Free Republic

President Donald Trump faces a bevy of district court judges issuing restraining orders and injunctions blocking his executive actions, and Josh Hammer suggests the president take a leaf out of Abraham Lincoln’s book on the issue. Trump has responded to the orders with calls for Congress to impeach lower court judges or restrain them in other ways, and observers on the Left have claimed Trump’s actions are creating a constitutional crisis. Chief Justice John Roberts publicly chided Trump over the judicial impeachment call. Hogwash, says Hammer, a lawyer who clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit....

A Maryland city has cleared what could be the last obstacle to its plan to rid the City Hall courtyard of a statue of the man who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision affirming slavery. Frederick’s Historic Preservation Commission voted 4-1 Thursday to allow the removal of the bust of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, and a nearby bust of Maryland’s first governor, Thomas Johnson, who owned slaves. City officials say both will go to nearby Mount Olivet Cemetery, where Johnson is buried. …

Analysis of an almost-150-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision — the Dred Scott case — is important because it helps answer a contemporary question, said Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy: "Why are black people so angry?" Part of the answer is the racism inherent in the foundation of our government, he said, and it's not a historical artifact. "Do we still live in a pigmentocracy? Yeah, we live in a pigmentocracy," Kennedy said Thursday night. "Until it is a (case) that one can read and feel that it is repudiated, it will continue to have . . . a certain potency."...