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How Abraham Lincoln Fought the Supreme Court

Karp, Matt
http://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/abraham-lincoln-supreme-court-slavery

Publisher:  Jacobin
Date Written:  19/09/2020
Year Published:  2020  
Resource Type:  Article

It is not enough to question the decisions, the justices, or even the structure of the current court -- we need to challenge, as Abraham Lincoln did, the foundation of its power to determine the law.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Lincoln persisted in rejecting judicial supremacy — and also the basic idea underlying it, that law somehow exists before or beyond politics, and thus it was illegitimate to resist the proslavery court through popular antislavery mobilization. “We do not propose to be bound by [Dred Scott] as a political rule,” he said. “We propose resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.”

Across the late 1850s, Lincoln argued that “the American people,” not the Supreme Court, were the true arbiters of the Constitution, and that the only way to defeat the proslavery judiciary was through mass political struggle. And after Lincoln and Hamlin were elected in 1860, the new president’s inaugural address articulated this view in perhaps the strongest language he ever used:

" [I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made ... the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal."

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