THE PUBLIC EYE: The New Civil War: The 50-year Conservative Plan
The June 24th Supreme Court ruling nullifying Roe v Wade should not be viewed as an isolated event in America's cultural wars but instead as the result of a fifty-year conservative strategy to supplant US democracy with plutocracy. Although culture wars are an important aspect of this strategy, conservative SCOTUS cultural rulings are not the final objective but merely a stepping-stone to the ultimate goal: weakening the Federal system to the point where the US becomes, in effect, a confederacy. Conservatives are refighting the 1861 Civil War. And they're winning.
Although the American Civil War is usually regarded as a war fought over slavery, from the perspective of constitutional law it was a war fought about states' rights. In this instance, the rights of states to permit slavery (and the expansion of slavery into new states). The debate about states' rights dates from the beginning of our country. At the 1787 constitutional convention, concern about the power of the central government versus the power of individual states led to series of compromises: notably the baroque electoral college system used to elect our President, the creation of the Senate where each state has two votes, and the "three-fifths" formula where each slave got three-fifths of a vote.
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