Subversives In South Carolina Mostly Safe

sabt-pestnu sends in an update on our story about South Carolina and subversives. "According to Eugene Volokh, the Raw Story article has got it backwards. Westlaw says that the cited statute dates back to 1951, when a lot of anti-Communist statutes were being enacted nationwide. What brought Raw Story's attention to it may be that South Carolina is once again trying to repeal the archaic law. And in any event, a half-century-old case (Yates vs. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957)) took most of the teeth out of such laws."

Comments

Re:problem is not that they were communists or not

[Nefarious Wheel]

Circletimesquare, your eye has a funny cast about it. Is that your cat?

agreed!

[circletimessquare]

end the racketeering

http://prof77.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/health-insurance-is-now-racketeering-protection-money-extortion/

Birther? Not likely

[billstewart]

I'd assumed he was talking about the Bush/Cheney/Rove Administration, the most shameful Presidency we've had since Jefferson Davis's administration. They've been far more opposed to and dismissive of the Constitution than anything done by either Roosevelt, or Woodrow Wilson (who was seriously bad news) or probably even Lincoln.

And Warren Harding doesn't even fit on that scale; he was just the traditional corrupt politician trading favors for money and other favors, and supposedly losing the White House china set in a poker game.

Re:Birther? Not likely

[elrous0]

The Andrew Johnson and, arguably, Ulysses Grant administrations were worse. But in those cases their incompetent was mostly unintentional. The Cheney Administration (let's not kid ourselves about who was really calling the shots) had a much more insidious agenda (though they were certainly incompetent in many respects as well). Chency had dreamed since the Ford administration of re-centralizing much of the Presidential power lost in the wake of Watergate, and he largely succeeded during his administration in resorting that power and gutting laws like of FISA that had decentralized that power. The fact that he also helped out his oil buddies was almost benign compared to some of the stuff he pulled off.