Roger Brooke Taney still has busts and effigies sprinkled around the country commemorating his role as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864, when he died in office, seven years after his horrendous Dred Scott decision. That’s the one saying blacks aren’t people, where “We the People” applies. It’s the decision overwhelmingly condemned as worst in Supreme Court history.
Those effigies of Taney are understandably unpopular among the former non-persons of color he screwed, plus anybody else legitimately human. The monuments to him nevertheless prove harder to remove than the stupid law he wrote. His bust in hometown of Frederick, MD now qualifies as mixed media since being doused with a coat of red latex last year, but its display at City Hall still eludes change or disposal.
We fast-forward a century and a half to where it’s now an odds-on bet that portraitists and chiselers are feverishly shaping busts and images of our lately departed Justice Scalia, since homage to racists and bigots is again conspicuously in vogue.
By any measure Antonin Scalia trumps even Taney’s disrepute for worst Supreme Court decision, since while Taney merely confirmed enslavement of a single race, Citizens United put the entirety of humanity on the auction block under the almighty rubric of a fictional entity called the Corporation.
It’s not a new idea to surrender freedom to an enterprising machine with a quenchless appetite for money and power expressed as the divine right to eliminate anyone in the way. This chapter of history will seem obvious to anyone surviving the machine into another century. They’ll look back and wonder how we could have so blindly sold our political soul. Or maybe, can of paint in hand, they’ll gaze up at a stony effigy of Antonin Scalia.