If you need one more reason to take pride in the genius of the American democratic process today, keep in mind that Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, the last person to administer the Presidential oath of office upon the Lincoln Bible on which Barack Obama will place his hand today, believed that:

…it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included [in the phrase "all men are created equal"], and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration, for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sympathy of mankind to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 63 U.S. 393 (1857), now known as one of the worst rulings in Supreme Court history, the Taney Court was asked to decide whether African slaves and their descendents could ever become citizens of the United States. The answer was an angry, Ted-Stevens-style, “NO!” After all, wrote Taney, our Founders found Africans to be:

“…beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Furthermore, Taney believed that it was essential to the health of the nation that the same Constitutional rights that applied to “real” Americans be forever witheld from Africans and their descendents because:

[Citizenship] would give to persons of the negro race… the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color [in slave states], both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.

In an unfortunate attempt to answer the “slavery question,” Dred Scott openly vindicated the “property rights” of slaveowners, vitiated the Missouri Compromise, and forcefully precluded the possibility that African slaves and their descendents could ever call themselves “African-Americans.” It remains one of the handful of Supreme Court opinions that everyone can now agree was just a really bad idea.

Although Barack Obama is the first incoming President to take the oath from a Chief Justice to whose appointment he was opposed, John Roberts is no Roger Taney. Justice Taney was an open supporter of the “rights” of slaveowners to their human “property,” and an avowed enemy of Abraham Lincoln. (Scholars still dispute whether or not Lincoln actually attempted to issue a warrant for Taney’s arrest several months after he took office.) Dred Scott had been in effect for four years by the time that the two men faced each other on the steps of a Capitol built on the backs of slave labor with this Bible between them, and a war that would truly solve the “slavery question” once and for all of American history was only months away.

Dred Scott was legally superseded by the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War which granted full citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” but it was never formally overruled by the Court.  With the conclusion of today’s ceremonies, however, one singular man has proven that Dred Scott really is as dead, ugly, and rotting as Taney himself.

Happy Inauguration Day!

U.S. Supreme Court, stupid laws Bad law, Supreme Court