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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

I believe the civil rights leaders themselves were mostly genuine. I think they were used as useful idiots on a couple instances to support the two most destructive policies of the US.

(1) Secession. This was used for evil in the form of slavery. But it is the most powerful check of federal power by the states we had. The fact it could be used for evil did not mean it is better to get rid of it.

(2) Expansion of the interstate commerce clause to mean basically anything. A main argument for why this can't be reversed is that it would destroy the civil rights acts, which acts upon even intrastate business. Rather what should have happened is 15th amendment should have been written to apply to private entities as well, instead of blasting away the interstate commerce clause.

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Im certainly sympathetic to #2 being one of the greatest unconstitutional practices of the modern US government, but is its genesis really the civil rights movement? There were many settled cases about interstate commerce before the Civil rights act, like Gibbons v. Ogden.

https://www.britannica.com/money/commerce-clause/Interpretat...

You're absolutely right -- it's not really the genesis per se on #2, just one of the modern weapons used. Civil rights act is one of the main weapons used today to explain why we can't wind back interstate commerce clause, creating a sort of legal suicide pact where the interstate commerce clause interpretation is held hostage if you want to keep your civil rights. That is, the CRA was arguably one of the most important things for double sealing the deal on progressive era expansion of the ICC.

Many times here on HN I have debated people who were well versed on constitutional law, and when I mention rolling back the interstate commerce clause one of their main go to is that they're afraid I will destroyed the CRA and that's why they can't do it. And they're right -- a nearly identical on many points CRA happened in 1875 as the one passed in 1964. The 14th and 15th amendment existed at both times, and the relevant points of the constitution stayed the same. Yet the latter was found constitution and the former was not, in large part due to the change in the meaning of the interstate commerce clause.

> when I mention rolling back the interstate commerce clause one of their main go to is that they're afraid I will destroyed the CRA and that's why they can't do it

I'll be honest, I've literally never seen this argument in any hall of power. And I know quite a few folks who believe in overturning Wickard.

The CRA, as currently interpreted, is more than fine on equal-protection grounds.

Overturning of CRA of 1875 ruled equal protection under 14th amendment doesn't bind private actors, that's why the CRA of 1964/68 depending on expanded ICC. The equal protection amendments (basically the 14th) of relevance haven't changed since the overturning of the 1875 CRA.

  The Reconstruction era ended with the resolution of the 1876 presidential election, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the last federal civil rights law enacted until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled in the Civil Rights Cases that the public accommodation sections of the act were unconstitutional, saying Congress was not afforded control over private persons or corporations under the Equal Protection Clause. Parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 were later re-adopted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, both of which cited the Commerce Clause as the source of Congress's power to regulate private actors.[]

of particular note: were later re-adopted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, both of which cited the * Commerce Clause as the source of Congress's power to regulate private actors.

* my note: now expanded

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1875

(2) is not a problem if you enact equivalent civil rights acts in every state. There would be plenty of political support for doing this today, including in the Sunbelt - which there wasn't in the 1950s.

I think “equivalent” would be the challenge here. When people need to know at all the nuances of what bathroom and restaurants they’re allowed to use, and what train cars when business or pleasure takes them across state lines it becomes a pretty large tax both for the individual and for interstate commerce at large

The bathroom issue is especially silly. Just mandate that public restrooms have to also include gender-neutral single-occupant bathrooms, that anyone can use as they desire.

Yes, but then achieving that mandate across the country becomes O(N) of states, all within the low bandwidth legislation process of state houses. Much simpler to just do it at the federal level, and still legitimately justifiable wrt interstate commerce imo

With that framing, aren’t those two outcomes detrimental side effects of achieving the objective, rather than the objective itself per your original comment?

The commenter you're responding to has an enlightening perspective on many things, but can't resist the temptation of framing their arguments in a needlessly inflammatory manner that bites off just a little more than is actually defensible. I chalk it up to age.

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