Daphna Renan
speaker
126 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 4d ago
Daphna Renan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah.
So who picked up on it is former Confederates that were trying to reclaim an old vision of the Constitution through a very targeted litigation strategy in
culminating in the Supreme Court and also a kind of
war of ideas, as one of them wrote in in The Lost Cause that became a kind of tract
that was putting forward the ideology that what we had was a a reckless Congress because a as the as reconstruction unfolds, Congress is passing the first civil rights laws, the first vote protections, the first agencies administering what they term practical freedom.
And so the the ideology is look, what we have is a reckless Congress, it's it's run amok, it's given up on the constitutional tradition.
Um, and what we need is a Supreme Court that can reclaim the constitution as it was.
So that is the vision that underwrites the the rise of judicial supremacy at at this period.
And the Republican Party.
comes into being in opposition to that vision.
So you see um Abraham Lincoln is kind of trying to think of what would it to make sense of this uh creed of judicial supremacy actually as the the Supreme Court's deciding Dred Scott.
And there are these scraps of his notes that he's saying, well what would it mean if this were actually the dominant creed that the Supreme Court gets to decide the question of whether Congress can restrict
um the spread of slavery in the territories or not.
And and he says and and judicial supremacy wouldn't just require that, it would actually require us to obey not uh not just the parties in the litigation, but all of us, the whole community, all of Congress, all of government, to obey the court on any constitutional question.
And he thinks like, how is this compatible with American constitutional democracy?
So Lincoln kind of rises to power, making a name for himself in debates in Illinois, where where he is taking the position that this cannot be our constitutional creed.
that uh the judicial supremacy giving this kind of power to the court is not uh a viable strategy for um building a meaningful democratic republic in in the United States.
And it becomes the the founding creed of the Republican Party that which really um you know stands in opposition to what they they term again and again is they they they will not stand for another a second Dred Scott decision.
So so those become the the
politics of the nation as it is
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