xd ED wrote:Obama has been on record re negative liberties and the Constitution. Perhaps Pelosi has been as well.
Anyone who discusses the constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, in any academic or professional setting will "be on record re negative liberties". Implying that there's something nefarious going on because you're caught talking about or referring to negative liberties is absurd.
xd ED wrote:And while the terminology might well be correctly applied
It absolutely is. There's no maybe about it, and there's no negative connotation to the term "negative liberties". It's simply a philosophical/political term which distinguishes between the two types of liberties. Your HVAC guy has been on record re negative pressure. Your lab tech has been on record re negative test results. Your third grader teacher is on record re negative numbers.
xd ED wrote:what should be distressing is the disappointment noted and the context that the Constitution is a barrier to further encroachments rather than a document protecting human rights.
I don't get that from his comments. He's saying that the civil rights movement made a mistake by focusing on the courts, because the courts were not a place where all of the movement's goals could be realized, despite how radical some people think the Warren court was.
Read it yourself:
I mean, I think that, you know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order in, as long as I could pay for it, I'd be OK. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
And, to that extent, as radical as I think 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 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 movements became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing, and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And, in some ways, we still suffer from that.