I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: supreme court justices

  • Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares


    In 1991 the great country troubadour Travis Tritt wrote and sang these immortal words about an ex-girlfriend who had apparently had a change of heart and wanted to reconnect with her former sweetheart.  Alas, as the songwriter penned, her man wasn’t buying it.  Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares, he suggested.  In 1991 a quarter was the cost of a local telephone call in those dinosaur-like objects we called pay telephones.   They are as extinct as the Tyrannosaurus Rex is today —  to everyone except my four-year-old friend Oscar who continues to experience their magic every day in his vivid imagination.

    One year later in a totally unrelated incident the government of the United States created Operation Sea Signal to get ready for a huge migration of refugees from Haiti and Cuba.   Two years later in 1994 Operation Sea Signal became Joint Task Force 160 which was responsible for taking care of more than 40,000 migrants who would be either sent back to their countries or paroled to the United States.  Camp X Ray was the name of the facility at the Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay where this operation was located.  In 1996 Operation Sea Signal was over, and our military left Camp X Ray.

    In December of 2001 Joint Task Force 160 was re-activated and Camp X Ray became a temporary home for people who were captured and deemed potential terrorists involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks on our soil or suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives with ties to our relatively new war in Afghanistan.  If you’re still reading and trying to keep a timeline, the first detainees were sent to Camp X Ray in January, 2002.  Surprise!  The very next month Joint Task Force 170 was brought into existence as a new intelligence gathering group of our folks to wheedle secret information out of our population of detainees who had been moved from the old Camp X Ray to the new 410-bed Camp Delta in April.  By November of 2002, everybody decided it was silly to have two joint task forces when one was enough.  So….160 and 170 became Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

    Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares, I might say at this point eleven years later.  I was fifty-six years old when I first heard of the prison at Guantanamo Bay and like most liberal Americans, I dismissed it at the time as something President Bush and Vice-President Cheney had dreamed up to play a part in the Global War on Terror and I confess I’ve tried not to think about its continued existence or the people who’ve lived there all these years. Snippets of news from Guantanamo nagged at me periodically over the years, but I was forced to give it more thought  when presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigned about closing Guantanamo Bay during his 2008 run.  Hooray! I thought.  At last, I can get this little persistent sense of liberal guilt behind me.  President Obama did win that first term and was re-elected in 2012.  But today is just past the middle of the year in 2013, and I know that the prison in Guantanamo houses more horrific acts than ever before.

    To his credit President Obama has issued executive orders to close our base there.  To their shame, the Senate has refused to fund closure.  In the 2010 Omnibus Defense bill we have renamed our detainees alien unprivileged enemy belligerents.  Wow.  Look that up in your Funk & Wagnall.  The political football that is Guantanamo has been kicked around our judicial system for years, too,  with the most recent ruling coming this week from U. S. District Judge Gladys Kessler who said she didn’t have the jurisdiction to respond to the petition of Syrian detainee Jihad Dhiab to stop his forced feeding at the prison.  She tossed it back to President Obama and basically said Shame on all of us if we allow this nightmare to go on.

    I remember the movie Iron-Jawed Angels from 2004 about the determined suffragettes in America and England who used hunger strikes to draw attention to their cause.  They, too, were force-fed at the hands of guards who had little tolerance for their beliefs.  The images were painful to watch on the screen then, as the videos and pictures of the force-feeding at Guantanamo are now.  The prison population at Guantanamo is now 166 and more than a hundred are on a hunger strike to protest the length of their imprisonment without trials. Unbelievable as it seems, 86 of our current alien unprivileged enemy belligerents have been approved for release to other countries, but political interests waylay the process.

    One of my personal heroes is a fellow Texan Molly Ivins, an author and columnist who died in 2007.  She was famous for her essays regarding personal liberty and our values as a nation.  She was also famous for her dislike of the Iraq war.  In her last column, she had this to say:  “We are the people who run this country.  We are the deciders.  And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell.”

    Well Molly, this is my own particular hell-raising day.  Mr. President, get us out of this sorry mess we call Guantanamo Bay.  Senators, act like you got a little bit of sense on this issue and close it down.  Supremes, it’s on your watch, too.  In the end, it’s not about liberal vs. conservative values – it’s about human dignity, respect for each other and fair treatment.

    And Travis Tritt, you can keep your quarter.  You’ve found someone who cares.

  • First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage? Ask The Supremes


    The dust has settled after the media frenzy surrounding the Supreme Court hearings on two cases affecting the future of same-sex marriage in the United States. Whew! The gays and gay-friendlies partied. Jon Stewart skewered DOMA and its supporters on Comedy Central. The Republicans tried desperately to find someone – ANYONE – in their party to explain their position on marriage on CNN in a way that the general citizenry wouldn’t characterize as narrow-minded at best or bigoted at worst. That search is ongoing and a generous reward is offered to the finder.

    The hearings are over and the rulings expected in June. Eight Associate Justices and the Chief Justice hold the key to opening doors of equality that have been slammed shut since the founding fathers held these truths to be Self-evident in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. “…That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    I am amazed to realize I have seen all of these Supremes don the robes of the Court at the end of the required appointment process. Clarence Thomas is the only Southerner. He was born in Georgia and is a Yale law school graduate. He is 64 years old and the only appointee of President George H.W. Bush. His appointment process was ugly, nationally televised and his robes permanently tainted. He is the only Supreme who is African-American.

    Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotamayor and Elena Kagan were all born in New York. Justice Ginsburg is the oldest member of the Court at the ripe age of 80. She is a Columbia law school graduate but studied at Harvard for a time. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton. Chief Justice Roberts was appointed by President George W. Bush and is a Harvard graduate. He is 58 years old. Justice Sotomayor is also 58 years old and is a Yale graduate who was appointed by President Barak Obama. She is the sole Hispanic Supreme. Justice Kagan is another Obama appointee and is 53 years old which makes her the youngest member of the Court. At the time of her appointment she was Dean of the Harvard Law School.

    Three other Associate Justices were Harvard law school graduates: Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer. Both Justices Kennedy and Breyer were born in California and are in the same age brackets. Kennedy is 76 and Breyer is 74, but they had different presidential appointments. President Ronald Reagan appointed Kennedy and President Bill Clinton appointed Breyer. President Reagan also appointed Justice Scalia who was born in New Jersey and is now 77 years old. He is the father of nine children which puts him in a category all by himself on the bench and how he ever had time to be a Supreme is beyond me.

    The final Associate Justice Samuel Anthony Alito, Jr. shares Scalia’s home state of New Jersey and is the third Yale graduate on the Court. He is 63 years old and was appointed by President George W. Bush.

    In summation, Your Honors, I find that the fate of same-sex marriage in the United States in 2013 rests with folks who graduated either from Yale or Harvard law schools and were born in the New York/ New Jersey area on the East Coast or California on the West Coast with one stray Southerner thrown in for good measure. Well, maybe not good measure, but certainly thrown in.

    The question before us today is whether this hodgepodge of political appointees will take its place in history as the Court that restores the unalienable rights of a minority of its LGBT citizens who have been made to feel “lesser than” and treated with discrimination that often threatens their Lives and their Liberty and always endangers their pursuit of Happiness.

    I respectfully ask the Court to stand and deliver on the promises that have been the hopes and dreams of all Americans for more than two hundred years.

    I rest my case.