ACLU Brings Suit to The Supreme Ct.To Erase(Trump)Racist Second Class Precedent For PR

 Puerto Rico* never asked to be part of the United States and never asked for Citizenship for its inhabitants. But Puerto Rico was a price of war with Spain who no longer had the Armada it once had. Spain decided to have the United States keep Puerto Rico as a price of war. For the United States, it fell right into the plan to control all the islands and nations around them.  As the US Navy grew and the States became more involved in world affairs now that British, France and the Spaniards had other problems at hand other than conquering. Conquering was left to the United States. From Mexico, Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the American Virgin Islands. There it was an Island named Borinkén with its semi-tropical weather, its own bank, an economy based on agriculture;  Also friendly natives with its Spaniard educated white population mixed with the Indians (mostly Tahinos)which were the original inhabitants and then it had slaves brought in from Spain to help to work the land.  They also had plenty of sugar, coffee and cheap labor for the still-growing nation of the US. For the Puerto Ricans in the Island whether white, brown or black now a new proposition (in the form of law) to become full US Citizens thanks to WW1. The US needed as many men as they could get. In Puerto Rico, they had men they could make fighters except they could not fight, will not fight and die for a nation that took them over. The answer was to make them citizens. As citizens, they could not refuse to fight. The island would not be incorporated but the US will give the Borinqueños a promise to have the unincorporated island as semi-independent with its own constitution and with elections offering, Commonwealth, Statehood or independence. But having the Federal laws and currency toping the El Banco de PR. So there it is how Puerto Rico was brought in to the United States and how their citizens became citizens except they could not vote in federal elections if they were on the Island. Citizenship only brought Puerto Rican blood to be spilled for a reason they did not know nor understood and widows and kids which will now be without a breadwinner. My father at 18 was one of those soldiers drafted to fight but he had *spurs on his feet and was sent home. (*spurs= He had an asthma attack for which he was hospitalized but at least he was now a veteran).
Adam Gonzalez
Adamfoxie blog Int.

Tucker Higgins@TUCKERHIGGINS CNBC

The Supreme Court has overruled racist precedents that allowed for segregated accommodations for blacks and whites and permitted the internment of Japanese-Americans during wartime.

Now, the court must overturn a precedent on the books that grants residents of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories second-class status under the Constitution, the American Civil Liberties Union told the justices in a friend-of-the-court brief submitted this week.

The precedent the ACLU is seeking to overturn was established in a series of early 20th century disputes known as the “Insular Cases.”The court held in those cases, decided between 1901 and 1922, that U.S. citizens living in so-called “unincorporated territories” were not entitled to the same constitutional protections as other Americans. The territories are home to about 4 million people, the vast majority of whom live in Puerto Rico.

That doctrine, the civil rights group said, is “no less offensive” than the one established by the 1896 “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was handed down by a unanimous court in 1954.

The ACLU’s brief is scathing. Adriel Cepeda Derieux, an attorney for the group, wrote that the cases are a “glaring anomaly in the fabric of our constitutional law” that “explicitly rest on anachronistic and deeply offensive racial-cultural assumptions.”To this day, he wrote, the doctrine “casts a pall on the rights of residents of Puerto Rico, including more than three million U.S. citizens, and close to 500,000 more in other so-called ‘unincorporated territories.’”

The brief came in connection with a case over the constitutionality of the financial oversight board established for Puerto Rico by Congress in 2016, in the midst of a financial crisis on the island. The federal appeals court in Boston held that appointments to the board were inconsistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, but the board is asking the top court to reverse the decision on the grounds that the clause does not apply.

The brief was filed on Thursday, as President Donald Trump was criticizing Puerto Rico for being in the path of a tropical storm accusing the island’s leadership of incompetence and corruption.Cepeda Derieux wrote that the ACLU takes no position on the broader merits of the case — or, tangentially, on the issue of Puerto Rican statehood — but urged the justices to use the case as a vehicle to scrap the Insular Cases once and for all.  

Cepeda Derieux wrote that the ACLU takes no position on the broader merits of the case — or, tangentially, on the issue of Puerto Rican statehood — but urged the justices to use the case as a vehicle to scrap the Insular Cases once and for all

“It is very difficult to rely on these cases on the face of them, because of how glaringly and unabashedly racist their reasoning is,” Cepeda Derieux said in an interview. “Not only do the Insular Cases say nothing about the Appointments Clause, but to look to them here is to give them exactly the sort of expansion that the court has warned against.”

Starting in the 1950s, the top court began walking back the doctrine. In the 1957 case Reid v. Covert, the justices held that its reasoning should not go beyond the specific constitutional provisions that were addressed in the cases themselves, namely matters involving taxation and certain Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights, including jury trials.

But lower courts have applied the reasoning beyond those areas. In 2016, the federal court in Puerto Rico ruled that same-sex marriage, upheld the year before by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, had not been incorporated on the island.

 The 1st Circuit later reversed the decision.

In a 1999 case, a federal court cited the Insular Cases to decide that the principle of “one person, one vote” was not a fundamental right of residents on the Northern Mariana Islands.

“Since it is clear that the ‘one man, one vote’ principle is not a right that is the ‘basis of all free government,’ it need not be applied in and to an unincorporated territory such as the Commonwealth,” District Judge Alex Munson wrote.

“Lower courts have wrestled with these cases,” Cepeda Derieux said, “and because these cases have a shorthand framework where it says that fundamental rights are the only rights that apply in the territories, that is a framework that lower courts have looked to and used in contexts where it shouldn’t apply and have used as a lens to apply the entire Constitution throughout the territories.”

The Supreme Court only rarely overturns its own precedents, generally abiding by a principle known as “stare decisis,” which puts a high bar on reversing decisions it has made in the past. Between 2010 and 2018, fewer than 10 decisions on matters of constitutional law were reversed, according to a government report.

Sometimes it takes a long time for decisions to be overruled, even if they are despised. Korematsu v. the United States, the 1944 decision that upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, was only overturned last year, in Trump v. Hawaii, the decision that allowed for Trump’s travel ban to take effect.

“Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion.

The Puerto Rico dispute is set to be argued in October, and a decision is expected by June 2020.

* This is a condensed Puerto Rican history and does not mean to present the skeleton without the meat of a lot of details such as dates in the total history. I tried to present those facts with honesty in the order in which they occurred. The facts come from history taught to me in the Seminary (it was in Spanish) and facts I learn on my own studying with material available for the island. Borinquén was the name of Puerto Rico until the Spanish decided to change the name to what they saw it was, a Rich port which is what the name means. Borinquén came to celebrate the founders of Puerto Rico, which were Indians, not Columbus and not Viva paper Towels are given to Puerto Ricans in their time of need by a psychopath who knows nothing of all the thousands of lives this race has lost to all the wars the mainland is gotten involved with. But then a Psychopath might not be interested in history and not know.
Adam Gonzalez, Publisher