Buchanan's ascendancy boded well
for the forces of resistance in
the Southern Democracy - and it
boded even better when the new
President began selecting a heav-
ily pro-Southern cabinet . . and
it would wreck the nation. It be-
gan with the momentous judicial
ruling about an obscure Missouri
slave, Dred Scott . .
The saddest story ever written about
the United States is the one the na-
tion keeps on writing, of its failure
to vanquish slavery. I cite historian
Supreme Court case which shattered the
unstable, degenerate truce between the
slave states and the free, not for the
vitality of that lie but, today, for
its manifestation of bigotry's endur-
ing corruption of American government.
ing, Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman
of The New York Times track today the
very zombie of that corruption, to a
courtship between an American President
and a Supreme Court Justice which mir-
rors precisely the meddling by James
Buchanan in the precipitation and the
writing of the Dred Scott decision,
detailed by Wilentz at pp 707-715 in
his Bancroft Prize-winning The Rise of
American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln.
horrid handiwork of our zealot of the
day, Samuel Alito. Lipton and Haberman
pull back the poultice of judicial re-
view, itself, in tracking the hand of
politics in the temptation of judges.
Yesterday we admitted a putrescence to
savor, once it had dried. It never dries.
tetes, fulminating now from the throat
of our own President of the slave states.
Why seek his monument? It's omnipresent,
he is but its momentary embodiment.
