Trump’s Nominee for Deputy AG Won’t Say if the Dred Scott Case Was Rightly Decided

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It’s routine for Republican judicial and Justice Department nominees to dodge questions about Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision striking down state abortion bans. And that’s what Deputy Attorney General nominee Jeffrey Rosen did today in his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings, as the Daily Beast reports:

“Would you agree that Roe v. Wade was correctly decided?” [Democratic Senator Richard] Blumenthal asked.

“What I would agree with is that it’s the precedent of the Supreme Court for better than 40 years now and unless and until that changes, it’s the law,” he replied.

Blumenthal then pressed him on whether it was decided correctly, and Rosen said he didn’t have anything more to say.

Since everyone knows the Trump administration is committed to the reversal of Roe but wants to avoid mobilizing supporters of reproductive rights, that response was no surprise. But the same answer to a different question from Blumenthal was another matter:

“Was the Dred Scott case correctly decided?” Blumenthal asked.

“Senator, I don’t think that it would be a productive exercise for me to go through the most — thousands of Supreme Court opinions and say which ones are right and which ones are wrong,” he said …

“I, um, I have views about lots of Supreme Court cases,” Rosen said, “but I’m not being nominated for this position to be the Solicitor General nor a judge and I think in this context the point I’m trying to make is that, whatever the law is, whether it’s a decision I would favor or disfavor, I see it as the role of the Department of Justice to uphold the law such as it is, unless Congress or the courts change it.”

Dred Scott, of course, was the decision that ruled a slave was still property in Free States.

Rosen’s not the first Trump appointee to take this tack: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and several lower-court nominees also refused to specifically endorse the overturning of Dred Scott, generally regarded as one of SCOTUS’ greatest decisions, as a correctly decided precedent.

But still, even Trumpites should understand how outrageous it is for the prospective number-two person in the agency responsible for enforcing civil rights laws to take the Fifth on a landmark bad decision that even open bigots now accept as inevitable and even right. Judges can at least claim they never second-guess each other in informal settings. Rosen has no such excuse.

This is a satirical website. Don't take it Seriously. It's a joke.

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