Code Black...Code Black! Voting Rights Act in the Emergency Room!

Sirens blare and lights flash as an ambulance rushes to the Department of Emergency Medicine at Georgetown University Hospital.   Native Washingtonians and political hacks gawk in astonishment as paramedics frantically transport an apparently lifeless body into the bowels of the emergency room.

Inside, an ER doctor studies the vitals provided by paramedics and urgently requests a medical history. The head nurse first confirms that Mr. American Body Politic has been a frequent patient in the hospital.  She then quickly prints out the following medical history:

• Born in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, in a difficult birth. He was born to highly educated European parents of substantial means and high aspirations. However, Mr. Politic was born HIV (hypocritical, inglorious, violent) positive, and his tiny body was also wracked with the dread disease of the day, "racial entitlement." The latter disease likely hereditary as it appears to have run in his family.
• Symptoms developed early as a "peculiar institution" was enshrined in it's founding birth certificate....Africans perpetually enslaved as chattel and counted as only three-fifths of a person. 
• "Racial entitlement" spread quickly throughout the body exhibiting symptoms such as exploitation of the indigenous Native Americans and the territory expanding Mexican-American War.
• Medical notes indicate that Mr. Politic had a close brush with death in the latter part of the 19th century when he engaged in a bloody civil war fought primarily over the fate of enslaved Africans. Politic was fortunate to have been attended to by the foremost physician of the day, Dr. Abraham Lincoln, who properly determined that the patient could not survive "half slave and half free." 
• In order to arrest the disease of "racial entitlement," Dr. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. As follow-on treatment, he and his assistant, Dr. Ulysses S. Grant, prescribed as a remedy: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, to the Constitution. A prescription designed to abolish slavery, make citizens of all persons born and naturalized in the United States, and to ensure the right to vote to all citizens irrespective of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
• In spite of those wise diagnostic and prescriptive remedies, Mr. Politic has suffered several medical setbacks as "racial entitlement" appears to lie dormant in his system only to reemerge with a vengeance. A few noted examples:

1. The emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council.
2. Leo Frank, a Jewish man, convicted for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old white girl in Atlanta, was sentenced to death. But, convinced by a review of the evidence that Frank was innocent, the Governor commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. As a result of public outrage over this act, a white mob kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him.
3. The irrational internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
4. The Tuskegee Experiment...an infamous clinical study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural black men who thought they were receiving free health care.
5. The Scottsboro boys... nine Black teenage boys who were falsely accused and convicted of raping two white teenage girls.
6. Plessy v. Ferguson... a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that confirmed the principle of "Separate but Equal," minority segregation, and set the stage for Jim Crow laws.
7. Jose Campos Torres, a 23-year-old Latino Vietnam Veteran, beaten to death by several Houston police officers. The officers responsible were convicted and received one year probation and a $1 fine.
8. The all-white southern primary, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests.
9. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney dead in Mississippi.
10. Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus bridge.

The medical notes even detail a rather extraordinary therapy prescribed by a brilliant young doctor. That doctor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., placed Mr. Politic into a hypnotic trance while suggesting a "dream" that all God's people would one day live in peace.  That dream was not immediately embraced by Mr. Politic and Dr. King himself died as a result of the disease he sought to cure. However, his therapy and his dream inspired later physicians to prescibe a more enduring remedy to the disease...the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  These Acts codified the principles outlined in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

We now watch in terror as Dr. Antonin Scalia stands over Politic's body and suggests that the Voting Rights Act, prescibed as a cure for "racial entitlement," is in fact the disease!!  Dr. Scalia says the Voting Rights Act is a "racial entitlement." Scalia, having earned a Doctorate of Jurisprudence, is completely ahistorical in his approach to diagnosing Politic's illness.

Scalia knows that Mr. Politic was born with the disease of "racial entitlement."  He knows that the disease has been extremely difficult to eradicate and that the patient has suffered several serious setbacks.  He knows that Politic needs a consistent regimen of antibiotic therapy to arrest the disease.  He knows that the Voting Rights Act has served as an extremely effective antibiotic therapy and the patient has experienced slow but steady progress. Most of all, Scalia knows that an antibiotic therapy cannot be discontinued until every trace of the disease has been expelled from the body!!  If "racial entitlement" exists anywhere in Mr. Body Politic, then the therapy should continue.

Dr. Scalia and his colleague, Dr. Roberts, ask whether "racial entitlement" is limited to the southern regions of the body.  If the disease is found in the northern regions of the body, then perhaps we should discontinue the therapy in the southern regions, they say. What?!!  That is an argument to EXPAND the therapy to other regions of the body. In fact, Dr's. Scalia and Roberts could learn a thing or two from Dr. Malcolm X who said, "We need to stop talking about the south...as long as you're south of the Canadian border, you're south!"

Not only should all sections of the Voting Rights Act be upheld as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Act should be expanded to include Philadelphia, Miami Dade, Cleveland, and many other regions of the country. It's ironic that those who fled virulent southern-style racism during the great Black migration should somehow lose the protections of the Voting Rights Act in their new northern abodes.

Dr. Scalia, if you insist that the Voting Rights Act represents a "racial entitlement," then you should talk to some good ole boys. They'll tell you that sometimes the only cure is to consume "the hair of the dog that bit ya." If it was "racial entitlement" that made us drunk, maybe a good strong shot of "racial entitlement" will sober us up!  Just saying...

Until we rendezvous...

Peace