Scrapbook
Scrapbook Impeach the Historians! C-SPAN recently surveyed 58 American historians and asked them to rank the 41 presidents in each of 10 categories of "presidential leadership." As has been widely...
...If you remove Lewinsky from the calculations, and consider the historians' rankings on only the remaining eight categories of performance, Clinton did remarkably well...
...and at Portland State, election committee members' cars were vandalized...
...Within hours of the Rice decision, public officials in Honolulu were "reassuring" reporters that only the state's voting scheme had been struck down...
...And should be enough to remind us that it really does matter who nominates judges to the bench...
...It's no surprise, then, that HUD's report, "In the Crossfire: The Impact of Gun Violence on Public Housing Communities," reads like an outline for a future trial brief...
...Which is a disgrace and an embarrassment...
...But there's a problem at the very root of the HUD argument...
...So the corrupter of our collegians' civic virtue is not, say, Clinton, but those pesky House Republicans who came up with the tactic of impeachment...
...In December, President Clinton expressed his interest in having HUD sue gun makers to force them to make safer products...
...Better than James Madison, James Monroe, and both the Adamses—and almost as good as Ronald Reagan and Andrew Jackson...
...Nixon's dirty-tricks squad would fit in nicely at many college campuses," the article says...
...Writing for a 7-2 majority in Rice v. Cayetano, Justice Anthony Kennedy summarily rejected the notion— advanced by Hawaii and endorsed by the Clinton Justice Department—that "exceptions" to the Fifteenth Amendment might allow such a racist scheme...
...Two things are notable about the Rice decision, both of which suggest that the issues it raises will remain with us like a pox for years to come...
...Almost, that is...
...Most Americans already think Monica Lewinsky is irrelevant to a judgment on Clinton's presidency, after all...
...Aloha Racism For many years now, the state of Hawaii has authorized its "Office of Hawaiian Affairs" (OHA) to disburse substantial sums of money—derived in part from general tax revenue—exclu-sively for the benefit of people who trace their ancestry to the pre-1778 inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands...
...Its mandate is "explicit and comprehensive" and Hawaii's violation of that mandate has been "neither subtle nor indirect...
...In other words, Hawaii's race-specific spending programs—none of which was challenged in Rice, and all of which violate the Fourteenth Amendment—will continue unabated...
...And now Hawaii's gonna have to knock it off...
...Besides low voter turnout offering an incentive to cheat, Newsweek reports that, "Adult politicians get a share of the blame, too, for introducing students to tactics like attack ads and impeachment...
...Crime rates are higher in the inner cities where most public-housing projects are located...
...Here's what the president must have discovered about himself...
...And guess what...
...It's been the only undisguis-edly racial voting qualification any state has dared have on its books since the Fifteenth Amendment was enacted in 1870...
...Since then, the administration has used the threat of a federal lawsuit to bully gun manufacturers into settling the 30 suits brought against them by municipalities across the country...
...Inside the report we find that "the rate of violence victimization for persons receiving housing assistance is not significantly different from those persons residing in rental housing with similar income backgrounds...
...As has been even more widely reported, Clinton ranked dead last in the "moral authority" category (Monica Lewinsky, you see) and 36th in "relations with Congress" (the Lewinsky-inspired impeachment...
...As has been widely reported, Bill Clinton, overall, finished right in the middle of the pack at number 21...
...Like a trial lawyer angling for astronomical punitive damages, HUD explains that "the damage imposed by gun violence goes beyond the lives lost and injuries inflicted...
...Giving Dirty Politics the Old College Try According to a Newsweek story, campaigns for student office in our nation's colleges and universities have gotten divisive, corrupt, and occasionally violent...
...Hawaii has defined that qualifying ancestry by reference to its citizens' racial "blood quantum...
...Last Wednesday the Supreme Court invalidated the state's Hawaiians-only voting restriction...
...Give us a break...
...GUNS AND HUD The Department of Housing and Urban Development has reported that residents of public housing are more than twice as likely to be affected by gun violence as the population nationwide...
...End of story...
...Stressing the department's "unique responsibility to ensure that residents of areas assisted by Federal housing funds live in decent and safe neighborhoods," the report concludes "that public housing residents are suffering greatly from the effects of firearm-related crimes and in numbers out of proportion to their overall representation in society as a whole...
...Bottom line: Where race is concerned, we live in a country where you've got to sue, over and over and over again, to get the government to obey the Constitution...
...A better measure would compare crime rates in public housing with private housing in similarly poor neighborhoods...
...There are no exceptions to the Fifteenth Amendment, Kennedy made plain...
...Our president is famously concerned with his place in history, of course, so The Scrapbook is sure it knows what Clinton did with these numbers the minute they were publicized on February 21: He tried to figure out how he would have done if Monica Lewinsky had been irrelevant to a judgment on his term in office...
...a fake e-mail accusing some candidates of being racist and homophobic circulated at UCLA...
...And Hawaii has prohibited anyone without the requisite blood quantum from voting in statewide elections for the OHA board of trustees...
...You might think this is an indictment of public housing, but, no, it's part of HUD's branching out into gun control...
...Where "pursued equal justice for all" is concerned, for example, Clinton ranked fifth—ahead of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote "all men are created equal," and James Madison, who wrote the Bill of Rights...
...The president we elect this year may nominate as many as three Supreme Court justices—and thus fashion a new majority...
...Also, alas, we should remain conscious of the fact that even the right president, nominating the right judges, is no guarantee that our highest laws will be obeyed...
...First of all, Rice makes clear that there are two sitting justices of the United States Supreme Court—the dissenters here, John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—who think it is sometimes okay for a state to restrict its ballots to people who can certify that they carry the chromosomes of a preferred race...
...Next January we'll get a brand-new president, our 42nd...
...And who is to blame...
...The historians are kinda behind the curve...
...Now then: Where do we go to vote for a set of new historians...
...Ballot-stuffing took place at Duke University...
...HUD did just such an analysis, although it wasn't touted by the media or in HUD's press release...
...No surprise really: Rather than seriously talk about the link between violence and poverty, the Clinton administration has created a stalking-horse to destroy a disfavored industry through litigation...
...And if you add that remarkably boneheaded assessment to the historians' similarly boneheaded overpraise of Clinton in most of the other seven remaining categories, you get this: Bill Clinton is the 14th best president we've ever had...
...Often, children exposed to gun violence present symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder similar to those observed in children exposed to war and major disasters...
Vol. 5 • March 2000 • No. 24
