Posted on 03/03/2021 12:56:16 PM PST by CedarDave
Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s name has been removed from a historic warship in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor by the Living Classrooms Foundation.
The foundation’s removal of Taney’s name from the ship serves as the latest in a series of gestures meant to acknowledge past wrongs and signal solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
James Piper Bond, LCF president and CEO, said in a statement Wednesday that the organization was inspired to make the change, calling the court ruling “an abomination” and “great injustice” toward Black Americans.
“The national historic landmark we are charged with stewarding should be reflective of our values of equality and opportunity for all,” Bond said. “We are not erasing history. Nor is it our intention to minimize the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have served with honor aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Taney. Our intention is to learn from history and celebrate the legacy of the ship and those who served aboard.”
The ship will, at least for now, be referred to by its hull identification WHEC 37, which stands for high endurance cutter, according to the foundation. The Taney name already has been removed from the ship’s stern.
“The name is being removed because it is a symbol of hate, repression and racial inequality,” said Chris Rowsom, executive director of the Historic Ships in Baltimore museum and vice president of Living Classrooms.
In a statement, U.S. Rep Andy Harris R-MD) said the removal of the name counters the foundation’s educational mission.
“Attempts to re-write shortcomings in our history, instead of using them to educate future generations, is a very bad idea — especially for a museum whose whole stated purpose is history.”
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
No. Have you ever read Dred Scott? It’s legislating for slavery by the bendy and it’s patently absured, using logic that makes Roe v Wade/Doe v Bolton and the current interpretations of the Commerce clause seem tame and restrained by comparison. (Roe v Wade was actually somewhat constrained; Doe v Bolton was the truly insane one that established a right to abortion.)
This is a good description of Dred Scott:
“Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s opinion ... ignored precedent, distorted history, imposed a rigid rather than a flexible construction on the Constitution, ignored specific grants of power in the Constitution, and tortured meanings out of other, more-obscure clauses. His logic on the citizenship issue was perhaps the most convoluted. He admitted that African Americans could be citizens of a particular state and that they might even be able to vote, as they in fact did in some states. But he argued that state citizenship had nothing to do with national citizenship and that African Americans could not sue in federal court because they could not be citizens of the United States. Scott’s suit, therefore, should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction by the district court. On this point, however, Taney stood on shaky constitutional ground: if even one state considered an African American a citizen, then the Constitution required that all states, and by inference also the federal government, had to accord that person “all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States” (Article IV, Section 2), which includes the right to sue in federal court. Furthermore, Article III, which establishes the jurisdiction of the federal courts, does not mention national citizenship but rather declares that “the judicial Power” shall extend, among other things, “to Controversies…between Citizens of different States” (the so-called “diversity jurisdiction”).
“Thus Taney continued, holding that Scott had never been free and that Congress had in fact exceeded its authority in the Missouri Compromise because it had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories. ... Even the doctrine of popular sovereignty as articulated in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)—whereby the people of each federal territory would have the power to decide whether the territory would enter the Union as a free or a slave state—lacked constitutional legitimacy, according to Taney. He thus voided the principles of free soil (opposition to slavery in the territories and in newly admitted states), territorial sovereignty...
[Me: So much for states’ rights. All future states must be slave states, according to Taney.]
“Curtis in particular undercut most of Taney’s historical arguments, showing that African Americans had voted in a number of states at the founding. “At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation,” he wrote:
All free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens.
“Thus, Curtis argued, they were members of the nation and could not now be denied the right to claim citizenship.”
[So much for the doctrine of original intent and the plain meaning of words.]
Yes. I also have books about the case and have sat in, as an adult, on at least one college course which was exclusively about the case.
Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s opinion ... imposed a rigid rather than a flexible construction on the Constitution
Ooooh, a "flexible construction"! Just like Hillary wants.
Around here instead of rigid we say original intent as does Clarence Thomas. Rigid, absured(sic) Taney was joined by six other justices.
ML/NJ
See my #30 for why the ship was named for Taney. It had nothing to do with his being on the Supreme Court or the Dred Scott decision and when named 85 years ago, Blacks were still considered unequal and subject to segregation in the south and discrimination in the north.
“And that’s not the ruling at all.”
You have misunderstood and imaged more.
Imaged (imagined?) what?
His ruling went so far as to argue that not only did purported slaves not have standing, but that free blacks could not have standing because even they could not be citizens.
>> Ooooh, a “flexible construction”! Just like Hillary wants. <<
Oooooh! You found one phrase to dismiss the entire argument. Is that the sum of your analytical skill? The author was calling Taney INCONSISTENT and therefore indefensible no matter WHAT your legal philosophy. Rigid in one place, yet “tortured meanings out of other, more-obscure clauses.”
>> Around here instead of rigid we say original intent as does Clarence Thomas. Rigid, absured(sic) Taney was joined by six other justices. <<
Strict (rigid) constructionism is not the same thing as original intent. How did you study law so much and make such a profoundly ignorant mistake? Their similarities end in that they are both textualist schools of interpretation and therefore hated by Living Constitution types.
Now, care to tell me where in the Constitution blacks are forbidden from citizenship? Or how one can be a citizen of a state, but not the nation?
Actually, no. I stopped reading your "good description" after I read its first sentence.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, you know. Or maybe you don't.
ML/NJ
When you say that you read Dred Scott, did you quit reading at the first sentence? The author was calling Taney INCONSISTENT and therefore indefensible no matter WHAT your legal philosophy. Rigid in one place, yet “tortured meanings out of other, more-obscure clauses.”
My post #51 was to someone else’s post #45 which included the statement “what he (Taney) wrote in the Dred Scott decision was so racist that it was anathema to a large part of the population.”
My point was that Taney's role as a Justice was not to impose a supposed emerging anti-racist morality but to interpret the Constitution as it was written.
Here's an a-hole that seriously needs to get doxxed.
Leave me alone.
ML/NJ
...Living Classrooms Foundation... James Piper Bond, LCF president and CEO... said. “We are not erasing history. Nor is it our intention to minimize the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have served with honor aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Taney. Our intention is to learn from history and celebrate the legacy of the ship and those who served aboard.” ...In a statement, U.S. Rep Andy Harris R-MD) said the removal of the name counters the foundation’s educational mission. “Attempts to re-write shortcomings in our history, instead of using them to educate future generations, is a very bad idea — especially for a museum whose whole stated purpose is history.”
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