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In 2017, I wrote a Top Comments diary on the topic of the removal of Confederate monuments from public places in the city of Baltimore, my hometown. One of these statues was of Roger Taney, a native Marylander who was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Taney never renounced the Union to become a Confederate, so those who don’t know exactly who he was may be puzzled that his statue was considered a Confederate monument. However, Taney wrote the single worst Supreme Court decision in history, that is, the Dred Scott decision, which put the nation on the path to civil war.
Now, in my opinion, Taney may lose his ranking in this category. Current Chief Justice John Roberts penned the decision in Trump v. United States, which creates an unprecedented condition of criminal immunity for the “official acts” of a president, where “official acts” apparently means anything the president does while he or she is president. Many commentators here and elsewhere have written about what this decision entails. It appears to me that the decision has one purpose, and one purpose only: to keep Donald Trump out of prison before the election this fall. Apparently, the reality that Trump would turn up his criming to 11 in a second term, and then never leave office, was simply taken in stride by the conservative justices.
Taney’s Dred Scott opinion, as vile it is in its dismissal of the idea that a slave had no rights before the Court whatsoever, at least was in accord with the Constitution at the time, before the Thirteenth Amendment ended chattel slavery in the United States. Roberts, in his opinion giving the president fully immunity, did not refer to the Constitution at all! His entire argument seems to have been made out of whole cloth. There is no appeal to law or precedent, and, in fact, the opinion creates what the founders explicitly wanted to prevent: a head of state who was not accountable to the laws of the land, that is, a despot.
I honestly have to wonder how the conservative justices could have justified signing on to this opinion. Are they being bribed? In the case of Clarence Thomas, we know he’s been raking in money and gifts from wealthy “friends” at an unprecedented rate, but given his history, we know he’d have signed on to Robert’s opinion for free. But what about the others? Or are they Russian agents, as we suspect Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin might be? Is someone threatening their lives? Or are they just so inherently evil that, given the opportunity to destroy the Constitution in the interest of helping their preferred candidate win a presidential election—one who is a chaotic sociopathic narcissist, an adjudicated rapist, and a convicted felon—they fell over themselves to do it?
With the issuance of Roberts majority opinion in Trump v. United States, Roberts may have lapped Taney in writing the worst Supreme Court decision of all time.
What’s your opinion?
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