It was one of the second debate’s stranger moments. Bush was asked about whom he would chose to fill Supreme Court vacancies and why. Though the president understandably sidestepped specific names, he indicated he’d choose “strict constructionists.”
Bush added that he’d select judges who agreed with him on the legality of “under God” in the Pledge. He also had one more legal precedent in mind:
“Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.”
Bush isn’t a lawyer (true story: he applied to University of Texas Law School but they rejected him), so I guess it’s understandable that he misstated the specifics of this case. But what was Bush’s point? That he’s against slavery? That he’s vaguely aware of a Supreme Court case from 1846?
My friend Paperwight cut through the rhetoric and explained that the reference has little to do with slavery and everything to do with abortion.
Anti-choice advocates have been comparing Roe v. Wade with Dred Scott v. Sandford for some time now. There is a constant drumbeat on the religious right to compare the contemporary culture war over abortion with the 19th century fight over slavery, with the anti-choicers cast in the role of the abolitionists.
Don’t believe me? Here.
Further, Bush has to describe Dred Scott as about wrongheaded personal beliefs, rather than a fairly constricted constitutional interpretation because he needs to paint Roe v. Wade the same way, and he wants “strict constructionists” in the Supreme Court, so he can’t really talk about the actual rationale used in Dred Scott.
Excellent point. It explains a lot.
I realize the right chides the left because we generally believe that conservatives will use “code words” that speak to their base without offending a mainstream audience. As far as the right is concerned, we’re paranoid — the rhetoric should be accepted at face value; it has no deeper meaning. I strongly disagree.
In the ’80s, “welfare queen” was thrown around as a euphemism for inner-city African Americans. In one of the most famous “code” swipes of all time, H.W. Bush admonished Dukakis for being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” which obviously was intended to raise the specter of being a “card-carrying member of the Communist Party.”
Political “code” words have been particularly common with this President Bush, particularly with regards to evangelical Republicans. Washington Monthly’s Amy Sullivan helped explain last year how Bush (or in this case, his speechwriters) choose their words carefully to be targeted, quietly, to a religious audience.
When President George W. Bush spoke of the “wonder-working power” of Americans in his 2003 State of the Union address, many television viewers may have considered it simply a nice rhetorical turn of phrase, an eloquent way of describing the potential social impact of volunteerism, which holds great appeal to a wide swath of American voters. Millions of evangelical listeners, however, knew better. They were already humming along to the rest of the chorus of an old gospel hymn that speaks of changing the world through divine, not human, intervention: “There is … wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb.”
The speech was, in many ways, a microcosm of the Bush administration’s more global strategy for appealing to religious constituencies. “Wonder-working power” was a kind of code that slid under the radar of many listeners and commentators, but was immediately recognized by the target audience of evangelical Christians.
With this in mind, the Dred Scott reference makes a lot more sense.