The following is from unionleader.com: The Founders wrote the Constitution to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Barack Obama envisions a very different Constitution.
In a recently unearthed 2001 interview with Chicago Public Radio, Obama discussed the Supreme Court's decisions during the Civil Rights era and lamented that the court only granted black Americans the same rights as white Americans. It was a tragedy, he said, that it did not grant the government the power to reorder society more fundamentally.
"But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth," he complained. "And sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, I think, as radical as people try 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, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it 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 one of the, I think, the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was, because the Civil Rights movement became so court focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And, ah, in some ways we still suffer from that."
This is an excerpt, read the rest here.
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