I know, Jesse Jackson playing the race card is about as shocking as Michael Moore asking for fourths.

Stand up to bigotry of ‘states’ rights’ — Jesse Jackson

In 1980, after receiving the nomination of his party, Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., at the Neshoba County Fair. Neshoba County is not someplace you just drop into; you have to want to go there. It’s a small town remembered largely for being the site of the horrid 1964 murders of three young civil rights volunteers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. Reagan went to Mississippi to give a speech that focused on states’ rights and the dangers of big government. He went to send a message — and it was heard clearly across the South.

States are rightly hailed as laboratories of democracy, places that can experiment and try out programs and ideas that, if successful, spread across the country. But from the earliest days of the Republic, states’ rights has always been the doctrine of reaction. It has been invoked to stop national reform and to protect local privilege.

States’ rights was invoked by slave owners to protest abolition, even to the point of seceding from the union. States’ rights was then used to defend segregation from national reform. Later, it was trotted out to oppose integration of schools, as demanded by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. To this day, it is used to justify state restrictions on voting, often imposed to constrict the right of the minorities and the poor to vote.  […]

And now we’re seeing the same doctrine — states’ rights — used to undermine health care reform. Empowered by the same Supreme Court decision that upheld the Affordable Care Act as constitutional, Republican governors across the country have refused to participate in creating their own health care exchanges. They’ve even turned their backs on billions of federal dollars in Medicaid funding to keep lower income Americans from having access to affordable care. Their resistance has made an already complicated reform plan even more difficult, even as they call for its repeal.