Thursday, December 15, 2022

Justice Taney bust in the Capitol to be replaced with a bust of Justice Thurgood Marshall. That is the good news. The bad news is, if WaPo reporting got a quote accurately, Steney Hoyer said something extremely ignorant, or had a clear senior moment.

 WaPo here, and the entire report is worth reading. The story, Congress voted - both Houses, by a voice vote each - to remove the bust in the Capitol of Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, to be replaced with a bust of Justice Thurgood Marshall.

The paragraph of interest, mid-item:

Hoyer told reporters Tuesday that Taney’s interpretation of the Constitution is one that every American should reject. “The good news is not only are we replacing the Taney statue but we also provide for a bust of Chief Justice Marshall,” Hoyer said.

While Rep.  Hoyer is not old enough to have lived to remember either Taney or Chief Justice Marshall (John Marshall, per Marbary v. Madison, etc.), to have been speaking from personal recollection, he was well alive and in his prime when Thurgood Marshall, was an Associate Justice serving under Chief Justice Warren into the term of Chief Justice Burgher, after he was nominated to serve on the Court in 1967 by Lyndon Johnson

Thurgood Marshall's most renowned case argued before the Court was Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954. 

Thurgood Marshall was succeeded on the Court by the second black man to serve there, the inauspicious _____________, confirmed by the Senate, Joe Biden presiding; _____________, having been nominated by George "Willie Horton" Bush, when Missouri Senator John Danforth put forward _____________'s name to Bush for nomination.

Crabgrass sees that latter nomination and appointment as a sacrilege to the memory of Justice Marshall and his range of litigated major civil rights accomplishments.