Mike Huckabee Just Said The Dred Scott Decision ‘Remains To This Day The Law Of The Land’

Mike Huckabee just displayed his extreme and willful ignorance about very basics issues of American jurisprudence. 

Mike Huckabee for months has been peddling a faulty understanding of how the law in America works. The former Arkansas governor insists that unless a local, state, or federal lawmaking body, like your city council or the U.S. Congress, passes a bill and it is signed into law, it isn’t law. In other words, everything is illegal unless a law makes it legal. 

On top of that false theory, Huckabee insists that the Supreme Court cannot “make laws.” So if they strike down a law, say, a ban on same-sex marriage, that does not mean that same-sex marriage is legal.

Some may have bought into this fiddle-faddle, but now Huckabee has pushed his unique version of jurisprudence too far.

“Mike Huckabee said Wednesday that the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford — which held that all blacks, free or enslaved, could not be American citizens — is still the law of the land even though no one follows it,” Buzzfeed’s Christopher Massie reports today.

Of course, nearly every high school student, and many even younger, know that the 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision.

“I’ve been just drilled by TV hosts over the past week, ‘How dare you say that, uh, it’s not the law of the land?’” Huckabee told right wing radio host Michael Medved. “Because that’s their phrase, ‘it’s the law of the land. Michael, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land which says that black people aren’t fully human. Does anybody still follow the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision?”

Medved asked Huckabee if he would try, if elected president, to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Huckabee said. “Because, in the case of this decision, it goes back to what Jefferson said that if a decision is rendered that is not borne out by the will of the people either through their elected people and gone through the process, if you just say, it’s the law of the land because the court decided, then Jefferson said, ‘You now have surrendered to judicial tyranny.’”

“The Supreme Court in the same-sex marriage decision made a law and they made it up out of thin air. Therefore, until Congress decides to codify that and give it a statute it’s really not an operative law and that’s why what Kim Davis did was operate under not only the Kentucky Constitution which was the law under which she was elected but she’s operating under the fact that there’s no statute in her state nor at the federal level that authorizes her,” Huckabee claimed.

Listen:

Needless to say, responses on Twitter have been quick:

 

Image: Screenshot via Courier-Journal