History Professor: Democrats Should Work Around SCOTUS Like Abe Lincoln Did
Associate Professor of History at Princeton University and Jacobin contributor Matt Karp said on Hill TV’s “Rising” Wednesday that Democrats should learn from former President Abraham Lincoln to work around a conservative-majority Supreme Court.
Karp noted that the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 went directly against a the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling of 1857, which decided slaves were property.
“The Emancipation Proclamation was unconstitutional according to Dred Scott, but the Supreme Court at that point had been so thoroughly muzzled, had been so thoroughly politically defeated,” Karp said. “...This is maybe the most important lesson I think: not so much the procedures, but the effort to politicize the court and reject what they called the ‘superstitious worship’ of the Supreme Court.”