Mike Huckabee, professional talker, espouses the position that a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't mean diddly.
Now that, if true, could really cause a heck of a mess.
For one thing, a state--Arkansas, say--could banish all its abortions to back alleys.
A state could declare that it didn't like the Citizens United ruling and would not certify for the ballot any candidates associated with unlimited outside expenditures in their behalf.
Huckabee says Abraham Lincoln felt the same way he does, though Abe remains unavailable for comment.
On ABC on Sunday morning, Huckabee said that Kim Davis, the oft-heterosexually married Kentucky county clerk, was entitled not to obey the same-sex marriage ruling, and to deny marriage licenses on religious grounds. Her right existed, he said, because the legislative branch hadn't ratified the court's gay marriage ruling by statute.
He said she held the right of resistance to the same-sex ruling in the same way Lincoln defied the Dred Scott ruling.
Alas, those matters are not exactly the same. Huckabee misses nuance. Some preachers have trouble with nuance. Sermons are better without gray areas.
Lincoln deplored for sure the Dred Scott ruling, by which five justices said slaves weren't citizens and that the western territories couldn't decide slavery for themselves in the event a slave owner brought his slave there. The majority said the slave owner held the pre-existing right to retain his property wherever he took it.
In his famous debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln said the ruling was horrible and that it applied to the matter of Dred Scott alone, not other cases, although he acknowledged that the dire precedent was clear. So he advocated having the ruling undone by a differently deciding Supreme Court adjudicating similar cases that would make their way through the system. But he specifically stressed that he did not propose resisting the ruling itself.
By the time a similar case made its way to the court, in 1862, the South had seceded and Civil War was raging over the transcendent issue of slavery altogether.
The Lincoln and Davis cases would become more comparable if civil war broke out in America over same-sex marriage.
Lincoln's opposition to Dred Scott was more like mine to Citizens United or the Arkansas General Assembly's to Roe v. Wade.
I'd love to see Citizens United undone by another case or a constitutional amendment. The Arkansas General Assembly would love to erode Roe v. Wade by passing laws that presume to carve into its application, thereby creating test cases. In fact, Northern state legislatures passed defiant measures in response to Dred Scott.
But in none of those instances did a single public official directly refuse to provide a service required of the office by a court ruling.
Anyway, it's different now. The nation has since adopted the 14th Amendment that guarantees equal protection under the law to everyone everywhere in the country.
That fortifies the plain truth that a Supreme Court ruling in one place is determinative for a similar situation in another place. Otherwise the protection would be unequal.
We have come over the years to resist anarchy and accept the overwhelmingly obvious principle that a ruling of unconstitutionality in a single case applies instantly to that circumstance universally. Otherwise, Topeka, Kan., might today offer the only racially integrated schools in the country, since Brown v. Board of Education was about only it.
In Huckabee's view, Orval Faubus could have simply ordered Dwight Eisenhower to take his troops and shove 'em up ... to Topeka.
The Kentucky clerk's lawyer could file motions and make appeals and foment a rigmarole to his heart's content. But he can't successfully contend that the basic right to an early-pregnancy abortion, the mandate for school integration and the required granting of same-sex marriage licenses are matters of personal option.
As for the argument from the right wing that the Kentucky clerk had been denied her constitutional right to freedom of religion, let's be clear: She did not get in any trouble for her religion.
She got in trouble for not performing a legal requirement of her public office.
Speaking of religion, the pending solution to this matter strikes me as mildly Solomonic.
The clerk gets out of jail so long as she doesn't interfere with the five of her six deputies who have sworn to issue same-sex licenses, albeit ones that no longer bear the personal name of the clerk.
Huckabee gets some desperately needed attention.
And, before it's over, I suspect Arkansas will get a monument to this woman on its Capitol lawn.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/10/2015