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Congress is currently weighing a bill that would remove the bust of Roger B. Taney that is on display in the old Supreme Court chambers inside the capitol. Taney, who served as chief justice of the United States from 1836 to 1864, is best known as the author of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the notorious case which said that black Americans have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Taney stands out as a uniquely odious figure in American history. One of the big questions in Dred Scott was whether Scott had standing as a U.S. citizen to sue in federal court. Taney’s opinion rejected the idea of black citizenship outright.

Blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution,” Taney asserted. At the time of the founding, blacks “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order.” In Taney’s view, black Americans were entitled to nothing more than whatever cursory privileges “as those who held the power and the Government might choose to give them.”

In addition to being wildly racist, Taney’s argument was historically illiterate. As Justice Benjamin Curtis pointed out in his Dred Scott dissent, “at the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, all free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens.”

What is more, Curtis noted, at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, “in some of the States, as we have seen, colored persons were among those qualified by law to act on this subject. These colored persons were not only included in the body of ‘the people of the United States,’ by whom the Constitution was ordained and established, but in at least five of the States they had the power to act, and countless did act, by their suffrages, upon the question of its adoption.”

In other words, a number of black Americans were quite literally part of “We the People” at the exact moment when those famous words were enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution. Taney’s toxic interpretation not only violated constitutional text and history, but it retroactively wrote those patriots out of the constitutional system that they helped to found.

Congress later overturned Taney’s villainous judgment when it enacted the legislation that became the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Among other things, the amendment’s Birthright Citizenship Clause rendered Dred Scott a dead letter.

Interestingly, one person who does not want to see the Taney statue removed from the capitol is Dred Scott’s great-great-granddaughter, Lynne M. Jackson, the president and founder of the Dred Scott Heritage Society. As WUSA9 reports, Jackson would rather see a bust of Scott placed alongside the bust of Taney. The current statue resides in the “place where the Dred Scott case was decided,” Jackson told the Associated Press. Having Taney “there by himself is lopsided.”

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On the first night of large-scale protests in Portland, Oregon, over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Jennifer Styles (who we granted anonymity so that she could speak freely about the situation at her workplace) was working the graveyard shift at the Multnomah County Justice Center, which houses the headquarters of the Portland Police Bureau and one of the city’s two county jails. It was May 29 and the 28-year veteran of law enforcement was alone in the basement’s booking and reception area when the fire alarms started going off.

Not being able to see outside, Styles switched on the news. The front of the Justice Center was on fire, a fact confirmed when friends immediately started to text, asking about her safety. By then smoke was pumping through the building’s ventilation system.

“I was in a secure part of the jail but I had civilian co-workers I was talking to in another area that was not secure,” she says, including people who worked as nurses and counselors and support staff for the jail. “Those people are not trained on confrontation. They’re not trained on how to deescalate. They’re not trained on how to fight people and protect themselves.”

Styles stayed on the phone with civilian staff, working out what to tell them if they needed to escape, weighing the possibility that running into a mass of the people attacking the jail would put them in additional danger. Then Styles heard the sound of breaking glass: the Justice Center’s big first floor windows were coming down. 

“You could hear the glass cracking and shattering,” she says. “At that point, the rioters were in.” 

Alone in the basement, Styles listened to what was happening overhead. “You could hear [rioters] throwing stuff. They were tipping over all the copiers. They were picking up computers and throwing them across the room,” she says. “And you could hear yelling, and it was very hard to distinguish if the yelling was from staff or if it was the rioters.”

She considered whether her coworkers were being beaten. They were not. That first night, they made it to the basement, where, until the ventilation system reversed, “we all got to breathe in toxic fumes,” she says. “The next week, they set dumpsters on fire, so then we got to inhale and have burning lungs from construction dumpsters.”

Such was the determination and demonstrativeness of Portland protesters that they continued to direct rage at the Justice Center for weeks, ripping down temporary fencing, sandbagging doors, and shooting fireworks inside. 

Then, on June 26 Trump signed an executive order to protect national monuments and federal buildings. Suddenly, the protesters had a new target: the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse, directly north of the Justice Center. 

The presence of federal law enforcement has been widely decried by local and state officials, and understood to have only escalated tensions between law enforcement and citizenry. However, it’s also given those who want to commit violence against a symbol an even bigger one, which has conversely taken pressure off the Justice Center.

“Up until the feds showed up, it didn’t feel like anybody cared,” says Styles. “Most staff felt like we were left out to be eaten, because we never knew when the politicians were going to say, ‘You know what? You’re all on your own.’ That’s what it’s felt like, like [Portland Mayor Ted] Wheeler and [Oregon Governor Kate] Brown have completely hung us out to dry. They’re more and more anti-police. They’re basically tying [the hands] of all the tactical teams, as to what they’re allowed to do to protect themselves and to protect us. But you know, there’s no rationale to, ‘Hey, go ahead and spend millions of dollars destroying these buildings, while blocking human beings inside and setting things on fire so they potentially can’t escape.'”

While Styles might feel more secure with the arrival of federal police, the consensus in the city is that federal forces have served only to embolden peaceful protestors who, if they did not before feel sympathy for the more violent factions among them, do now. They’re appalled at the violence federal agents are leveling at people, at the lack of accountability, at the rank overreaction. 

Styles does not see it this way. She thinks those committing violence have been allowed to get away with attacking buildings and monuments because they’ve become accustomed to a police force that has been told not to arrest protestors, the definition of which refracts depending on where you stand on the political spectrum.

“We hear on a regular basis, ‘We’re just protesting! We haven’t done anything criminal; we’re not doing anything violent,'” she says. “Tearing apart all the fencing, blocking people—mothers, fathers, husbands, whatever—in a building and then trying to either smoke us out or set us on fire? And all they’re going to get is a slap on the wrist. Their lives and their rights are more valuable than ours.”

As far as Styles can tell, there are two types of people attacking the buildings every night; committed radicals, and assorted hooligans.

“The fact is that these people, the agitators, are very organized,” she says. “You catch them at night live-streaming on either Twitch or YouTube or Periscope, and you can hear them talking about what tools they need to bring the next night so they can dismantle this or that block and make it harder for the officers to get out.”

They are also getting bolder, staging people at the Justice Center’s parking ramp, writing down or taking photos of staff license plates and, via DMV records, posting employees’ home addresses, she says. 

“All I can do is put on my bright lights and hope they cannot see it,” says Styles.

The attacks have destroyed all of the Justice Center’s street level windows, and the office on the first floor had to be gutted. Half the staff has relocated to the other county jail (which has thus far escaped destruction), while those who remain at the Justice Center learn to navigate the nightly tensions.

It’s not for everyone. 

“It takes a psychological toll, when we are told on a daily basis that we should all die, that everybody hates us,” says Styles. “We’re grown adults, but when you start hearing that on a regular basis, and you see the news that we should be defunded and all cops are bastards and all pigs should die, you get to the point where officers are quitting and resigning and retiring early.”

Styles is staying. She’s set to retire in two years, and also, she likes her job, albeit it requires her to “hear stories of horrific things” that people do to each other.

“I have to talk to these people who have committed the crimes, and they have no concern over other human beings,” she says. “And then I see all these people out here demolishing our building and wanting to kill officers. And it’s the same thing; they have no concern over human life. How is that any different?”

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The left has long regarded federalism as a total sham whose real purpose, since slavery, has been to maintain white dominance, not limit federal power over states. And President Donald Trump—aided by his administration’s enablers—is doing everything in his power to prove leftists right. Even before the pandemic, but certainly after it, Trump has toggled between invoking and dissing states rights depending on what would go down best with his predominantly white base.

Trump got elected on an anti-immigration platform that played on nativist fears. Its central pillar consisted of attacks on so-called sanctuary cities that don’t fully cooperate with federal efforts to eject undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom happen to be Latino. And true to his word, Trump has left no stone unturned to go after these jurisdictions in his four years in office. He has made multiple attempts, including via executive order, to strip federal aid from such cities. Courts have repeatedly rebuffed his efforts—but that didn’t stop him from threatening again in April to even deny pandemic-related aid to these cities if they didn’t fall in line with his immigration enforcement priorities.

Nor has President Trump shown much appreciation for state autonomy when it comes to reopening the economy in the midst of the pandemic. He claims to have “ultimate authority” to force states to end their lockdown. If a liberal president made such statements to, say, deal with a climate emergency, Republicans would have conniptions. Yet when Trump invoked it, Vice President Mike Pence, a religious conservative who built his own failed run for the presidency in 2016 around a “renewed vision of federalism” to push back against federal diktats on gay marriage and other cultural issues, insisted that there was a “long history” demonstrating that “the authority of the president of the United States during national emergencies is unquestionably plenary.”(Plenary power means that the president can act without regard to constitutional constraints.) To be sure, governors who are prolonging the lockdowns without factoring in economic costs deserve pushback. But that hardly means that a president lacking granular knowledge of local disease spread should usurp local control, something that Pence of all people ought to understand.

Likewise, Trump wants to withhold federal education dollars from school districts that are reluctant to physically reopen. He was originally proposing to strip them of existing federal funds but that is unlikely to pass legal muster. Hence, as with sanctuary cities, he is now is toying with tying new coronavirus relief funding to the reopening of schools. Trump hasn’t ruled out a veto on the trillion-dollar “stimulus” package currently in the works if it fails to make school aid conditional.

Does Pence, who, as governor of Indiana, refused the Obama administration’s $80 million federal pre-school grant, claiming it would result in “federal intrusion,” have any qualms about Trump’s intrusions? Nope! He’s all on board and has pledged to explore ways to “give states a strong incentive and encouragement to get kids back to school.”

But such soft extensions of Uncle Sam’s powers of the purse in violation of principles of federalism pale in comparison with the hard police power that Trump is deploying in cities experiencing protests against police brutality.

To burnish his bona fides as a “law and order” president, Trump dispatched federal agents wearing tactical gear driving unmarked vehicles to scoop up and detain protesters in Portland, Oregon, who Trump has branded as “violent anarchists.” His initial pretext was to safeguard federal buildings from “vandalism” (which initially mostly consisted of graffiti). But on July 11, as per The Dispatch’s Charlotte Lawson, a “rapid deployment team” cracked down on a largely peaceful crowd with “brutal” force deploying tear gas, batons, and rubber bullets—cracking the skull of one protester. This has only escalated the situation, inciting even more—and less peaceful—protests, prompting local and state lawmakers to plead with Trump to call off his troops and to sue him.

The leader of a party that champions federalism and respect for states’ rights would listen to them. Trump, however, is doubling down. He is threatening to send more federal forces to Chicago and other cities “run by very liberal Democrats.”

This is reminiscent of the tactics that President Richard Nixon, another law and order president whose political strategy Trump seems to be channeling, deployed to court his Southern white base. In fact, notes Foundation for Research and Equal Opportunity’s Jonathan Blank, federal SWAT teams are a 1970s invention whose express purpose was to quell white fear of racial unrest.

But its not just Trump’s assaults on federalism that are calculated to rally his base, his invocations of it are too.

Masks are deeply unpopular with Trump supporters and have become yet another flashpoint in the culture wars. Until recently, Trump was refusing to wear one himself much less use the bully pulpit to encourage their use despite their widely accepted efficacy in stopping the spread of the disease. So when asked why he didn’t support a national mask mandate he said he wants to “leave it up to the governors” and that “people need a certain freedom.”

This would of course be a perfectly respectable answer—just because something is desirable does not mean it should be imposed!— if Trump weren’t simultaneously cracking heads of protesters in violation of their freedoms and strong-arming states to do his bidding on other issues. Under the circumstances, however, it is not just hypocritical but a dangerous mockery of individual freedom and states’ rights.

Liberals never had any use for federalism and have always been perfectly willing to deploy federal power to advance their tyranny of good intention. But Trump’s brazen and self-serving inconsistency will make it all but impossible for genuine federalists to rely on this principle to push back against such tyranny.

They can blame Trump when the left turns around and accuses them of being mere protectors of white power.

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