Fidelity to the Constitution

by Nicole Flatow

The country lost a civil rights giant, with the passing of president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, John A. Payton. He died suddenly on Thursday at Johns Hopkins University Hospital after a brief illness, The Root reports.

Payton led LDF in several major Supreme Court victories, including Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder, which rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Lewis v. City of Chicago, a major employment discrimination victory, according to a statement from LDF.

The statement adds:

Widely considered one of the country's most skilled members of the Supreme Court bar, John Payton's enduring legacy will be his commitment to a principle articulated by LDF's founder, Charles Hamilton Houston. "What I am more concerned about," Houston said, "is that the Negro shall not be content simply with demanding an equal share in the existing system. It seems to me that his historical challenge is to make sure that the system [that] shall survive in the United States of America shall be a system which guarantees justice and freedom for everyone."

LDF's work will go on, in just the way that John would have wanted.

President Obama said today in a statement:

Michelle and I were saddened to hear about the passing of our dear friend John Payton. As president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, John led the organization's involvement in five Supreme Court cases.

A true champion of equality, he helped protect civil rights in the classroom and at the ballot box. The legal community has lost a legend, and while we mourn John's passing, we will never forget his courage and fierce opposition to discrimination in all its forms.

Payton was a voice for the civil rights community, and a leading constitutional thinker. During a 2009 American Constitution Society event at the National Press Club on “The Road from Lincoln to Obama,” Payton discussed the importance of shedding our racist history as we move forward with our constitutional jurisprudence.

“I would say Reconstruction didn’t fail. It was destroyed,” he said.

He continued:

By Doug Kendall, President, Constitutional Accountability Center

Lyle Denniston recently described “the tendency of the ‘Roberts Court’ to take on the broadest kind of controversy in cases brought to it.” From Citizens United v. FEC, in which the Court expanded the case on its own motion, scheduled a second argument, and then issued a sweeping ruling discarding prior case law, to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) cases about to be argued, in which the Court decided to hear just about every claim presented to it -- including claims unanimously rejected by the lower courts -- and scheduled six hours of argument time over three days, the Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has put itself at the center of some of the most important political controversies of our day.

Decisions like the Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United illustrate that the Roberts Court is not only taking big cases and issuing sweeping rulings, it is also splitting sharply along ideological lines on important questions about the meaning of our founding document. That is the focus of The Constitution at a Crossroads: The Ideological Battle over the Meaning of the Constitution, an attempt by Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) to map and describe the ideological battlegrounds on the Roberts Court. We began to rollout the Crossroads project today with a media teleconference featuring Tom Perriello (former Member of Congress and current head of Center for American Progress Action Fund) and myself (you can listen to our remarks here).

CAC will be releasing Crossroads chapter-by-chapter over the next several months, beginning today with the release of three chapters on the powers of the federal government, which helps set the stage for the ACA argument later this month. Our plan is to release a dozen or so more chapters over the course of the spring, as the Court races toward the end of its October 2011 Term. After the Court completes its work, we will spend the summer editing, revising and compiling Crossroads into a single document for release in the early fall, timed to coincide with the celebration of the 225th Anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution and  the opening of the Court’s October 2012 Term. Because Crossroads will be released over time and then revised and edited after the Court ends its Term in June, we very much welcome comments and criticisms from ACS members as we shape the final product.

Crossroads is not the first attempt to map the ideological divisions on the Supreme Court. In 1988, in the wake of the decisive defeat of the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and in the run-up to an election that seemed destined to determine the direction of the Court for a generation to come, the Reagan Justice Department released a series of reports that highlighted “substantial differences of opinion over the judicial role in contemporary society.” The most famous of these reports, entitled The Constitution in the Year 2000, highlighted fifteen areas of constitutional law likely to be decided by the Supreme Court over the intervening years, and the “alternative roads down which the Court might travel over this time.”