Commenter Archive

I guess I don't feel its that easy to take down a monument these days, and I might be one of the most anti-Taney people in this thread and I don't want to see his statue removed.

I am saddened that the Robert E. Lee statue at Lee Circle in New Orleans is being removed. I lived there a few years and remember looking at it from the window of the street car as it jerked its way to where I worked. It was an attractive, classic monument to a guy who had no connection with the City, erected by people who wanted to honor their soldiers. It's a city with a lot of odd anachronistic juxtapositions of time periods, factual and mythical.

I don't live there any more. And before I came, a lot of white people left the city, leaving it to people with no connection to Lee or the Civil War, either they are foreigners like I was (pronounced Na'thner) or they are descendents of slaves. The city has lots of problems without easy solutions and voting the removal of statutory isn't very costly.

I think that might have been Taney's argument. I believe he was most concerned that the federal government had essentially confiscated state-militias.

As far as I know, the original source on this was Don E. Fehrenbacher, Dred Scott: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. He reviewed the Taney Papers and found his later writings and concluded that he "would have struck down many of the administration's principal war measures, including conscription, emancipation, and the currency program."

The Taney Papers do not appear to be on-line, but the main one of interest is an 8-page memorandum that Taney penned around the time of Lincoln's inauguration, in which he concluded that the South was wrong in its belief that there was a Constitutional right of secession, but that the Union had no authority to force the seceding states back-in. (Essentially James Buchanan's position) It is reasonable to conclude that Taney would not have upheld any of Lincoln's war measures under this analysis.

Mark E. Neely, Jr., specifically discusses Taney's prepared opinion to strike down military conscription in Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War.

The case against Taney is that after causing the Civil War, he spent his remaining time writing judicial opinions which would give the Supreme Court an important role in resolving the war, including a prepared opinion declaring federal conscription unconstitutional. That Taney's Supreme Court never got to weigh in on any of the issues of the war was primarily because of the slow nature of appellate review during a fast-changing environment of war. No case ever got to the SCOTUS. Also Taney died in 1864.

Somewhat similar to Robert E. Lee who kept a public face of duty to country, while secretly planning other designs, Taney was publicly conforming, while privately scheming.

Dred Scott did not reflect the wishes of the country at the time. The next year, the Republicans took control of the House for the first time, and Stephen Douglas, angling both to return to the Senate and become the next President, had to argue that the opinion could be circumvented by hostile state legislation. This was clearly an example of a judiciary out-of-touch with popular sentiment and overreach.

Not only that, Taney did this in a scene reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre. Jackson ordered the Secretary of Treasury to withdraw the deposits and he refused; the law had established pre-conditions to their removal. Jackson then fired the Secretary of Treasury and appointed Taney to the position, and Taney withdrew the deposits. Jackson was censured by the Senate and Taney was the first person rejected by the Senate for a cabinet position.

Is Divine even a place? Google maps doesn't think so. Is it an allegory?

My googling indicates that the state legislature voted to burry Taney on the state house grounds and erect the statue over it. Taney had expressed a desire to be buried next to his mother, so that part of the plan was nixed.

I agree on the focus on who erected the statute, but I thought Taney lived in or near Baltimore. He practiced law there and had financial interests in the pet bank there. When the Merryman case was decided, he was presiding over the Circuit Court in Baltimore. Justices at that time were assigned circuits and I understood that Taney, as Chief Justice, assigned himself the Baltimore circuit so he could be close to home.

The point that Taney was in Baltimore is an important one for the question of whether Taney was authorized to decide Merryman.

I am no fan of Taney, nor Meryman, but I don't start from the assumption that the continued presence of statuary in a location is an act of honor of subsequent generations. The statute was erected by people (in this case the City of Baltimore a few years after Taney's death) to honor an important person in their community. I have no sense the honor was bestowed for anything more than the titular honor, as opposed to his views on race and the Civil War. Basically, there are two screens I operate on, who is the subject of the memorial, but more importantly, who are the people who erected it? Lee statutory erected, particularly outside Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s is highly suspect.

I agree with this, but to me the easiest way to spot the historical trends is to observe that in the Second Party System, the Democrats almost always focussed on race as the primary issue, while the Republicans almost always focussed on religion.

Initially, the Democratic Party was a white man's party, but even today race is the most defining issue of a racial coalition. The Whig/Republican strand tended to see Protestant morality as providing a necessary framework for self-government, and were most consistently opposed to open immigration (as well as territorial expansion). Lincoln did not understand how someone could be a know-nothing and opposed to slavery, but in his time those views were more commonly held together than his.

There was overlap between Republican progressives and the Second KKK. This is ideological, Progressives tended to be anti-immigration (but not anti-African American), and instrumentalist -- the political forces most opposed to government by technocrats and businessmen were seen as the Democratic party machines operated out of saloons, catering to recent immigrants who were rewarded with patronage jobs for their support. Progressives wanted to close the saloons, establish civil service, and limit non-Protestant immigration.

I'm more surprised by the number dots in the South.

It's not just children; any social aspect places restrictions on all possible scheduling arrangements -- children, spouse, parent-care, co-workers, employees, utilities, clients, etc. From a personal perspective, I provide business services and it is to my advantage to have a business-hours norm (roughly 9 to 5) for a whole host of reasons, but the primary reason is selfish, I want non-work time.

I agree w/ Stillwater. The Courts will police contracts on a case-by-case basis. Last year, a federal court dismissed the case brought by Jimmy John employees wanting a determination that the covenant not to compete was unenforceable because there was no case-or-controversy given that Jimmy Johns hadn't expressed any intent to enforce it against them specifically.

The issue needs legislation, but many of the norms in this area are based upon a complex set of judicial balancing tests. It's hard for lawmakers to feel comfortable stepping in.

A quick google and I found a summary of a case involving a California resident employed by T-Mobile. He signed a non-compete agreement that specified the State of Washington as the proper venue and choice of law. He was successfully sued in Washington under the non-compete clause, and he was unsuccessful in attempting to get a federal court in California to set it aside. So, yes it can happen.

In my jurisdiction, courts do not tend to invalidate non-compete clauses, but reform their scope and duration to be reasonable under the circumstances. The clause cannot apply to this type of worker, or beyond this many months/years, or over a distance of so many feet/miles. What I think that does is reduce any incentive for the business to tailor their agreements. The courts will do that for them, and given all of the moving parts in the judicial inquiry, the law is not really that predictable.

Why would that matter? Workers don't get to decide where to locate, its the investors. Non-compete clauses get enforced in tech areas regarding "idea" employees because the companies provide a venue for employees to throw around ideas for innovation, and the companies don't want an employee to leave and start-up a competitor based upon an idea that blossomed through their investments. Though I do recall a Seattle court telling Microsoft its non-compete clause had an unreasonable duration, and something like 12-18 months was sufficient given the pace of innovation.

The non-compete that the tech industry used was the secret agreement not to hire away each other's employees.

I think the scathing dissent in Massachusetts v. EPA had to do with the procedural issue of state standing. Under what circumstances can a state sue the federal government? Ann Althouse has said the opinion is the worst written that she has to teach and would consider it a person favor if it was overruled, which I didn't interpret as having anything to do with the underlying energy issue.

She probably teaches politics. The discipline of political science for a long time had the ambition of being about analysis of systems.

I had initially included reference to the Asian exclusion in the U.S. and Australia. Chinese immigration to the U.S. was explicitly banned from 1882 to 1943, and was discouraged or limited from 1790 to 1965.

Mass immigration that moves population needles has been extremely rare, at least prior to 1970. British settlement was rather unique in including women and focussing on settlement, instead of resource extraction or adventurism. But if we are going to cast moral judgments on the past, it should be in the context of what was done at that time. There was mass migration of Chinese to Manchuria from 1890 to 1942, were the policies adapted any different?

I don't believe "spoiler" has some intricate meaning that the discipline of political "science" can claim special knowledge. The context here is pejorative, and if that is the case, then the condemnation would apply just as well to the emergence of an anti-slavery party in the 1850s. Following the Kansas-Nebraska Act, various third-parties emerged and began winning elections and siphoning support away from the Whigs, becoming the new second party. Was John C. Fremont a spoiler?

Of course, she can decide what is in her economic best interest, but it is worth pointing out that by seeking non-monetary compensation, she incurred a lot of additional transaction costs to obtain a number of promises that are probably not legally enforceable. To the extent this is about supporting the community, it is certainly worth wondering whether there are charities or other community support groups that she could have supported by just taking the highest bidder.

Hi3: "But the whitewashing of Australia didn’t start with the country’s creation in 1901 as a British Commonwealth. In 1901, Australia’s population of 3.8 million people was already 97 percent white. It would remain over 95 percent white until the 1970s."

The author is strongly implying design, when the nature of settlement colonies was that they were being settled by people from the home country. Large transportation and settlement businesses developed to support it. I doubt those percentages are very different from Canada and New Zealand. They are very different from the United States in one respect, the vast number of Africans enslaved. In 1970, the U.S. population was almost entirely either white or black (98.6%), with the black population almost entirely descended from involuntary immigrants.

The historical piece is a poor description of U.S. immigration policy after WWII. The U.S. was still under the Progressive-era ethnic quota system, which remained in place until 1965. The country was dedicated to a long-term policy preferring Northern Europeans who were deemed to be more assimilable. From 1948-1952, most Americans supported a one-time admission of European (not Asian) war refugees under certain conditions. The U.S. ended up admitting a lot of German displaced persons which the European countries refused to accept, a lot of agricultural workers because the U.S. had rural labor shortages from the war, and people otherwise with prior assurances of employment.

The piece criticizes a law that Truman reluctantly signed by quoting an anti-semetic slur by a Senator who . . . voted against the bill. It both exaggerates and minimizes issues of race and ethnicity to make it appear that there were evil forces that were defeated, when in fact lots of divergent views and characters, and in the end not much changed.

We've had similar water issue locally without the lead issue (so far). A suburb got tired of paying the city for drinking water and the city's use of water to influence development and annexation. Even after the City made a final offer to charge suburban residence the same as city residence, the suburb formed its own water supply. Not aware of lead pipes.

The problem was they were switching from an aboveground water reservoir to an underground well. The coating on the pipes came off; the treatment approach was inadequate. Two years later, residents still complain about odor, colors and particulates in the water, and complaints of damage from the water. The state regulators have said the water is safe, but most residents complain the water is undrinkable.

One thing I've taken from what I've read is the distinctions between water being safe from a health perspective and being aesthetically drinkable, and water that can be safe to drink, but contain enough iron and manganese to be damaging to equipment.

The state government can dissolve the municipality by amending its Constitution. Maybe that's a banal point, but the states can do anything they want with local governments, but they can be subject to whatever process imposed on itself. They may need to amend the Constitution, pass enabling administration, or exercise some administrative authority.

In the new in Illinois has been the fact that all local school boards (except Chicago's) can be determined by the state board of education to be insolvent, which means they can be taken over by the state, have their elected board members removed, district merged or divided, etc. Its a precondition for bail-out money. Republicans want the Chicago school district to be brought into this program as a condition for a bailout; Democrats see the vast and potentially radical powers that such legislation would give a Republican governor. A law will not be passed, though in theory it could.