Dred Scott decision can’t nullify Harris’ eligibility

I believe in embracing our history. Even when it’s discriminatory I believe we should learn from history, remember it and teach from it.

Our history happened. Slavery happened. Japanese incarceration in the U.S. during World War II happened. Racist practices in America happened.

But why should we be able to use overturned racist laws and try to resurrect them, legally?

I asked myself this question after the National Federation of Republican Assemblies claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris is ineligible to hld the office of president, citing “precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases.”

Among the six cases in the document attributed to the NFRA was the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857.

Dred Scott? Are you kidding me? Dred Scott is widely regarded as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. It’s so bad, I wish we called it something else, as to not disparage the Black man whose name it uses.

At the Supreme Court Historical Society Annual Lecture in 2009, Justice Stephen Breyer said the title “worst” reflects “the immorality of the decision.”

The decision ruled that enslaved people aren’t protected citizens. According to archives.gov: “In 1846, an enslaved Black man named Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court. They claimed that they were free due to their residence in a free territory where slavery was prohibited.”

From Oyez.org, a free law project from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute: “The majority held that ‘a negro, whose ancestors were imported into (the U.S.), and sold as slaves,’ whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore did not have standing to sue in federal court.”

The document argues that candidates Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Harris (“whose parents were not American citizens at the time of their birth”) are ignoring this old, fallacious and unsound law.

You know why it’s unsound? Constitutional amendments overturned Dred Scott. The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (all those born here become citizens) and 15th (the right to vote can’t be denied based on race, color or previous condition of servitude) said so.

But here we are. Because this old ruling still appears in the legal books, a political group can attempt to deploy it like a weapon.

Here is my problem: Dred Scott happened, and kids today should learn about it. But why can’t we say, “Nope, that ruling and many other discriminatory laws like it technically don’t exist. And you can’t use it in a legal argument.”

Why can’t we do that?

Numerous states didn’t repeal bans on interracial marriage for years after the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case allowed people of different ethnicities to marry.

Racial covenants limiting Black people’s property rights were still on the books in Missouri as recently as 2021.

The presence of these laws is clerical in nature and they should be repealed as a matter of symbolic importance, but they rarely have any practical effect after being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, let alone in the aftermath of three amendments to the U.S. Constitution nullifying the law.

This argument attributed to the NFRA is a waste of time, brain cells and taxpayer money if it goes any further. I say let’s make any laws overturned by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments invisible to legal arguments.

Yvette Walker is a columnist for the Kansas City (Mo.) Star.