Читать книгу Justice Rehnquist, the Supreme Court, and the Bill of Rights - Steven T. Seitz - Страница 18

Consequent to the conflict between Federalists and anti-Federalists, the new Constitution and Bill of Rights created three competing sovereignties: the central government, the state governments, and protected spheres of activity qua individual people. Any combination of two of these would be a winning coalition. The coalitions were spheres of influence: the nation, the state, and the individual. It is the individual-rights sovereignty that typically shifted sides or shared fractured coalitions. This is what we see over the course of nearing three centuries.

Individual-rights sovereignty sided with state-sovereignty until the three decades leading to the Civil War. The Abolitionist Era was a bitter period of unrest; the shift of coalitions began with the state governments unwilling to champion individual rights in the South, leaving the Northern states to make coalition with individual-rights activists. Once the Abolitionists took charge of the central government during and after the Civil War, the central government became the champion of individual-rights sovereignty and made the 14th Amendment possible. By 1887 the coalition dissolved into a lengthy period of quasi laissez faire and social Darwinism; property became the most important national focus, driving individual-rights sovereignty to minimize the life and liberty portion of the American individualist creed.

The Great Depression ended the era of quasi laissez faire; soon, social Darwinism met its fate as well. Individual-rights sovereignty drifted back toward active coalition with the central government as the latter transformed into an administrative state. Southern and some non-South states, however, continued a stronghold for Jim Crow laws. The growing civil rights movement after World War II and the mood at the Nuremberg trials strengthened the governing coalition between individual-rights sovereignty and the central government against increasingly recalcitrant and hostile states. The liberal democratic order dominated the international scene for three-quarters of a century and would guide the relation between state and nation. The policy revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s added civil rights to the economic rights secured in the Great Depression Era. The backlash to increased civil rights brings renewed calls for states’ rights. An uneasy partnership between some state governments and the central government left the search for individual rights to furtive combination with individual states or separate administrations in the central government. The resulting pattern looks much like the fractured coalitions before and after the Civil War Era.