Bernie Sanders Quotes
If you don't believe this election is important, if you think you can sit it out, take a moment to think about the Supreme Court justices that Donald Trump would nominate and what that would mean to civil liberties, equal rights, and the future of our country.
Sanders, Bernie. "Address to the Democratic National Convention." Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia. 25 July 2016. Address.
After Lincoln was elected, Southerners were threatening secession fearing that his government might try and do what they had promised to do in the campaign—and that meant restricting slavery in the new territories of the nation. The Southern logic was that because the slaves were counted in the census for purposes of apportioning congressmen, the smaller slave states have had an artificial overrepresentation so that the Southern States could block most efforts to limit, regulate, or abolish slavery. However, if all the new territories entered the Union as non slave states, the slave states would lose their parity in Congress. Further, it would be easier to get the states to approve Constitutional Amendments to abolish slavery in the slave states. They saw the slavery issue in the new territories to be the beginning of the end for slavery in the U. S. So they wanted to intimidate the new government into not implementing their campaign promises.
Plessy v. Ferguson was one of the worst Supreme Court Decisions in American history. It held that states could provide and/or mandate racially segregated facilities and institutions so long as they were equal.
The case was Shelley v. Kraemer where the Supreme Court outlawed discriminatory restrictive covenants A restrictive covenant was a condition that was written into the deed on a piece of property. Even if the owner of the home did not want to discriminate, the previous owners who wrote the restrictive covenant into the deed (or his relatives and heirs) could sue and invalidate the sale. In many cases, insurance would not sell title insurance or banks would not give mortgages for a Black or a Jew where there was a covenant in the deed, even if the covenant was more than 100 years old. Homeowner associations would also enforce the covenants which were originally written into all the deeds of the development. Once the supreme court ruled that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, no court would enforce any of these lawsuits. It was one of the fastest steps forward in the history of Civil Rights since the day after the court decision racists could no longer enforce the covenants that were in tens of millions of deeds in America.
Bernard Sanders is an American politician who has served as the junior United States senator from Vermont since 2007 and as U.S. Representative for the state's at-large congressional district from 1991 to 2007. He is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history, although he has a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucused with House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career. Sanders unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and 2020, finishing in second place in both campaigns. Before his election to Congress, he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
