The Chief Justice's Goof

The otherwise perfectly awesome inauguration of our new President hit an embarrassing speed bump when Chief Justice Roberts messed up the oath of office he was to administer to the President. He apparently tried to recite the 35 words from memory, and as my grandmother used to say, 'got his tongue wrapped around his eye tooth and couldn't see what he was talking about." Mr. Obama tried to correct the awkward incident but seemingly didn't recite the words exactly. I learned in 40 years as a minister to never try to remember ceremonial words like wedding vows, the mind plays tricks.

The beauty of the inauguration and the great speech the President delivered seemed to cover what had happened in the confusion of the recital of the oath. By the next day however, some people, mostly of conservative persuasion, raised questions of the legality of the inauguration. Chris Wallace of Fox News was shown saying that he doubted that Mr. Obama had really become President. Yesterday, the Chief Justice hauled himself and his robe down to the White House, and without using a Bible, but I imagine a typed index card, administered the oath of office in a private but photographically recorded ceremony. The law of the land has been followed.

In the first attempt at doing the oath Mrs. Obama held the Bible that Abraham Lincoln had used when he was sworn in by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. That set me to thinking. Taney was not only Chief Justice but a chief political enemy of Lincoln and the principal author of the Dred Scott Decision, one of the most shockingly dismal documents of the American government and probably a major cause of the Civil War. A footnote is that Senator Obama voted against the confirmation of Roberts as Chief Justice. Taney gave the majority decision in the Dred Scott v Sandford decision that ruled among other issues that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States. "They were," he wrote, "altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Now of course. one of them is our Commander in Chief and President of the United States.

A fine book on the subject is "Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney," by James F. Simon, a wonderful Civil War and Lincoln historian who died this last summer.

This isn't a case of history repeating itself, Roberts certainly doesn't sink to the level of Taney (pronounced Tawny) but an interesting comparison. Anyway, Barack Obama is our President, legally signed, sealed and delivered by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court