May 10, 2010
Hon. Joseph N. DiVincenzo, Jr.
Essex County Executive
Hall of Records, Room 405
465 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
Newark, NJ, 07102
Re: Hon. William J. Brennan, Jr.
Dear Mr. DiVincenzo:
CWA Local 1081 congratulates your administration for facilitating the June 3, 2010 dedication of the “Essex County Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. Memorial Statute”. As your flier announcing the dedication so sagely states, “A native of Essex County and graduate of Barringer High School, Justice Brennan was a highly respected and influential member of the U.S. Supreme Court and his decisions in support of individuals’ rights shaped the laws we follow today”.
Justice Brennan often took positions favoring criminal defendants, minorities, the poor, and other underrepresented groups. At his retirement, Justice Brennan said the case he thought was most important was Goldberg v. Kelly, which ruled that a local, state or federal government could not terminate welfare payments to a person without a prior individual evidentiary hearing. Governor Christie proposes the elimination of General Assistance for some 35,000 of New Jersey’s most needy single adults which would adversely affect 11,000 Essex County residents.
Justice Brennan's conservative detractors charged that he was a purveyor of judicial activism, the same charge now leveled by Governor Christie against New Jersey Supreme Court Associate Justice John Wallace Jr. in attempting to justify the former’s decision not to re-nominate the latter. Justine Brennan is quoted as asserting, “If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage”.
Justice Brennan was a strong believer that affirmative action was a way to remedy past discrimination, and he wrote numerous opinions on the subject. Governor Christie has proposed legislation that would allow local governments to opt out of Civil Service and thereby avoid its protections against the arbitrary hiring and firing of public employees, thus denying veterans their present hiring preference while permitting the proliferation of political patronage at the particular disadvantage of women and minorities. While dissenting in McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987), Justice Brennan opined, “The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law”.
Justice Brennan was also an ardent defender of the rights of children, declaring that we must teach young people "that our Constitution is a living reality, not parchment preserved under glass." He was appalled by cases in which the Court seemed to hold that the Bill of Rights does not apply to schoolchildren, and wrote in one dissent that the majority's decision had given school officials the license to act as "thought police" and taught the students "to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes" (Hazelwood School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260, 285, 290, 108 S. Ct. 562, 577, 580, 98 L. Ed. 2d 592 [1988]). Governor Christie has referred to New Jersey’s school children as “drug mules”.
The keynote speaker at your June 3rd event is Harvard University Law Professor Lawrence H. Tribe. In addition to his record as a scholar, Professor Tribe is noted for his extensive support of liberal legal causes. He has argued many high-profile cases, including one for Al Gore during the disputed U.S. presidential election in 2000. In his piece “A Tribute to Justice Brennan” in the Harvard Law Bulletin, Professor Tribe states, “William J. Brennan, Jr. was one of the greatest justices of all time. But to say that is to put the matter much too abstractly. Consider what our constitutional world looked like before Justice Brennan began to reshape it: the Bill of Rights protected people mostly from federal abuses and provided only the most watered-down protection from state and local oppression.”
Respectfully, CWA Local
1081 is completely confident that neither Justice Brennan nor Professor Tribe
would avow that Governor
Christie is “doing a great job” and that “they agree with him on 95% of what
he’s doing”.
Sincerely
David H. Weiner, President
CWA Local 1081