Statuesque

Public monuments should be subject to public approval. If a constituency wants to remove a statue of someone, then it more or less should probably be removed. Of course, this should be done by a ballot box and with proper re-positioning of said statue as a part of the plan. Cowardly people who don't want to push against anything that might push back and who might not even know who the statue is of do not make up a constituency.

It would probably better to add something to the statue instead of removing it, as a way of making sure the history the statue is supposed to represent and the history its placement represents are fairly explained. Many of the monuments to Confederate soldiers in different town squares went up not in the immediate aftermath of the war, but during the early part of the 20th century as a way of reinforcing the idea of Jim Crow laws and segregation. A new marker could be placed on them describing how bigotry and prejudice during those times prompted the spate of remembrances and their monuments.

So when I read that the United States Congress is weighing a bill to remove the bust of 19th century Chief Justice Roger Taney, I immediately disagreed. It's not because I like Taney. He served as Chief Justice from 1836 to 1864 and wrote, among other decisions, the horrid majority opinion in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857 that claimed that African-Americans, whether free or enslaved, had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." It was an opinion that echoed earlier rulings in which he had concurred, such as Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) that ruled states which did not permit slavery still had to honor federal fugitive slave laws.

As the first Chief Justice after the great John Marshall, Taney also had a role in shaping how the federal judiciary would operate alongside the other branches of government. He helped decide many cases on issues other than slavery that created some of the concepts of the way government law-enforcement agencies are allowed to operate. He opposed President Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, a bedrock legal principle that Lincoln tried to work around in order to arrest saboteurs and other potential Confederate sympathizers.

Be that as it may, his decision in Scott is by itself enough to make his tenure a disaster -- an associate justice actually resigned in protest. Which is exactly why his memorial bust should remain on display in the old Supreme Court chambers inside the U.S. Capitol. Our current dependence on the court to make law instead of interpreting it -- because none of those supposed to make law have time in between campaign fundraisers and talking-head appearances on cable TV news shows -- means that too often we defer to the court as though its nine members are somehow wiser than either the 545 members of the legislative branch or the one member of the executive branch. Admittedly, their intellectual superiority over certain legislators and executives can be taken as a given, because some of the first two groups are very dumb. But the courts still get it wrong. They are fallible human beings who can operate just as much from prejudgment, confirmation bias, incorrect assumptions and plain ol' political agendas as can anyone else, and they often do.

As long as a bust of Democrat Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864, remains on display we have a good reminder how that court can indeed get it wrong and what happens when it does.