Free Republic

It is little wonder that early Democrats garnered such popular support and would demand Andrew Jackson end America’s experiment with central banking. Jackson called it “dangerous to the liberty of the American people because it represented a fantastic centralization of economic and political power under private control.” It’s hard to believe that guy who said that is now on the $20 bill. Jackson also warned that the Bank of the United States was “a vast electioneering engine” that could “control the Government and change its character.” These sentiments were echoed by Roger Taney, Jackson’s Treasury Secretary, who talked of the...

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the vines and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree Pastoral scene of the gallant south The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh Then the sudden smell of burning flesh” “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol / Billie Holiday *I was quite dismayed by the George Zimmerman acquittal. It’s almost as if nothing has changed in the 5 years since Obama was elected, in the last 50 years since the Voting Rights Act was passed, or...

"Law sharpens the mind by narrowing it." --Edmund Burke . . Our governor here in Arkansas now has vetoed not one but two anti-abortion bills that made it past the state legislature this session. One bill sought to protect the unborn starting at the 20th week of pregnancy. The other would go into effect after 12 weeks' gestation if a fetal heartbeat could be detected. Both are now law, passed over the governor's objections. The Hon. Mike Beebe is ordinarily the most reasonable and agreeable of men -- even if he is a lawyer by trade and a politician by...

The criticisms of the recent absurd comments by Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin, who at this writing is his party’s nominee to take on incumbent Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in November in a contest he had been expected to win, have focused on his clearly erroneous understanding of the human female anatomy. In a now infamous statement, in which he used the bizarre and unheard-of phrase “legitimate rape,” the congressman gave the impression that some rapes of women are not mentally or seriously resisted. This is an antediluvian and misogynistic myth for which there is no basis in fact...

My take on the ObamaCare decision, based upon 1857 Dred Scott decision.

The Hall of Famous Missourians will soon add a bust of Rush Limbaugh to its ranks, according to reports. Along with a bust of Dred Scott, the slave who sued for his own freedom in a famous 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the embattled talk radio personality will soon be added to the Hall. Continue Reading The sculpture is currently being made by sculptor E. Spencer Shubert, and, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is being paid for by private funds raised by the Speaker of the Missouri House. Limbaugh, a native of Cape Girardeau, Missouri,will be inducted into...

Third Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Jonesboro, Illinois September 15, 1858 MR. DOUGLAS' SPEECH. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I appear before you today in pursuance of a previous notice, and have made arrangements with Mr. Lincoln to divide time, and discuss with him the leading political topics that now agitate the country. Prior to 1854 this country was divided into two great political parties known as Whig and Democratic. These parties differed from each other on certain questions which were then deemed to be important to the best interests of the Republic. Whig and Democrats differed about a bank, the...

By applying positivism instead of natural law, 19th century courts burdened American racial history to this day. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," he could not have meant then what we understand these words to mean today. When the framers of the government wrote in the Constitution that "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," and that the Constitution is "the supreme...

A century and a half after the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that no black — slave or free — could ever become a U.S. citizen, the case's legacy is still being debated. The fallout from the 1857 decision, which helped spark the Civil War, was the subject of a mock re-hearing of the case before a 10-member court led by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer at Harvard Law School on Saturday. While the decision, issued by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, is almost universally seen as the moral low point of the court's history, participants in...

ST. LOUIS, March 7, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In March 1856, a black slave named Dred Scott was judged by the US Supreme Court to be less than a person. Today his great, great granddaughter, Lynne Jackson, is pointing to the case as a beacon of hope that full human rights will be extended to all citizens, regardless of their age, size or degree of dependency. The March 6, 1857 Dred Scott decision ruled that any person descended from black Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States, according to the U.S. Constitution. Blacks, the ruling...

The framers of the United States Constitution believed that people of African descent “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and that “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit…. [to be] bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.” With reference to the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence: “It is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race was not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people...

On this day in 1857, the Supreme Court announced its infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford decision. The slave, Dred Scott, having travelled in northern states, where he was free, was suing for his freedom after returning to Missouri. The Justices had been wrestling with how a person could be a slave, then free, then a slave again depending where he was. The solution for the seven Democrats on the Supreme Court (the two Republicans dissented) was that blacks could not be citizens anywhere, North or South, so they had no standing to sue in court for anything. Chief Justice Roger...

Analysis of an almost-150-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision — the Dred Scott case — is important because it helps answer a contemporary question, said Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy: "Why are black people so angry?" Part of the answer is the racism inherent in the foundation of our government, he said, and it's not a historical artifact. "Do we still live in a pigmentocracy? Yeah, we live in a pigmentocracy," Kennedy said Thursday night. "Until it is a (case) that one can read and feel that it is repudiated, it will continue to have . . . a certain potency."...

The U.S. Supreme Court hands down its decision on Sanford v. Dred Scott, a case that intensified national divisions over the issue of slavery. In 1834, Dred Scott, a slave, had been taken to Illinois, a free state, and then Wisconsin territory, where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery. Scott lived in Wisconsin with his master, Dr. John Emerson, for several years before returning to Missouri, a slave state. In 1846, after Emerson died, Scott sued his master's widow for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived as a resident of a free state and territory. He...

From Wikipedia: Dred Scott was an American slave who was taken first to Illinois, a free state, and then to Minnesota, a free territory, for an extended period of time, and then back to the slave state of Missouri. After his original master died, he sued for his freedom. He initially won his freedom from a Missouri lower court, but the decision was reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court and remanded to the trial court. Simultaneously, Scott had filed suit in federal court, where, after prevailing on the issue of his status as a citizen of Missouri, he lost a...

Somewhere in a north St. Louis County cemetery choked with weeds and surrounded by trash, where toppled tombstones poke through the brush, lies a legend of history. Harriet Scott, it turns out, is buried here, somewhere, at Greenwood Cemetery. For years, no one knew where she lay. They were uncertain even of when she died. Some assumed she rested next to her husband, Dred Scott, in St. Louis. His grave can be found at a tidy, well-marked spot in Calvary Cemetery, where only the grave of playwright Tennessee Williams receives more visitors.

Chicago is no longer my kind of town. It's a liberal Democrat kind of town. It's a town with a gay and lesbian center – funded by taxpayers. It's a town that aborts over 20,000 of its residents a year. It's Jesse Jackson's home town. It's a town where Republicans meet in catacombs. It's a town where even Catholic priests vote 4-to-1 Democrat. So imagine my surprise when last week the overpowered Cook County Republican Party issued a press release accusing Democrat tyrants of abusing their most prized possession, African Americans.

Today (Tuesday) the San Francisco Chronicle ran an editorial entitled, “Why Alito is the wrong choice.” Instead of demonstrating what it says, it demonstrates why the Chronicle has failed to do its homework as reporters, in preparing its editorial. Here’s why: The editorial begins with this statement: In some ways, Alito's taciturn approach to questions about the great constitutional issues of our time was similar to that of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. But the distinction between the history of the two judges -- and the role of the justice they were nominated to replace -- are important. First,...

I've saved this and the response to it for today, Open Line Friday, to share with you. This woman is a subscriber at RushLimbaugh.com. She said, "Rush..." Her name is Anita. "Rush, I'm a die-hard fan. Though I was raised to support a woman's right to choose, since becoming a mother and listening to you over these many years, I've come to strongly believe that abortion is wrong. But because I'm conservative and believe in property rights, I can't reconcile the government's involvement in the ultimate property right to your own body. Can you help me?" So I thought about...

I'm trying to find more cases like Dred Scott (in which the Supreme Court determined that African-Americans could never become citizens, for those who aren't familiar with it) in which the Supreme Court ruling was eventually overturned by executive order or Congressional legislature. Many thanks!