Imbeciles by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

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Holmes put his Boston life behind him and moved to Washington. On December 8 he reported for work at the Supreme Court’s dingy offices in the United States Capitol. He heard oral arguments in his first case and, since the justices did not have chambers in the court’s crowded offices, brought his work home with him to the hotel room in which he and Fanny were staying.

Life as a Supreme Court justice proved much to Holmes’s liking. He was a more important man in Washington than he had ever been in Boston, despite all of his intellectual accomplishments and family connections. Holmes and Fanny were soon fielding invitations from some of the city’s most prominent officials. They were regularly invited to dine at the White House, and occasionally to accompany the president and first lady to the theater.

The docket of the Supreme Court was more interesting to Holmes than the “trifling and transitory” matters he had bristled at on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. It was not long before Holmes heard his first major civil rights case. In the 1903 case Giles v. Harris, Jackson W. Giles sued, on behalf of more than five thousand Alabama blacks, to be added to the voting rolls. He charged that blacks in Alabama were systematically being prevented from registering—something that was happening across the South.

The Alabama Constitution of 1901 had adopted a set of new voting rules designed to prevent blacks from voting. These included a “grandfather clause”—much like the one in Virginia that was an issue in Aubrey Strode’s political campaign—that allowed men who had fought in the Civil War, and descendants of people who had fought in designated wars, to register automatically. The rules were designed to make it easy for whites, but not former slaves and their descendants, to vote. Blacks were subjected to literacy tests administered by white voter registrars who did not want them to vote.

There was no doubt that the convention that produced the Constitution of 1901 intended to disenfranchise blacks. The convention delegates were all white men, although Alabama at the time had 1,001,152 whites and 827,545 blacks. The convention president also said bluntly that it was intended “to establish white supremacy in this State.” Giles argued that the voting rules violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed blacks equal protection of the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which expressly prohibited states from denying blacks the right to vote.

Holmes, writing for the majority, ruled against the disenfranchised black men from Alabama. He argued that if Giles were correct that Alabama’s whole voting system was “a fraud upon the Constitution of the United States,” the court could not become “a party to the unlawful scheme” by “adding another voter to its fraudulent lists.” It was a strange analysis, because ordering disenfranchised blacks to be put on the voting rolls would have been an important step in curing the system’s unconstitutionality.

Second, Holmes argued that whether Alabama blacks should be added to the voting rolls was the sort of political question courts should stay out of.

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