On the recordJuly 9, 2015
I am very grateful for my very dear friend--not just friend, but dear friend--from Iowa, and I am pleased that he would take the time to talk about this. He is making some great points. The Dred Scott decision, if you really look at it, was decided by a majority who had great aspirations that the media was going to love what they did. Instead of looking at the words of the Constitution and applying those words, they were playing to the elite media, and the elite media was completely wrong. Slavery was the worst abomination and blot on this Nation's history, and it is tragic that the Supreme Court played an active role in that. It is tragic that in the seventies, as you pointed out, from the sixties, the seventies, the Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has contributed to tens of millions of murders--tragic. But I guess as a former judge and a former chief justice, nothing infuriates me more than for a judge or justice to believe that they are completely above the law. I know what it is to recuse myself. I know what it is for judges who are friends of mine who had strong feelings about a case, but they knew that they would not be fair and impartial and so they had to recuse or disqualify themselves. With regard to marriage, we had one Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, who has made comments indicating a massive question over her impartiality. But if you take two Justices about which there is no question, they were totally disqualified. They were very partial, and they were opinionated.…
