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Chief Justice John Roberts, meet Roger Taney, your history big brother.

Abraham Lincoln despised Taney as the legal upholder of white supremacy but had to suffer being sworn in by the old Maryland scarecrow in 1861. In that fraught March moment, the dark past and bright future of America came face to face.

Lincoln defied Taney's trying to thwart his path to war. It's always well to see what Lincoln did -- in this case, to a rogue Supreme Court.

Until now, scholars thought nobody as bad as the dreaded Taney would ever haunt us again. Cracking open the divided nation like a chestnut, he ruled that Blacks, free or enslaved, could never have rights "the white man was bound to respect." Never, not even in a free state, could Blacks become citizens.

That 1857 decision enraged the North and helped set off the Civil War.

But then Roberts came along, all shiny packaging and smooth manners, armed with his Harvard degrees. Don't be fooled, he's not the noblest Roman Catholic of them all. His strategic delay in dropping the former President Donald Trump's Jan. 6 immunity case at the very last is much like the saying: The medium is the message.

The agonizing delay over six months -- or longer, Lord -- effectively meant Trump would not stand trial for subverting democracy before the November election. The high court handpicked the president in Bush v. Gore overnight. Roberts' passive refusal to hand down "equal justice under law," the court's motto in marble, is a grave insult to we the people.

Far from calling "balls and strikes," as Roberts absurdly promised the Senate, he presided over the Dobbs decision, which brazenly struck down reproductive freedom for women and girls. The 6-3 Republican majority, with three Trump appointees, overpowered the three Democratic women justices. What's worse, the three members that Trump named to the bench were dishonest, declaring under oath they would respect Roe v. Wade as settled law on legal abortion.

In a similar outrage to Taney's, the Roberts court stripped a class of citizens -- all females -- of human rights in June 2022. This was new. American democracy is meant to expand, not contract. It's an unwritten law that rights are never taken away. Duh. But we are not living in that country anymore. Women and girls are the first to lose some of their liberty and right to determine their life, health and destiny.

We are the canaries in the mine for what next?

The three seasoned liberals (a Black, a Jew and a Latina) on the court should lead the parade on law pertaining to females. Such a major reversal should be arrived at by consensus. Roberts & Co. told them to take a walk while the six Republicans (all raised Catholic) subject women and girls to medical torture. Yes, experts consider it torture to force a girl raped by her stepfather to carry a dead fetus.

In fact, pregnant women and girls crossing state borders to seek medical care -- on the run -- reminds one of a tragic historical analogue: fugitive slaves crossing the Mason-Dixon Line to the free city of Philadelphia.

President Joe Biden should shine more public light on the captured court, which has no checks, balances nor (enforceable) ethics code. Two far-right members, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, take plush gifts and vacations from dark-money donors. And they are each married to women who openly flout their allegiance to MAGA rallies and flags.

Taney cast a dark spell of 28 years. He was nominated by Andrew Jackson and proposed by his brother-in-law, the slave-owning Maryland lawyer-poet Francis Scott Key. A zealous protector of his place on the antebellum pyramid, Key prosecuted abolitionists in the 1830s.

Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus when the war broke out. Taney stated he did not have that power, that a rebel in Baltimore could not be detained without a warrant. The new president confronted the ancient chief justice in a famous response:

"Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?"

In the moral equivalent of war, we need the president to defend ourselves.

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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

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