The "decision" today in light of others

Context for later this morning..

1857Dredd Scott vs Sanford : 7-2 African brought to the USA and held as slaves (or their descendants, whether or not they were slaves) were not protected by the Constitution and were not U.S. citizens..A Roger Taney decision and one which went a long way towards determining how Lincoln decided to treat him

1896 Plessy vs Ferguson : 7-1, upholds the state’s right to mandate Separate but Equal, i.e. SEGREGATION

1935 A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States: 9-0 Two kosher butchers unravel national price controls and rendered the National Industrial Recovery Act, a main component of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, unconstitutional.

1952 Youngstown Sheet and Tube vs. Sawyer: 5-3 also commonly referred to as The Steel Seizure Case, was a United States Supreme Court decision that limited the power of the President of the United States to seize private property in the absence of either specifically enumerated authority under Article Two of the United States Constitution or statutory authority conferred on him by Congress. It was a “stinging rebuff” to President Harry Truman.

Justice Hugo Black’s majority decision was, however, qualified by the separate concurring opinions of five other members of the Court, making it difficult to determine the details and limits of the President’s power to seize private property in emergencies. While a concurrence, Justice Jackson’s opinion is used by most legal scholars and Members of Congress to assess Executive power.

This case is actually very interesting since FDR appointed very liberal judges formed the majority to limit executive power

1954 Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka: 9-0 reverses Plessy, and mandates the end of segregation, stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of theFourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.

1973 Rowe vs. Wade: 7-2  is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. Decided simultaneously with a companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the Court ruled that a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state’s two legitimate interests in regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting women’s health. Arguing that these state interests became stronger over the course of a pregnancy, the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the trimester of pregnancy.

The Court later rejected Roe’s trimester framework, while affirming Roe’s central holding that a person has a right to abortion until viability. The Roe decision defined “viable” as being “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid”, adding that viability “is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.”

2000 Bush vs Gore: 7-2 that the vote recount method was unconstitutional, 5-4 that no constitutional method could be conceived and carried out under the time limits of state law, - is the United States Supreme Court decision that effectively resolved the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush. Only eight days earlier, the United States Supreme Court had unanimously decided the closely related case of Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, 531 U.S. 70 (2000), and only three days earlier, had preliminarily halted the recount that was occurring in Florida.

Each of these votes close or decisive settled NOTHING in terms of feeling, of the public, but did settle law. The true nature of the changes wrought by these decisions only made political sense when the consciousness of the public was changed.

This requires sustained leadership. Dredd Scott and Plessy represented popular sentiment. Brown ultimately set off busing which remains controversial. Row vs Wade settled NOTHING politically in a lot of places. And Bush, 2000 DESPITE a decisive majority of SCOTUS finding that Florida’s recount methods denied the rights of its voters still left him regarded as an illegitimate president in the minds of the the other side until the day he left in 2009.

Nothing in terms of public or political sentiment will be settled later today.