Daily Take: The Shameful Failure of Yesterday’s SCOTUS 14th Amendment Arguments
The Hartmann Report
Thom Hartmann
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2024
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
The simple reality is that the future of American democracy is as much on the line in this case as it was in 1866: that was lost in yesterday’s arguments, but should have been central to them…
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The shameful failure of yesterday's Supreme Court 14th Amendment arguments. |
| 0:05.7 | The single most astonishing thing about yesterday's oral arguments before the Supreme Court |
| 0:09.9 | was the almost complete lack of historical context in those arguments about an |
| 0:15.5 | insurrectionist stain on the ballot. The fear that led Colorado to ban Trump from the ballot was that he'd kept his word and it was that he'd keep his word and suspend the Constitution and be a dictator on day one. |
| 0:31.0 | Neither were mentioned even once. The word suspend and dictator don't |
| 0:35.4 | appear anywhere in the transcript. And yet that is exactly what provoked |
| 0:39.6 | Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Michigan Senator Jacob Howard, and New York Senator Roscoe Conclin, and 12 others, to write and push through Congress the 14th Amendment. |
| 0:50.0 | The Confederate states it ceased to be a democracy in any real sense by the late 1830s, |
| 0:57.0 | as I detail in the hidden history of American oligarchy, with the wealthiest families in each of those states |
| 1:02.4 | running them like dictatorial fiefdoms. |
| 1:05.0 | When their political or economic power was challenged, they were not at all reluctant to beat in prison or even lynch, poor or working-class whites. |
| 1:14.0 | Much like today's Russia, no dissent was tolerated. |
| 1:17.6 | If somebody tried to launch a serious political challenge |
| 1:20.2 | against one of the old-south oligarchs during that era. |
| 1:23.0 | They most frequently ended up dead or being burned out of their home. |
| 1:27.0 | Compounding this, Lincoln had made the horrible mistake of taking a slaveholder, Andrew Johnson, as his second term vice president, a largely futile |
| 1:35.8 | effort at healing the nation. |
| 1:37.8 | And when Lincoln was assassinated the following year and Johnson became president, Congress freaked out. |
| 1:45.0 | On the Supreme Court, both Chief Justice Roger Tani and Associate Justice Samuel |
| 1:50.2 | Nelson were in poor health. Tawney had authored a notorious Dread Scott decision and had earlier owned enslaved people. |
| 1:58.0 | And Nelson's tuition through law school was paid by his father's one of his families enslaved individuals. |
| 2:05.0 | So Congress, fearing President Johnson, was preparing to appoint another Confederate |
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