The Insular Cases [TEASER]

If you're looking for a vacation paradise, go south to Puerto Rico, hub of the Blue Caribbean.

Hey, everyone, this is Leon from Fiasco and Prologue Projects.

On today's episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are discussing the Insular Cases, a series of rulings from the early 20th century that set the course for the United States' relationship with its so-called territories, like Puerto Rico and Guam.

Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States as a result of the Spanish-American War.

The constitutional rights of citizens of these territories have been in dispute since the United States took control of them.

There have been patchwork attempts to afford people who live in these places some rights.

In 1917, Congress declared all Puerto Ricans to be United States citizens.

But people in Puerto Rico, Guam, and elsewhere still can't vote in federal elections, and the Supreme Court's insular cases and the policies that they've influenced sit at the root of this inequality.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have trained our Constitution to fight against civil rights like an mRNA vaccine trains our bodies to fight against infectious disease.

I am Peter.

I'm here with Michael.

Hey, everybody.

Henry Annan.

Hi, hi.

Got the vaccine.

Guys, dose one in the bag.

We're all vaxed, right?

We're all vaxed.

By the time this episode drops, I'll be fully vaxed.

I'm only a few days away.

Nice.

I've only got the first dose.

It was about a day and a half ago, feeling pretty foggy and

fatigued.

My arm hurts.

I'm hopped off that derna, as the kids are saying.

Yoinked off the dern.

But I figured, why not take this incredible fog that has consumed my brain for two straight days and talk about an area of the law that I had absolutely no prior knowledge of.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Right.

I think that's where we want to go.

Today we are talking about the insular cases.

We are reaching way back in time here,

farther back than any case we have covered so far to 1901.

And yet not quite that far back at all,

as we will eventually.

Yeah, good point.

And like the title suggests, we're not really covering one case, but a series of cases that came in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

At the time, all the big countries were having fun going to war with one another over like various little territories that meant nothing to them other than serving as like a nominal indicator of their respective spheres of power and influence.

And America, in particular, had spent the century following its founding, expanding westward, eventually hitting the ocean, and just sort of kind of eyeballing

areas to do a little subjugation to.

That's right.

Yeah.

So you get the Spanish-American War in 1898, which famously starts after there's an explosion aboard the USS Maine and the United States government intentionally fabricates a claim that the Spanish did it.

Thankfully, that was the last time the United States would ever fabricate an attack or otherwise purposefully lie to foment domestic support for a war of colonial aggression.

Could you imagine if we just kept doing that repeatedly over the course of the next century?

Yeah, I mean, unheard of, not acceptable, totally inappropriate.

That's so depressing.

So the U.S.

wins the war, you know, USA number one, and the Treaty of Paris is signed.

And the treaty divvies up the spoils of war, which, of course, are mostly territories full of actual human beings.

When I say territories, That's what the law calls them.

That's what everyone calls them.

But I think we should probably just be saying colonies, right?

Yeah.

Yep.

That is the accurate description.

Spain cedes control of Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines to the United States.

And now there is a lingering question with respect to those colonies.

And that question is,

what is going on with those colonies?

What kind of rights do they have?

What exactly are they?

And so forth.

It's like a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up engine here.

What is the deal?

I told you, I am absolutely stranking off the dern, I got it.

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