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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm good in large part because today we get to continue our discussion of the various eras, the various courts of the United States Supreme Court. We had just finished discussing in a two pattern the very influential Marshal Court, and now today's episode, we're going to be looking at the successor court led by one Roger Taney. It's spelled T-A-N-E-Y, but according to most scholarship, it should be pronounced T-A-W-N-E-Y, Tawney.
N. Rodgers: His middle name was Brooke, because we do love a three-name person, Roger Brooke Taney.
J. Aughenbaugh: Taney, who was born in Maryland.
N. Rodgers: We won't hold that against him.
J. Aughenbaugh: You got something against the state of Maryland?
N. Rodgers: I was just kidding.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good Lord.
N. Rodgers: I actually like Maryland. I like their flag, because it's enormously confusing.
J. Aughenbaugh: I don't know how many times I've driven in Maryland, and I've seen the state flag, and I'm like, there's a lot going on here. Oops, I need to stay focused on my drive.
N. Rodgers: With the checkies and then the red and the white, and you're like, ah.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States, and he served in that office for roughly 18 years.
N. Rodgers: Another long-term.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Considering the first three guys were like, boop, boop, boop.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're out of here. They barely had enough time to get the seat warm. But for most of our listeners, Chief Justice Taney is best known because he wrote the majority opinion in pretty much by all accounts, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the court's history. He wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott versus Sandford in 1857. For our non-American listeners, that's the ruling that said African Americans, at that time, slaves could not be considered US citizens. Then, for a good judicial activism measure, that's also the ruling that went ahead and said that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the US territories, which was not a question-
N. Rodgers: Which is way out of his lane.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which neither party in the case even raised, but we will discuss why he addressed it and why the court addressed it. But he had a rather long political life before he became Chief Justice. Before he was on the court, he served as a US attorney general, the US Secretary of Treasury under Andrew Jackson, and he was also the first Catholic to serve on the US Supreme Court.
N. Rodgers: Was there anti Catholicism at that time?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. That's why it was rather unusual because just as he was stepping down from the court, is where you begin to see the rise of the Know-Nothing Political Party in the United States and some rather virulent anti Catholicism in regards to immigrants coming from central and eastern European countries, primarily, for instance, like Italy and Sicily. He was born into a wealthy slave owning family in Calvert County, Maryland. He served in the Maryland House of Delegates. He was a federalist until the War of 1812. Federalists did not think we should go to war with Great Britain. The majority of Democrats in Congress felt we should. He agreed with the Democratic Party, and he switched. He was one of the most prominent attorneys in Maryland throughout the 1820s. Eventually, he was appointed attorney general of Maryland in 1827. He gained favor with President Andrew Jackson because he supported Andrew Jackson both in 1824, when Jackson lost the presidential election, but also in 1828, when he won. He, like Jackson, did not like the US National Bank, and for a short period of time, he served as Secretary of Treasury, and he worked actively to eventually scuttle the second National Bank of the United States.
N. Rodgers: He was that guy?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Interestingly enough-
N. Rodgers: But he didn't get actually appointed to be Secretary of the Treasury. Like, he was a recess appointment, and then when the Senate got a chance to say that guy, yay or nay, they said nay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nay.
N. Rodgers: Which we've seen before. We saw that with one of the justices.
J. Aughenbaugh: Rutledge. He was recess-appointed as chief justice, and then Rutledge goes ahead and gives a speech in his home state of South Carolina denigrating a treaty that the Washington administration had negotiated. All of Washington's party supporters in Congress were like, Yeah, you're not going to go ahead and get the permanent chief justiceship.
N. Rodgers: I wonder if these early experiences for these guys have taught now that nominees that they need to be much more circumspect in their opinions and their activities. Basically, the people we put on the court now are made of tapioca pudding. They are very bland.
J. Aughenbaugh: They say nothing during their Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.
N. Rodgers: What do you think about fried chicken? Oh, I refuse to discuss any chicken fried, broiled, or in any other way. They just don't-
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, interestingly enough, Nia, we actually have a name for it now. It's called the Ginsburg Rule. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated by Bill Clinton to serve on the Supreme Court, she said in response to Senate questions over 100 times that she could not comment on a particular Supreme Court case or an area of law because it would affect her ability to serve as an unbiased judge if that case got to her while she was on the Supreme Court. She said it over 100 times. Now, pretty much every nominee says the exact same thing. Senator-
N. Rodgers: I won't know until I see the facts of the case.
J. Aughenbaugh: I cannot comment on that because that would be prejudging.
N. Rodgers: Prejudicial to the case.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Now, interestingly enough, after the Senate rejected Taney to be the permanent Secretary of the Treasury in 1835, when the Democrats regained control of the United States Senate, Jackson appointed Taney to replace John Marshall as Chief Justice, and the Democrats were like, You may now go and become the Chief Justice. Yes.
N. Rodgers: Well, I mean, I'm not trying to be ugly, but that's a big step up from Secretary of the Treasury.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, yeah. I mean, you're basically the leader of an entire branch of government, in contrast to being the leader of a department of one branch of government.
N. Rodgers: You won't be replaced.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you got life tenure.
N. Rodgers: Unless you're impeached, you have lifetime tenure. It doesn't matter who the next president is; you're not losing your job.
J. Aughenbaugh: Initially, the Tiny court.
N. Rodgers: Taney.
J. Aughenbaugh: Excuse me, Taney Court. Yes, thank you for correcting me.
N. Rodgers: I've been mentally correcting myself all along because it looks like Tiny, Taney, and you're like, Tawney. We should just call it the T Court.
J. Aughenbaugh: The big fear among federalists who then eventually became the Whig Party was that the Taney Court would roll back all of Marshall's decisions that established that the federal government was supreme because the Democratic Party was the states' rights party.
N. Rodgers: Got you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Taney was a fervent supporter of Andrew Jackson, and there's many things you could say about President Andrew Jackson. One of them was he was a huge supporter of states' rights.
N. Rodgers: He also had gray hair.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, he did.
N. Rodgers: You can say that about him, too.
J. Aughenbaugh: I mean, roughly for the first decade, decade and a half, that he led the Supreme Court, Taney was widely respected. The opposition party or parties to the Democratic Party felt comfortable with the Supreme Court settling disputes.
N. Rodgers: Did he get the agreement that Marshall got?
J. Aughenbaugh: By and large. It was still unusual to see three or four dissents. You didn't get as many unanimous opinions on the Taney Court, but you didn't see a whole bunch of 5 - 4. But this all changes with slavery. Because as we move into the 1950s, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Eighteen.
J. Aughenbaugh: 1850s. Excuse me. Good Lord. I'm having trouble.
N. Rodgers: It's okay, I just wanted to make sure we say to the audience 1850s. You're beginning to build up to the Civil War. You're getting-
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The parties increasingly could not find middle ground.
N. Rodgers: They're drawing lines.
J. Aughenbaugh: They're becoming much more polarized. I mean, after the 1850 compromise, which basically went ahead and said that for every free state, you had to have a slave state.
N. Rodgers: But there was discussion about the new territories, which comes into the Taney Court, doesn't it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, it does.
N. Rodgers: Because at that point, they're also saying, What are we going to say to the new territories? Do they get to have slaves, or do they not have slaves?
J. Aughenbaugh: For Taney, this was personal because I might have mentioned a few moments ago, he was born into a slave holding family. Now, by the time-
N. Rodgers: Wealthy slave holding family, which means not just a few.
J. Aughenbaugh: A bunch. Now, when he got confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court, he still had owned slaves. But by the end of the 1840s, he had set them free. But he was still very sympathetic to the South and their use of slavery, and he grew increasingly annoyed and upset with the northern states because many northern states, Nia, as we move into the 1850s, began to pass very strict abolitionist laws. I mean, some northern states, for instance, Nia, prohibited businesses within their state from doing business in southern states because southern states still employed slaves.
N. Rodgers: A lot of Northern states had laws about if you could just get there, you would not be returned. Sanctuary states basically.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sanctuary or safe harbor. This really upset Taney because Congress had passed fugitive slave laws, which required all states to honor.
N. Rodgers: To return fugitive slaves to the South. Northern states were saying, We're not going to do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is all building, and a case ends up on the court's docket. It's the infamous Dred Scott case. For our listeners who may not be familiar with the case facts, Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri. His owner had traveled to Illinois. Now, Missouri was a slave state. Slaves could be owned in Missouri, but Illinois was considered a free state. When his owner's family returned to Missouri, they said, Dred, you're still our slave. He filed suit claiming that once he was taken to Illinois, he became free. Now, the lower courts ruled against him, so Dred Scott filed an appeal with the Supreme Court.
J. Aughenbaugh: I've read a couple biographies of Taney. It's pretty clear. Taney encouraged his colleagues to take this case because he wanted a case that would settle once and for all the slavery issue.
N. Rodgers: Which side note had been chewing at the national government since the end of the Revolutionary War. When they sat down and tried to figure out a constitution, it had been gnawing away. This was a question that the founders didn't settle, and he's like, okay, we got to settle it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The case gets to the Supreme Court the court in a 6-3 vote agreed with the lower court that Taney could not bring suit against his slave owners.
N. Rodgers: Dred Scott.
J. Aughenbaugh: Dred Scott. Excuse me. Dred Scott could not bring suit against his slave owners because as a slave, he had no political or legal rights that were clearly listed in the US Constitution.
N. Rodgers: He has no standing?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Again, it wasn't a shocking decision in terms of its accuracy in regards to the Constitution. But to have the Supreme Court basically say that an entire race of people had no political or legal rights. That's horrific. But he didn't stop there. Taney did write the majority opinion. Again, yeah, he wrote the majority opinion. He then went ahead and answered a second question that had never been briefed either by the state of Missouri or Dred Scott.
N. Rodgers: Dred Scott's attorneys.
J. Aughenbaugh: Taney then went on to say that in the Constitution, the Congress had no authority to pass any laws regulating slavery. Therefore, the compromise of 1820 and the Missouri Compromise of 1850 were unconstitutional. Now, Taney may have thought that he was settling the slavery issue once and for all.
N. Rodgers: But how did that work out? All 57?
J. Aughenbaugh: That was 57.
N. Rodgers: 1957, how'd that work out five years later?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, four years.
N. Rodgers: Four years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, well, Lincoln gets elected president in November of 1860. By the time Lincoln travels to DC from his home state of Illinois in 1861, a handful of Southern states had already.
N. Rodgers: Trying to kill him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, one trying to kill him. But they had already announced that they were seceding.
N. Rodgers: Right. [inaudible] 1956 when you're right four years. So much for settling that.
J. Aughenbaugh: In part because once the court said, Congress had no authority to regulate slavery, Northern states became even more recalcitrant in regards to abolition. Because for many Northern states, their attitude was, Well, if Congress can't pass the 1820 and 1850 compromise, then Congress had no authority to pass the fugitive slave laws, which means we're under no legal obligation to return any slaves who make it to our jurisdictions. Well, Southern states were like, Whoa, whoa if you're not going to honor our property rights and our slaves, then we don't want to be part of this country. We're going to leave.
N. Rodgers: Right. Fill us secede.
J. Aughenbaugh: A decision that Taney and five of his colleagues hoped would settle the slavery issue once and for all actually just blew it up into what became the US Civil War.
N. Rodgers: Well and Dred Scott was in retrospect, a terrible decision.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because it treated humans like chattel. It treated them like property. He was using that model that Marshall set up of if there is a property prior to a new rule, that property is still under its previous contract. But humans are not property.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Is what the abolitionists were saying. They were saying, No, these are people. They're not physical objects that you have contract over. The South was saying, Well, pretty much they are. They are physical property over which I have contract.
J. Aughenbaugh: I've always posed this interesting what if to my students when I teach this class or case in class Nia. I said, Let's hypothesize that the Supreme Court decided to not take this case. Because they had jurisdictional discretion. They didn't have to take the case. What if they had just let the lower court ruling stand? It would have only applied to Dred Scott and the state of Missouri. Because what we also know was, as we moved into the 1850s, more states that were being admitted into the union preferred to be free. Would not have history so isolated Southern states that eventually the practice would have ended.
N. Rodgers: That's a good question. It's an interesting thought experiment. Would the economy in the South have changed such that it no longer required the enslavement of people in order to work. This is how you get anything like the Southern economy is the only way you can have cotton in the way that you have cotton is to have free labor to do it and free labor is slave labor.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. It is a labor farming, particularly the farming of certain crops is extremely labor intensive or at least it was in the 19th century.
N. Rodgers: Right. It's not now, but it was then.
J. Aughenbaugh: But it was then. The only way it can work is if you had a lot of unpaid labor. You either had to have slaves or you had to have really large families.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the only way it could work. But it's an interesting thought experiment. It really highlights, Nia, something that I caution my students about. When the Supreme Court gets involved in every and all dispute in this country, it runs the risk of making things worse. Why? Because you and I've discussed it on this podcast. When a dispute goes to a court, a court decision picks a winner and a loser and neither party afterwards is all that interested in negotiating with one another to get a compromise. Particularly, that's the case for winners, cause winners are just like, well.
N. Rodgers: You have to compromise.
J. Aughenbaugh: The highest court in the land went ahead and said that our argument is persuasive.
N. Rodgers: Right. Why do I have to bend? I don't have to bend at all.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The highest court said, we won and the losers are so upset. They immediately conclude that not only is the opposition full of evil despicable people but.
N. Rodgers: So is the court.
J. Aughenbaugh: So is the court and then the court's legitimacy and reputation.
N. Rodgers: Comes into question.
J. Aughenbaugh: Comes into question. That's the danger of the American tendency, Nia, to always take these really difficult disputes to port.
N. Rodgers: Right. Okay step. Well, my difficulty well, of course, I have I hate this ruling because as a reasonable human being.
J. Aughenbaugh: This idea that people [inaudible] .
N. Rodgers: As a modern human it's impulsive. But the more important factor to me than the repulsiveness of the ruling is the scope creep of the ruling. This idea that it goes to the idea of judicial activism. I am going to decide for the country that we are not going to have this discussion anymore. Like, No, you don't get to decide that. The whole point of a democracy is that we as a group decide a thing. The other point of democracy is that we as a group are forced to protect the minority opinion because otherwise they get run over. Him saying we didn't hear anything about this question of whether it's acceptable for the states to come in choosing free or not free, nobody asked you that. Nobody asked you to talk about that. The modern court has taken great care to make rulings, generally speaking, as narrow as they can make them.
J. Aughenbaugh: When they don't see Dobbs v. Jackson, for instance, the court's legitimacy takes a hit.
N. Rodgers: Do you get people saying, Oh, I guess you're king now.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it's what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said about the timing of the Roe V. Wade decision. Now, did Justice Ginsburg support the court's ruling in Roe V. Wade? Yes. But she also said publicly that the court issuing that ruling when it did stopped the democratic process. What Ginsburg is talking about is when the court decided Roe in '73, 10 states had already gotten rid of their anti-abortion laws. There was already a movement. She's like, When the court gets involved, then it stops the democratic process and the court needs to pay attention to that.
N. Rodgers: It goes to your thought experiment. If he hadn't jumped in here, would enough states going free have pressured the states that weren't to come into cultural alignment with the rest of the country.
J. Aughenbaugh: With the rest of the country. Yes. I don't know if it would happen, but there's always the danger when the court gets.
N. Rodgers: Well, how many lives could we have saved if it could have happened that way? Although the problem is that slavery would have lasted longer. You have these and you lose slave lives.
J. Aughenbaugh: But, like any institution, just because you have the authority to do something doesn't mean you should use it.
N. Rodgers: Did the Department of Defense can invade Canada, but it shouldn't.
J. Aughenbaugh: Closer to home, Nia, you've heard me make this joke to my students. You know, guys, according to VCU, I have the authority to give you a quiz every class. I just choose not to use that authority in every class. For some really good reasons, including the fact my students wouldn't like it and I wouldn't like it.
N. Rodgers: Six classes in they'd hate you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Which as Taney finds out foreshadowing, we'll get to that later. He's pretty much hated. But he does something else before he gets to the land of pure hatred.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. You talks shift towards states. The shift towards states rights. Yes. As I just mentioned, listeners, for roughly the first 10-12 years, the Taney court didn't really roll back a lot of martial court, federal government is supreme. But then his court really makes a shift. The first one is an example, again, of how important property is. The Charles River Bridge versus Warren Bridge case. In this decision, the Taney court upheld the state's power to issue a new charter for a brand new bridge, even if it potentially violated the terms of a previous charter, why? Because private property has a social responsibility to the public good. Now, what was at issue was Boston concluded that it needed a new bridge over the Charles River, because it was having more traffic. More economic activity. More people were moving, wanting to get across the Charles River. The problem for the state was they had granted an exclusive franchise to the Warren Bridge company.
J. Aughenbaugh: The argument that the state made was, we are doing it per our police powers in the Tenth Amendment. The Charles River Bridge Company said, wait a minute here, the Charles River Bridge Company was, like, this is violating our property. You gave us a contract. The Supreme Court said, wait a minute here, sometimes the state can regulate economic activity for the benefit of the public, but notice, which level of government can do this, Nia?
N. Rodgers: State.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, states.
N. Rodgers: Which in the Marshall Court, it was the federal government at the ferry case.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The federal government.
J. Aughenbaugh: Gibbons versus Ogden, corporations and the Commerce Clause. The Taney Court also issued a whole bunch of decisions about the rights of corporations and the interpretation of the Commerce Clause, many of which limited the federal government's ability to regulate commerce.
N. Rodgers: Corporations are people.
J. Aughenbaugh: That actually comes up in a future court, but you're foreshadowing where the Taney Court was taking jurisprudence in the United States. The Taney Court issued in the second era of federalism in the United States, and it's this idea that the federal government can regulate certain parts of the economy, only that which crosses state lines, but anything that happens within state lines, only which level of government can regulate it.
N. Rodgers: State.
J. Aughenbaugh: States, yeah.
N. Rodgers: That's interesting, and that holds till today.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. It holds until the mid 1930s. The mid 1930s, the Supreme Court, all of a sudden is, like, the new deal in broad federal government regulation of the economy is a good thing, and that's where you get cooperative federalism. Now the era we're in now is rolled back cooperative federalism. It's closer to dual federalism, but let's be clear. Which level of the government in terms of the economy is still dominant?
N. Rodgers: The federal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, the federal.
N. Rodgers: States are doing a lot of regulating their own commerce within the state, and you see that with pot.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That is one of the perfect markets to talk about state rights versus federal rights.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the reason why, and I've told you this before on the podcast, Nia, that's why I think at some point in time, the US Supreme Court's going to have to go ahead and weigh in, if there's a conflict between federal law and state law in regards to regulating marijuana, which one is supreme?
N. Rodgers: They're going to have to answer that question because they've put it off for a very long time.
J. Aughenbaugh: Really long time, and really, as long as the federal government is not aggressively enforcing federal.
N. Rodgers: That's basically what President Obama said is, it's against the law, but we're not going to enforce it, and Donald Trump has done that.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is the other thing. Congress has nearly zeroed out. The FBI and DEA, what does it stand for?
N. Rodgers: Drug Enforcement Administration.
J. Aughenbaugh: Drug Enforcement Administration. They basically have zeroed out in terms of the budget, any funding to go after marijuana growers, distributors.
N. Rodgers: So what if it suddenly became a thing for the next president after that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, without the Taney Court, you wouldn't have this change in federalism. There is one other area of law that I think the Taney Court should be noted for, and that is the Taney Court officially, if you will, recognized or cemented what we now refer to today as the political questions doctrine. The political questions doctrine says federal courts should avoid taking disputes that are best addressed by the political branches of government, and they said it very clearly in the case of Luther versus Borden in 1849, which was an election case. Now we typically hear the courts say, we're not taking this case because it's a political question because it deals with foreign affairs, but the Roberts Court has, shall we say, resurrected the political questions doctrine in regards to election disputes, like gerrymandering. Again, we keep on debating this stuff.
N. Rodgers: No debate ever really ends, and maybe that's the hallmark of democracy. Is that you're constantly trying to figure out where the edges are of any given flying carpet.
J. Aughenbaugh: What's acceptable, and what's not? What can this branch of government do? Should the government do it? These are all things to wear in a democracy.
N. Rodgers: Culturally, it shifts from one thing to another. We no longer accept the idea of slavery in this country. We no longer accept the idea of any group of people being treated as chattel. That is a cultural shift that has also affected our legal system and the way we interact culturally.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right, but listeners, as we conclude this episode, the Taney Court had a huge impact in a couple areas of law.
N. Rodgers: One could argue it led to the Civil War.
J. Aughenbaugh: It led to the Civil War. You can blank a plausible argument that Dred Scott made to avoid the civil war, but in terms of the court, Nia, you hinted at this earlier in the episode, the big impact of the Taney Court was that the Supreme Court as an institution lost a lot of the prestige and legitimacy that Marshall generated for the institution, and it wasn't just that Taney was vilified. He was. It's just that the entire court was because these were decisions that were associated with a particular government institution, and not enough of his colleagues pushed back on decisions like Dred Scott. That's the thing about institutions. It takes years to go ahead and develop a good name, prestige, reputation, but all you need to have is one failure, and that institution's legitimacy and reputation go into, excuse the expression, the toilet. Nia, you and I have used this example a number of times, both on and off recording, but think about how sterling FEMA's reputation was until Hurricane Katrina.
N. Rodgers: Then it was just a mess.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's been a mess since. I know some of this is political, and some of it is budgetary, but it's pretty hard to find a whole bunch of people.
N. Rodgers: FEMA is doing a great job. They're the best.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It's extraordinarily unfortunate when an institution is not able to maintain it's respect level. I think that's happened with the current Supreme Court. I think that the Supreme Court in the Warren era and the Rehnquist era, you see a pretty high respect level for the court, but then it starts to dribble away. I don't know that John Roberts enjoys as much respect as the previous few courts did.
J. Aughenbaugh: I would push back just a little. The Warren Court ended up generating a lot of negative response throughout the country for particular rulings.
N. Rodgers: That's fair.
J. Aughenbaugh: When the Rehnquist Court rolled back some of them, supporters of the Warren Court then got upset. Now we're on this roller coaster. You know who's very supportive of the Roberts Court? Conservatives, and liberals aren't.
N. Rodgers: Except that even they get rulings they don't like either.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Then they're, like, pooh on the court. These people were supposed to fall in line, and that's the danger of thinking that anybody on the court is going to fall in line because they're not. They're going to do what they need to do. They have the conscience they need to have.
J. Aughenbaugh: This thing about institution is being like living organisms that have reputations. Nia, before we conclude this, I want to get your thoughts on this. Think about the hit NASA took the first time the space shuttle blew up. NASA had failures before that, but it recovered. Think about, for instance, how long it took for NASA to regain the trust of the public and a willingness to have Congress spend significant money on exploring other planets or to resume the Space Shuttle program.
N. Rodgers: Manned trap.
J. Aughenbaugh: Really a manned travel.
N. Rodgers: People were willing to have you send up non-manned travel, but they were mistrusting after a bunch of people died, including a teacher. All of a sudden, you're like, [inaudible] , people die doing this. All along, NASA had said people could die doing this, but they hadn't had anybody actually die doing this, and that makes a difference. We were all watching. I don't know, if you remember, but I was watching the TV when it happened.
J. Aughenbaugh: I was about ready to enter a Spanish literature class at the pit at Johnstown, and I'm sitting in the lobby of the Student Commons eating my lunch, and all of a sudden, the Space Shuttle blows up. Then I got to go to class, and the professor brings in one of those portable TVs.
N. Rodgers: Remember those on a giant cart?
J. Aughenbaugh: The next thing you know we're watching this in real time. We may want to explore this, and I'm just thinking out loud, and this is the lifespan of institutions.
N. Rodgers: That's a good way to put it.
J. Aughenbaugh: There's a whole bunch of literature on this, and we can go in and explore that, and listeners, if this is something you might want Nia and I to talk about.
N. Rodgers: Opposite note, if there's one you think it would be interesting to explore, or you think it's a terrible idea, you can tell us that as well. That doesn't mean we'll listen because we're stubborn, but I do think that part of Taney's reputation modernly, part of why it's so bad is because we view him through a modern lens as opposed to viewing him through the historical lens. I don't know that he was any worse than any other man of his time. The problem is that when you view him from the modern lens, that guy is a slave-owning jerk face. Yes, that guy was, but he was also a man of his time, and we now know better, but thanks, Aughie. That's an interesting view of the courts super high, and then it's coming down to blah. Can I ask you in the preview of the next one? Do we keep on the dissent?
J. Aughenbaugh: We see a little bit of, shall we say, establishment of stability on the court. The next court is led by, again, one of my favorite names of a Supreme Court justice, Salmon Chase.
N. Rodgers: Salmon. Anybody who names their kid after a fish? I'm, like, what's your name? White fin tuna? I'd be, like, that is a great name. If I ever adopt a child, and they let me name it, I'm going to name it White Fin Tuna or something cool like that. I love salmon. That's a great name.
J. Aughenbaugh: You just gave me an idea. The next dog I get, I'm going to name it Albacore.
N. Rodgers: There you go. Call it Al for short.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or Tilapia.
N. Rodgers: Which goes to the song.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Here, Tilapia.
N. Rodgers: Call me Al.
J. Aughenbaugh: Here, Tilapia.
N. Rodgers: Thanks.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, please forgive me and Nia's frivolity here at the end of the episode, but nevertheless, thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thanks, Aughie.
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