Scalia used to liken Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott, the 1857 ruling that also created a right — slaveholders’ rights to their property, human beings — out of a general invocation of “liberty.” Rather than stabilize a country on the verge of civil war, the court’s intellectual and political overreach destabilized it.
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What may have been most destabilizing about Dred Scott, though, was not the new right it so sloppily created, but the rights it abolished: those of African Americans, both enslaved and free, and of anti-slavery whites.
Taking rights away is risky political business. People get mad — which means the Republican Party better get ready.
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