When in the course of American history, the Supreme Court of the United States has delivered an opinion that the public regards as outrageous, it sets in motion the political equivalent of Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."   Such was the case in 1857 when Chief Justice Roger Taney's Court issued the obscene ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford which condemned Scott to a life of slavery.  The reaction to that decision was growing support for the aggressively antislavery Republican Party, established only three years earlier,. Thus in the next presidential election its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was the winner. The South, in its turn, reacted by passing eleven ordinances of secession that brought on the Civil War. In 2012, 155 years after the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court has ruled, in effect, that all Americans are slaves, that whatever shall be decreed by the powers-that-be in Washington shall ...(Read Full Post)