February 26, 2014
Leonard Pitts, Jr.
The Miami Herald
3511 NW 91st Avenue
Miami, FL 33172

RE: Perhaps a teachable moment – More comments on “ignorant and intolerant” White folk in a cabal with some Judas Black ministers to suggest that “Boys in the Band” may not be the paradigmatic modern American Liberal template for public policy.

Mr. Pitts,

Good old John Calhoun!

It’s almost 200 years but it must feel good to be vindicated, and by a Black man to boot!

John C. Calhoun was a Senator, a Democratic Senator if you will, from South Carolina who posited a simple theory. If a state, any state, didn’t like a law coming from Washington they didn’t have to obey it. Each state had the right of nullification. [Calhoun and Webster mixed it up rhetorically on the floor of the Senate but we’ll save that for a more advanced class.]

Yesterday, Eric Holder, the Black Attorney General of the United States, told the assembled state Attorneys General that if they didn’t like a law well then, by cracky, they didn’t have to enforce it.

Yes, that sound is from Orwell. “All pigs are equal: some pigs are more equal than others”. Pigs? Laws? No difference.

This prompts 2 quotes.

“The Rule of Law means, in the first place, the absolute supremacy
or predominance of regular law as opposed to the influence of
arbitrary power, and excludes the existence of arbitrariness, of
prerogative, or even of wide discretionary power on the part of
government.”
The Law of the Constitution
A.V. Dicey

The other is more subjective.

“And when you cut down every law to get at the Devil
where would you hide when he turned on you, the laws
being flat? I would give the Devil the benefit of the Law
for my own safety’s sake.”
Thomas More had his head cut off for saying that.

I am almost embarrassed to say this but I thought that the Attorney General, in
addition to being “clean and articulate”, was bright. What happens if the next AG decides that eclectic enforcement of Federal law becomes the standard?

How about if he decides that after reading it the Affordable Care is not, as Curley Biden said, such a “big fucking deal”? How about if he says that the Davis-Bacon act is History? How about if he says that as a fan of NASCAR it’s time for gas mileage rules to go? How about announcing that the Georgetown salamander, the Delhi smelt, and the long beleaguered Furbish lousewort have got to make it on their own in this far too cruel world?

How about if he decides that only 6 of the first 10 amendments can be valid on any one day? Maybe we could have odd/even day enforcement. It worked for gas, didn’t it?

Calhoun was a man of deep intellect whose idea, carried to its Logical end, was nullified on the field of battle.

No wonder that old ladron Castro refuses to die. Every time he approaches flat-line status this country does something so egregiously dumb to itself that it’s like giving the old thug a Viagra enema.

The next lecture will be on how the “Ignorant and intolerant” White guys got a unanimous vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Plessy v Ferguson. The following lecture will be how the “ignorant and intolerant” White Republican Senators got all the Civil Rights acts of the ‘60s passed when the Democratic Senators sat on their wise and tolerant asses and voted against them.




Kevin Smith