Quote of note:

That is the choice facing us: are we to continue to pile up debt forever so that billionaires may keep "their" money? Are we to sacrifice the rights as citizens to a decent life to prop up the stock market? Or will we see, as Jefferson did, that a high national debt means the living work for the dead. The fight over social security is like the fight over slavery: there are those who want to consume the future to feed the present, who will strip bare the land so that we can have a few more years of low dividend tax rates in the present. Our interests as stockholders, or our rights as citizens?

The sign of crisis in a nation is when, to feed the beast, the present wishes to stretch back and erase two generations of government. Taney stretched back to 1787, and now George W. Bush seeks to reach back to 1933, in order to erase the New Deal, and the most important pillar of its legacy.

Feeding the Beast: Dred Scott and George W Bush.
by Stirling Newberry

...Taney argued not merely that slavery should continue, but that America was a slave nation, whose existence was defined by protection of slavery, which could send people to die in Indian Wars to protect slavery. Slavery, was property, and property the overwhelming truth of America. That the very same men who passed the Ordinance to organize the Northwest territory did not think that they had nullified their own actions does not enter into Taney's mind.

This then is the eternal conflict between the reactionary faction in politics, whatever party or parties of government it works through, and the progressive movement in politics. The reactionary faction believes that the future belongs to the past, and that when there is a conflict between the rights of citizenship, and the rights of property, then citizenship is inconsequential, "a mere nullity". The progressive movement in politics believes that the first and most sacred truth of government, is the rights of the living. It was Jefferson who enunciated this principle, and who, despite the limitations of his time, tried time and again to have it established.