Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 2: Beware of rogue Supreme Courts who don’t care about the rights of voters

“The Supreme Court has all but guaranteed that Donald Trump will not face trial for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election before this November’s presidential election,” writes Mark Joseph Stern on the Supreme Court’s decision to accede to a delaying tactic employed by Donald Trump in his trial on those charges.

On this timeline, the justices will probably issue a decision near the end of June. That punt gives Trump exactly what he wanted: an extended pause that will make it impossible for Judge Tanya Chutkan to hold a trial in time for the upcoming election.

If Trump wins that election, of course, he will ensure that his Justice Department halts the prosecution and dissolves the charges against him. Which means that SCOTUS has awarded him a powerful incentive to beat Joe Biden by any means necessary, and a good reason to hope that he can evade accountability for Jan. 6. (1) [my emphasis]

A rogue Supreme Court also accelerated the coming of the Civil War in the 19th century by its infamous decision in the Dred Scott case. Bill Blum reported in 2018:

Shortly after midnight on Aug. 18, 2017, just days after the neo-Nazi march on Charlottesville, Va., workers arrived on the grounds of the Maryland Statehouse to remove a statue of Roger B. Taney, the man who authored the lead opinion in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. Generally regarded as the most odious ruling in the high court’s history, the Dred Scott decision held that African-Americans, wherever they resided, could never be U.S. citizens. The decision also held that the Missouri Compromise of 1820—which had outlawed slavery west of Missouri and north of latitude 36º30′—was unconstitutional.

The morning before Taney’s memorial was taken down, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to condemn similar undertakings in other locations across the country:

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it.”

Ironically, the president’s tweet, while vile and typically uninformed, wasn’t entirely wrong. You can learn from history, to be sure. When it comes to Confederate monuments, you can learn a lot about the history of American racism in general. (2) [my emphasis]

It’s a safe assumption that Trump knows essentially nothing about the politics of the 1850s or why Roger Taney’s disastrous ruling effectively removed any practical possibility of ending slavery without civil war.

But he knows neo-Confederate symbols, monuments, and attitudes are useful in motivating his anti-democracy MAGA base. Trump greatest political talent is being a perceptive demagogue.

The historian William Hoagland (https://substack.com/@williamhogeland) likes to take grumpy verbal potshots at historians who he thinks are being excessively glib in using past developments as sources of easy and obvious lessons for the current moment in US history when seriously authoritarian Trumpist politics have captured the Republican Party. And he often has a point.

But history does matter. And in the United States we have a written Constitution that goes back to the late 18th century. Which in turn built on a tradition of English common law, which also is used even now to interpret the meaning of Constitutional provisions, like impeachment. While the country has become far more democratic than it was in 1789, much of the basic governmental structure has a long legal continuity.

And the symbolic meanings of events and personalities that have evolved over more than two centuries are still part of the language that we use to discuss politics and law. Or, as the much-quoted comment of one of Wis most important characters, Gavin Stevens, famously put it: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (3)

Notes:

(1) Stern, Mark Joseph (2024): The Supreme Court Just Gave Trump Exactly What He Wanted. Slate 02/2/8/2024. <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/supreme-court-donald-trump-trial-january-6.html> (Accessed: 2024-18-03).

(2) Blum, Bill (2018): Trump’s America Raises the Ghost of Dred Scott. Truthdig 01/22/2018. <https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-america-raises-ghost-dred-scott/> (Accessed: 2024-18-03).

(3) From William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. In: Faulkner, William (1954): Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun, 229. New York: Signet Books.