I regret that I have not up to this point been made familiar with any Confederate Cabal, and remain perplexed as to why they might be unhappy with the fine work of the Claremont Institute. For years the C.I. has impressed me as being responsible for publishing numerous articles brimming with insight and elouquence. The Claremont Review of Books is only one example of their dedication to literary excellence, and my suspicion is that perhaps this Confederate Cabal is suffering from a dietary deficiency, possibly involving insufficient ingestion of gumbo or steak with bearnaise sauce :-)
Numerous clinical studies have shown that such deficiencies commonly result in a lack of appreciation for fine writing :-)
I guess (better sit down for this one) I'd have to agree with Non, that Bush blew the reference by misrepresenting the case and it's context. I would add that Non's statement, "Slavery was Constitutional because there was nothing in the Constitution which prevented it," is incomplete in that the Constitution explicitly protected the practice, and bound the ratifying states also to its protection by the fugitive slave clause.
The mistake that you're trying to justify is to grant the DoI the weight of the Constitution, or even the law. The DoI contains the force of neither, nor could it have ever. Taney made clear that the DoI and the Constitution were written by slavers, and signed/ratified by slavers. Nothing the Clermont Institute writes can change the clear fact that the man who penned the Declaration could not possibly have believed it applied universally, let alone the lame attempts to incorporate it into the Constitution via some metaphysical underpinning/connection.
Ultimately, all Taney did was to reiterate Lincoln's statement that the DoI represented, "the white man's charter of freedom."
We have no need to scrub our history and take out all the bad stuff. Leave it there as testament to our mistakes and our honesty.
Jaffa and others at the Claremont Group (which includes Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University, Scripps College, Harvey Mudd College, Pitzer College, and the Keck Graduate Institute) are firm believers, like Lincoln, in the "founding principles" of the nation, some of which are spelled out in the Declaration of Independence (i.e "all men are created equal," all are entitled by their humanity to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," etc). The Cabal doesn't like the concept.