If you don’t know, maybe you should know that my caption pays homage to one of the most articulate and outstanding Americans ever to exercise our freedom of speech. It is borrowed from Frederick Douglass’s short, inspiring speech about our freedom of speech.
It is well worth noting that Douglass was no lawyer or judge. Even so, with his clear, compelling speeches he proved (as clearly and compellingly as any lawyer or judge could have) the evil falsity and even the absurdity of Chief Justice Taney’s infamous 1857 opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Douglass never should have “the full liberty of speech” on “all subjects upon which [American] citizens [enjoy the freedom to] speak” and “to hold public meetings upon political affairs.”
Douglass’s eloquent, succinct, reflective manner in addressing our freedom of speech, our liberty and our duties to each other after a vicious attack in December 1860 might also have provided inspiration and a model for an even more famous address of similar sentiment, timbre and brevity after a national tragedy in November 1863.
Now is a good time to invoke the words and spirit of both speeches and both speakers. This week, Americans were treated to the spectacle—recorded for posterity—of multiple justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) again toying with our Constitution and potentially preparing to tell us something about our Constitution that, again, was deeply false and exceedingly dangerous to our democratic republican society.
A former president (POTUS) asked SCOTUS justices—several of whom he personally appointed—to grant him immunity from prosecution for the crimes he committed. Understand this: Trump’s point is not that he did not commit crimes. His point is that he should not have to do the time. Trump’s point—and the point of the SCOTUS justices who are toying with the idea of giving Trump at least some of what he wants—is that, to place Trump above the law, SCOTUS should say all presidents from this day forward are above the law. Trump is not asking for a presidential pardon (like Nixon). Trump is asking SCOTUS justices (whom Trump appointed) to completely fabricate for Trump an exemption from our Constitution that will haunt us forever.
This is a crucial time—before SCOTUS purports to tell us what our Constitution means—for people who possess the insight, intelligence and integrity of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to speak up about exactly who and what it was that made America and made it great. We are blessed, for example, with outstanding historians of the American Revolution and professors who have devoted much of their lives to attempting to divine and explain the truth about those crucial questions.
America manifestly was not made great by judges telling any people in power that they were above our law and our Constitution. That exceedingly dangerous pretense is the blatant antithesis of what our Constitution plainly says and means. When it suits them, SCOTUS justices invoke the words of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, including in The Federalist Papers, to tell us what our Constitution means. A quick search of The Federalist Papers revealed at least 20 references to despot or despotism. It revealed 64 references to ambition or ambitious.
The Federalist writers warned repeatedly against “lawless ambition,” “perverted ambition,” “dangerous ambition” and “wars of ambition.” They even directly warned of “ambitious encroachments of the federal government” and “the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates.” They warned “against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government.”
They expressly and specifically anticipated exactly the issues that SCOTUS currently is pretending to have the power to address differently than our Constitution does:
An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.
An avaricious man, who might happen to fill the office, looking forward to a time when he must at all events yield up the emoluments he enjoyed, would feel a propensity, not easy to be resisted by such a man, to make the best use of the opportunity he enjoyed while it lasted, and might not scruple to have recourse to the most corrupt expedients to make [his] harvest as abundant as [possible]. . . . Add to this that the same man might be vain or ambitious, as well as avaricious. . . . An ambitious man, too, when he found himself seated on the summit of his country's honors, when he looked forward to the time at which he must descend from the exalted eminence for ever . . . such a man, in such a situation, would be much more violently tempted to embrace a favorable conjuncture for attempting the prolongation of his power . . . .
The Federalists emphasized that to protect and preserve our “representative republic,” they designed the Constitution so that “the executive magistracy is carefully limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power.” They emphasized that “against the enterprising ambition of” any federal “department” that threatens our Constitution, “the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions.”
Their point was plainly that we must never “forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.” We must not allow our Constitution to be broken “by ambition or by avarice, by jealousy or by misrepresentation.” We must “withstand the ambitious aims of those men who may indulge magnificent schemes of personal aggrandizement from” our Constitution’s “dissolution.” We must not allow “the public liberty” to “ever be the victim of the ambition of the national rulers.”
We must “ask” ourselves and SCOTUS “how the interests of ambition, or the views of encroachment, can be promoted by” the “conduct” that SCOTUS may pretend to have the power to exempt from our Constitution. We should not stand idly by while SCOTUS justices eliminate the positive “effect” of criminal statutes (which Congress created to protect all from all) “against the enterprises of ambitious rulers in the national councils.” We must not allow SCOTUS justices to deliberately make us victims of “national rulers actuated by the most ungovernable ambition.”
Many of the thoughts and words in Fredick Douglass’s speech in December 1860 continue to be relevant, inspiring and well worth repeating many days. But some of his words we should not be compelled to repeat today:
But the leaders of the mob were gentlemen. They were men who pride themselves upon their respect for law and order.
These gentlemen brought their respect for the law with them and proclaimed it loudly while in the very act of breaking the law.