way-at-everything-but-Conservative-Movement-claims ethos.
What a cesspool.
A carefully crafted one, in fact.
Enough said. For the moment.