Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African-American on October 2, 1967 and I wanted to look at his life, and I found this article at Mental Floss.

From Mental Floss:

Before he became the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall was already a powerful civil rights pioneer: He argued 32 cases in front of the Supreme Court in his work as a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the ’40s and ’50s. He won 29 of those cases, including landmark decisions about school segregation and voting rights. And although his name is synonymous with the civil rights battles of the 1950s, Marshall was also at the forefront of debates about police brutality, women’s rights, and the death penalty.

Over 50 years after his historic appointment to the nation’s highest court, Marshall is remembered both for his trailblazing work and for his big personality. (Justice Marshall was a devoted fan of Days of Our Lives and as solicitor general was known to “drink bourbon and tell stories full of lies” with President Lyndon Johnson.) Here are a few things to know about this civil rights hero and legal pioneer, who was born on this day 110 years ago.

1 HE WASN’T ALWAYS THURGOOD.

Thoroughgood Marshall was born in Maryland in 1908. Young Thoroughgood would eventually change his name to Thurgood. He once admitted, “By the time I reached the second grade, I got tired of spelling all that out and had shortened it to Thurgood.”

2 HE LEARNED ABOUT LAW FROM HIS FATHER.

As a child in Baltimore, Marshall developed an interest in the law when his father William, a country club steward, took him to observe legal arguments at local courts. Thurgood and his father then had lengthy discussions around the dinner table during which Thurgood’s father fought every statement his son made. Justice Marshall said of his father in 1965, “He never told me to be a lawyer, but he turned me into one.”

3 AS A YOUNG LAWYER, MARSHALL FOUGHT FOR AFRICAN-AMERICAN TEACHERS TO BE PAID FAIRLY.

During his time at Lincoln University (where he graduated with honors in 1930), Marshall’s family struggled to afford the tuition. His mother, Norma, who worked as a teacher, pleaded each term with the university’s registrar to accept late payments, whenever she could scrape together enough money to pay the cost of attendance.

Marshall tackled equal pay for African-American teachers after he graduated from Howard University’s law school in 1933. Six years later, Marshall won a big victory for teachers like his mother, when a federal court struck down pay discrimination against African-American teachers in Maryland. Marshall went on to fight for teacher pay equality in 10 states across the South. And many of his most well-known legal battles were fought against discrimination in public education, like Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

4 HE WORKED A NIGHT JOB AT A BALTIMORE HEALTH CLINIC DURING SOME OF THE BIGGEST LEGAL BATTLES OF HIS EARLY CAREER.

Marshall fought to make ends meet as a young lawyer. In 1934, he took a second job at a clinic that treated sexually transmitted diseases. Marshall worked at the clinic even as he prepared for the landmark case to integrate the University of Maryland. When he moved to New York in 1936, Marshall did not officially quit his night job—he merely requested a 6-month leave of absence from the clinic, according to biographer Larry S. Gibson. But Marshall never returned to his night job. By 1940, he had become the Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

5 MARSHALL RISKED HIS LIFE WHILE FIGHTING CIVIL RIGHTS BATTLES.

While working for the NAACP in 1946, Marshall traveled to Columbia, Tennessee to defend a group of African-American men. Marshall and his colleagues feared for their safety after the trial and tried to leave town fast. But, according to biographer Wil Haygood, they were ambushed by locals on the road to Nashville. Marshall was arrested on false charges, placed in a sheriff’s car, and driven quickly off the main road. His colleagues—who were told to keep driving to Nashville—followed the car, which then returned to the main road. Marshall said that he would have been lynched if not for the arrival of his colleagues.

6 HE WAS BOTH AN INFORMANT AND A SUBJECT OF AN FBI INVESTIGATION DURING THE RED SCARE.

In the 1950s, Marshall tipped off the FBI about communist attempts to infiltrate the NAACP. But he was also the subject of FBI investigation, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover. According to FBI files, critics tried to connect Marshall to communism through his membership in the National Lawyers Guild, a group that was called “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party” by the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. Later, after he was nominated to the Supreme Court, Marshall’s opponents tried again to tie him to communism, but the FBI couldn’t find any communist ties.

7 AFTER A ROCKY START, PRESIDENT KENNEDY APPOINTED MARSHALL TO HIS FIRST JUDICIAL ROLE.

President John F. Kennedy sent his brother Bobby to meet with Marshall about civil rights in 1961. But Marshall did not hit it off with the Kennedys and felt his experience on the topic was being discounted. According to Marshall, Bobby “spent all his time telling us what we should do.” Still, a few months later, Kennedy nominated Marshall to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals. It took a year for the Senate to confirm his nomination, over the objection of several southern Senators.

8 PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON NOMINATED MARSHALL TO THE SUPREME COURT IN 1967, AFTER HE CREATIVELY ENGINEERED AN OPENING ON THE COURT.

In 1967, President Johnson wanted to put Marshall on the Supreme Court—but there wasn’t a vacancy, so Johnson decided to do a little political maneuvering. According to the most common version of what happened, Johnson appointed Justice Tom Clark’s son, Ramsey, as the Attorney General, which made the elder Clark—who feared a conflict of interest—retire on June 12, 1967. Johnson officially nominated Marshall as his replacement the next day.

9 MARSHALL HAD TO UNDERGO AN INTENSE SENATE CONFIRMATION HEARING BEFORE TAKING HIS SEAT ON THE SUPREME COURT.

Marshall was sworn in to the Supreme Court on October 2, 1967. But before he took the oath of office, he had to survive a grueling wait, as several senators from southern states worked to derail his nomination. For four days in July 1967, those senators questioned Marshall about his legal philosophy and imposed a quiz about political history, reminiscent of a Jim Crow-era literacy test. Marshall was subjected to more hours of questioning than any Supreme Court nominee before him. Finally, on August 30, the Senate voted to send him to the Supreme Court.

10. HIS LEGACY IS STILL DEBATED.

Marshall had a perfect record of supporting affirmative action and opposing capital punishment during his tenure on the Supreme Court. But he grew frustrated with the Court in the 1980s and announced his retirement in 1991. Then, in 2010, President Barack Obama nominated one of Marshall’s former clerks to the Supreme Court. During Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearing, senators questioned her connection to Marshall and criticized his record. But Kagan speaks fondly about Marshall: “This was a man who created opportunities for so many people in this country and improved their lives. I would call him a hero. I would call him the greatest lawyer of the twentieth century.”

SOURCE: Mental Floss: Amy Moreland

Filly brought this story to my attention and I thought it would make an interesting open. 

From historicmsyteries.com:

A star, decorated with flawless Brazilian diamonds, and with an emerald trefoil and ruby cross set against blue enamel. A diamond badge, and five gold jewel-encrusted collars. These were the stunning pieces that made up the Irish Crown Jewels, and on July 6, 1907, the gems were discovered to be missing.

Most of the 394 jewels came from Queen Charlotte, wife of George III and Queen of Great Britain (and later the United Kingdom) from 1761 until 1818. Their value, for the stones alone, has been estimated at many millions of dollars, but for the history they encompass they are priceless.

And nobody knows where they are. 

The Heist

The timing of the theft was particularly significant: the jewels were taken just before the visit of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom in the summer of 1907. As part of this occasion, the jewels were supposed to be used to swear in Lord Castletown as a new knight of the Order of St Patrick.

Just four years earlier, in 1903, security around the jewels had been beefed up. The Ulster King of Arms office in Dublin Castle, who had responsibility for the jewels, had moved from the Bermingham Tower to the Bedford or Clock Tower.

The jewels were moved to a new safe, which would be kept in the newly built strongroom set up specifically for that purpose. But the new safe was too enormous to fit through the entryway to the strongroom, so the Ulster King of Arms, Sir Arthur Vicars, had it housed in his library instead.

Vicars and his employees owned seven latch keys to the Office of Arms’s entrance, as well as two keys to the safe containing the jewels. With so many locks protecting the safe and the priceless artifacts within, they were considered completely safe from theft.

However, one should never discount the human element in such security measures, and here we have our first suspect: Vicars himself. Somehow, he had access to the jewels and could retrieve them on his own, a clear vulnerability in the system.

Furthermore, during the long night hours spent on duty guarding the jewels, Vicars was known to drink. On one occasion, he awoke from a drunken stupor to discover he was wearing the jewels around his neck.

Was this the actions of a drunkard who didn’t take his job seriously? Had someone placed the jewels around his neck while he was passed out to mock him, as a cruel joke at his expense exposing his incompetence?

Or could this be a trial run for the theft itself?

Who Stole the Irish Crown Jewels?

One of the key problems with solving this almost inconceivable crime is that it is not known when exactly the jewels were taken. There was no system in place to regularly inspect the jewels, and they were kept locked in the safe out of sight. It was only with the imminent arrival of Edward VII that the jewels, somewhat embarrassingly, were found to be missing.

The jewels had last been seen in the safe on 11 June 1907, and so were stolen at some point between then and 6 July when, four days before the King’s arrival, their theft was noticed. The King still came to Ireland, but Lord Castleton, without the jewels, was not invested as a knight.

Francis Shackleton, the brother of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and Vicars’s second-in-command, was the leading suspect. Shackleton, despite his renown, was in financial trouble, and furthermore had the opportunity to obtain the key and duplicate it.

At the time of the theft, Shackleton was found to be out of the country. But this did not completely exonerate him, as the lack of forcible entry has led to speculation that it must have been an inside job.

Another hypothesis holds that Shackleton planned the heist and had his associate Captain Richard Howard Gorges carry it out. Both men were homosexual at a time when this was illegal, and the theory was that Gorges had given Vicars whiskey until he had fallen asleep.

The King and Viceroy of Ireland would have been keen to avoid a scandal, given that following this line of inquiry would have exposed the pair as homosexual. Given the friends and associations of Shackleton at the highest levels of society. Shackleton was exonerated, possibly to suppress this information.

If Not Shackleton, Who?

The Dublin Metropolitan Police conducted a police inquiry, distributing posters depicting and describing the lost diamonds. On the 12th of July, Scotland Yard Detective Chief Inspector John Kane arrived from the United Kingdom to assist.

His report, which was never made public, is alleged to have identified the perpetrator but was suppressed by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). Vicars declined to resign from his job, and also refused to appear before the commission investigating the theft.

Instead, Vicars called for a public Royal Commission with the power to summon witnesses and publicly accused Shackleton of the theft. Shackleton refused to participate.

As mentioned above, the commission found Shackleton not guilty, and also concluded that Vicars had not exercised adequate vigilance or proper care as the custodian of the regalia. Vicars was then forced to resign, as were all of the others who worked under him.

Other suspects were suggested. One immediate rumor was that the gems had been taken by political activists affiliated with the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Pat O’Brien, Member of Parliament of the United Kingdom accused “loyal and patriotic Unionist criminals” of having committed the crime.

Some tabloids claimed that Lord Haddo, son of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was involved in the robbery. Augustine Birrell, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, declared in the Commons that Haddo had been in Great Britain when the crime occurred and that the speculation was baseless.

Laurence Ginnell claimed in 1912 and 1913 that the police investigation had established the identity of the thief, that his report had been suppressed to avoid scandal. He also claimed that the jewels could be easily retrieved, however in fact they never were.

The Mystery Still Unsolved

The lack of a clear solution to the mystery has invited much speculation down the years. According to a 2002 book, the jewels were stolen as part of a Unionist scheme to disgrace the Liberal government and then restored to the Royal Family in secret.

Another theory put forward by the Genealogical Office of the Republic of Ireland was that the jewels were never removed from the Clock Tower, but merely hidden. Donal Begley, the Chief Herald of Ireland, supervised the dismantling of walls and floorboards during repair work to the Clock Tower in 1983, in case the jewels would be discovered, but they were not.

There have also been a lot of false alarms over the years. James Weldon, a jeweler, received a letter containing unusually detailed information on their movements, recognized the person who delivered it as Shackleton.

He received another letter twenty years later, which he brought to the attention of W T Cosgrave, first President of the executive of the Irish Free State. However, the diamonds were never found,

And to this day, their location is unknown. What happened to them, and where they are now, remain a mystery. However, there is still hope that one day, the diamonds will be recovered for Ireland.

 SOURCE: HISTORICMYSTERIES.COM: BIPIN DIMRI

I found this trivia article on HISTORY.COM.

1 True or False? Francis Scott wrote his verses intending them to be a song not a poem.

2 Was Key a prisoner on the English ship Tonnant when he wrote the ballad?

3 How many men were required to hoist the flag flying over Fort McHenry?

4 What was the original name of The Star-Spangled Banner?

5 In what year did the Star-Spangled Banner become our national anthem?

6 How many versus are in the Star-Spangled Banner?

7 Did Key support the war?

8 What was Key’s occupation?

9 Was Key a slave owner?

10 Was Key tone deaf?

Want to see how you did?

ANSWERS:

1 True

 “The Star Spangled-Banner” was not a poem set to a melody years later. Although Key was an amateur poet and not a songwriter, when he composed his verses, he intended them to accompany a popular song of the day. “We know he had the tune in mind because the rhyme and meter exactly fit it,” says Marc Leepson, author of the Key biography What So Proudly We Hailed. The first broadside of the verses, printed just days after the battle, noted that the words should be sung to the melody of “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Key was quite familiar with the tune, having used it to accompany an 1805 poem, which included a reference to a “star-spangled flag,” he had written to honor Barbary War naval heroes Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart.  Although Key composed the patriotic lyrics amid a burst of anti-British euphoria, “To Anacreon in Heaven” was ironically an English song composed in 1775 that served as the theme song of the upper-crust Anacreontic Society of London and a popular pub staple.

2 No

In his capacity as a Washington, D.C., lawyer, Key had been dispatched by President James Madison on a mission to Baltimore to negotiate for the release of Dr. William Beanes, a prominent surgeon captured at the Battle of Bladensburg.  Accompanied by John Stuart Skinner, a fellow lawyer working for the State Department, Key set sail on an American sloop in Baltimore Harbor, and on September 7 the pair boarded the British ship Tonnant, where they dined and secured the prisoner’s release under one condition—they could not go ashore until after the British attacked Baltimore. Accompanied by British guards on September 10, Key returned to the American sloop from which he witnessed the bombardment behind the 50-ship British fleet.

3 11 men
In addition to a thunderstorm of bombs, a torrent of rain fell on Fort McHenry throughout the night of the Battle of Baltimore. The fort’s 30-by-42-foot garrison flag was so massive that it required 11 men to hoist when dry, and if waterlogged, the woolen banner could have weighed upwards of 500 pounds and snapped the flagpole. So as the rain poured down, a smaller storm flag that measured 17-by-25 feet flew in its place. “In the morning, they most likely took down the rain-soaked storm flag and hoisted the bigger one,” Leepson says, “and that’s the flag Key saw in the morning.”

4 When Key scrawled his lyrics on the back of a letter he pulled from his pocket on the morning of September 14, he did not give them any title. Within a week, Key’s verses were printed on broadsides and in Baltimore newspapers under the title “Defense of Fort M’Henry.” In November, a Baltimore music store printed the patriotic song with sheet music for the first time under the more lyrical title “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

5 During the Civil War, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was an anthem for Union troops, and the song increased in popularity in the ensuing decades, which led to President Woodrow Wilson signing an executive order in 1916 designating it as “the national anthem of the United States” for all military ceremonies. On March 3, 1931, after 40 previous attempts failed, a measure passed Congress and was signed into law that formally designated “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem of the United States.

6 4 verses

The version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” traditionally sung on patriotic occasions and at sporting events is only the song’s first verse. All four verses conclude with the same line: “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” (In 1861, poet Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a fifth verse to support the Union cause in the Civil War and denounce “the traitor that dares to defile the flag of her stars.”)

7 No. Ironically, the man who created one of the lasting patriotic legacies of the War of 1812 adamantly opposed the conflict at its outset. Key referred to the war as “abominable” and “a lump of wickedness.” However, his opposition to the war softened after the British began to raid nearby Chesapeake Bay communities in 1813 and 1814, and he briefly served in a Georgetown wartime militia.

8 Lawyer. Although Key loathed politics, he was a prominent figure in Washington, D.C. “He was an important player in the early republic,” Leepson says. “He was a very successful and influential lawyer at the highest levels in Washington.” Key ran a thriving law practice, served as a trusted advisor in Andrew Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet” and was appointed a United States Attorney in 1833. He prosecuted hundreds of cases, including that of Richard Lawrence for the attempted assassination of Jackson, and argued over 100 cases before the United States Supreme Court.

9 Yes. While he advocated for some enslaved people seeking freedom, Key too owned slaves. He hailed from a large slave-owning family and often helped slave owners recapture their escaped slaves. Despite this, Key opposed slave trafficking and became one of the founders of the American Colonization Society, which shipped thousands of free Black people to Africa to establish a homeland there.

10 Most likely. Key was much more adept in his legal day job than he was as an amateur poet. Most of the odes he composed were never meant to be seen beyond family and friends, and none came remotely close to realizing the popular fame of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In addition to being a middling poet, Key also had a hard time carrying a tune. “Key’s family said he was not musical,” Leepson says, “which means he likely was tone deaf.”

SOURCE: HISTORY.COM

On August 5, 1861, President Lincoln imposes the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. Strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800.

As early as March 1861, Lincoln had begun to take stock of the federal government’s ability to wage war against the South. He sent letters to cabinet members Edward Bates, Gideon Welles and Salmon Chase requesting their opinions as to whether or not the president had the constitutional authority to “collect [such] duties.” According to documents housed and interpreted by the Library of Congress, Lincoln was particularly concerned about maintaining federal authority over collecting revenue from ports along the southeastern seaboard, which he worried, might fall under the control of the Confederacy.

The Revenue Act’s language was broadly written to define income as gain “derived from any kind of property, or from any professional trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere or from any source whatever.” According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the comparable minimum taxable income in 2003, after adjustments for inflation, would have been approximately $16,000.

Congress repealed Lincoln’s tax law in 1871, but in 1909 passed the 16th Amendment, which set in place the federal income-tax system used today. Congress ratified the 16th Amendment in 1913.

SOURCE: HISTORY.COM

This day in history, July 30, 1975, was the last day Jimmy Hoffa was seen.  This article from the Detroit Free Press details the story:

Detroit Free Press:

Jimmy Hoffa, the well-known labor union leader, went missing 45 years ago – on July 30, 1975 in Bloomfield Hills – the mystery behind what happened continues to captivate the public.

Here’s what you need to know about who he was, his disappearance, and new revelations in his case.

Who was Jimmy Hoffa?

Born James Riddle Hoffa on Feb. 14, 1914 in Brazil, Indiana, Hoffa rose to his well-known status in his twenties with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, of which he later became president. The group was a labor union that represented a mix of professional and blue-collar workers in the private and public sector.

During his tenure, he was convicted of several crimes, including jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy and mail and wire fraud. On July 30, 1975, Hoffa was at a restaurant in Bloomingfield Township. Hoffa called his wife, Josephine, from a pay phone to say that he’d been stood up at a lunch meeting with two mobsters. He was never seen again.

Theories behind his disappearance 

Based on his final moments in a call to his wife, many believe Hoffa was killed by the mafia. One major theory that was previously presented to a grand jury was that the Mafia killed Hoffa to prevent him from disclosing mob infiltration of the Teamsters, including its tapping into the union’s pension fund to finance its rackets. 

Hoffa had resigned the Teamsters presidency after going to prison. In 1965, a federal jury in Chattanooga, Tenn., convicted Hoffa of conspiring to accept illegal payments from a trucking company and later of trying to funnel a $10,000 bribe to the son of one of the jurors.

Martin Scorsese made an Oscar-nominated film about Hoffa

The film, ‘The Irishman,” directed by Martin Scorsese, was released on Netflix in 2019. The film starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci follows Frank Sheeran (De Niro) and his journey to becoming involved in organized crime and working for Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino). The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. 

Although the film was a major hit, many have concerns about the accuracy of the film and the portrayal of Hoffa.

Metro Detroit search sites for Hoffa

There are several locations in metro Detroit that people believe could be tied to Hoffa’s disappearance. A few include a north Corktown location where Hoffa had a Teamster 299 site, which is where he began his rise to power in the 1930s. There is also a field in Waterford Township that was searched two months after Hoffa’s disappearance but nothing was found. 

In 2004, police took forensic evidence from his home in Oakland County where blood was found on the floorboards but couldn’t be matched to Hoffa. 

New revelations in his disappearance 

In November, a Hoffa expert, Dan Moldea who wrote ‘”The Hoffa Wars,” said that he believes Hoffa’s body could be at a former New Jersey landfill known as “Brother Moscato’s Dump.” The FBI told the Detroit Free Press back in November that they would be willing to look into this tip if the appropriate evidence guides them that way.

“Absolutely — if we had credible evidence that leads to a location,” said FBI spokeswoman Mara Schneider. “The case has been going on for so long, and there’s so much interest in finding Mr. Hoffa. We would very much like to be able to solve this.”

SOURCE: DETRIOT FREE PRESS; Emma-Dale

July 30, 2020

Today is the anniversary of the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr.  A lot of theories have been put forth on the causes of the crash and conspiracies abound about who might be involved.  I found this article on Grunge.com claiming and ultimately ridiculing Q-anon for the conspiracy theories.

From Grunge:

How The Conspiracy That JFK Jr. Is Still Alive Gained So Much Momentum           

By S. Flannagan/Nov. 23, 2022

On November 2, 2021, hundreds of people gathered at the site where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, located at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. They expected to witness something truly incredible: The resurrection of the president’s late son, John F. Kennedy Jr.

As reported by Rolling Stone, on the day of the unusual gathering, the crowd descended on the Plaza from all corners because they believed that Kennedy Jr. was ready to unveil himself as still living. All of this, even though he died tragically in a plane crash in 1999, alongside his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law Lauren Bessette, as noted by History. But the crowd believed that he was still alive and ready to re-enter public life in perhaps a bizarre way.

According to the same source, Kennedy Jr. was expected by the crowd to take his rightful place as vice president to Donald Trump. The crowd believed that Trump was due to be announced as the president and ready to return to the office. All of this despite that Kennedy Jr., like his father, was a lifelong Democrat and Trump is a leader of the far-right Republican contingency. Kennedy Jr. failed to show, though many attendees postulated that he might be ready to make an appearance at a Rolling Stones gig that night. He didn’t arrive then, either. So why exactly did so many people subscribe to such an idea? The answer lies in one of the most unusual but nevertheless prevalent set of conspiracy theories of modern times: QAnon.

As noted by Rolling Stone, the majority of those who congregated in Dealey Plaza that day were affiliated with or believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory. Per The New York Times (NYT), QAnon first emerged in late 2017 on the notorious 4chan messaging board through a series of cryptic messages posted by an anonymous user known only as ‘Q.’

Per NYT, believers in the conspiracy theory have taken to interpreting postings by Q as insider information from a source inside the U.S. government, who claims that many prominent politicians are involved in a cabal that is based around satanic rituals and child trafficking (these are assertions made without any quantifiable evidence). The same theory claims that the only force capable of battling such a cabal is Donald Trump, who followers claim communicates with QAnon adherents through cryptic messages of his own, often hidden in his speeches.

So how does John F. Kennedy Jr. fit into all of this? According to Rolling Stone, QAnon claims that rather than having been dead for more than 20 years, Kennedy Jr. is in hiding and has been biding his time until the pieces are in place for him to join Trump in battling the alleged cabal.

Following the gathering of hundreds of QAnon believers in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, in November 2022, MSNBC ran a report highlighting the group’s belief that John F. Kennedy Jr. was due for a return to the political stage alongside Trump (pictured).

In it, host Rachel Maddow introduced footage of two prominent figures in the QAnon movement, Mike Penny and a man who goes by the moniker M.L. They outlined the movement’s conviction about how Trump is related to the Kennedy family (though this has been proven false). According to the clip, the group believes that Trump is the secret son of General Patton and, through him, is a cousin of John F. Kennedy Jr. The same clip also claims that Patton was the grandson of Lincoln and that he was related to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. They also assert that Joseph Kennedy — the brother of President John F. Kennedy, who died in World War II — was the father of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

“It’s all about the bloodline,” said M.L., claiming a sprawling lineage between disparate wings of American politics without a shred of evidence. Meanwhile, outlets such as NPR have reported that spreading conspiracy theories such as QAnon is increasingly “tearing families apart.”

Journalist Ben Collins, who appeared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC report, shared his shock that so many people from across the country turned out for the November 2021 gathering, believing John F. Kennedy Jr. would reveal himself after more than two decades in hiding.

As Collins noted, the belief in the reemergence of Kennedy Jr. and his installation as the vice president for Donald Trump is notable for being unusual even among QAnon followers. According to The Independent, the conspiracy surrounding Kennedy Jr. is believed by about 20% of QAnon followers. Among those that believe it, some followers also subscribe to the idea that Kennedy Jr. has appeared in public in the guise of Trump. They claim that he has been hiding in Pittsburgh for years or that he is, in fact, the originator of the whole movement as the 4chan user known as ‘Q.’

Per Rolling Stone, the theory emerged through cryptic 4chan posts by a user known as ‘R,’ that suggested Kennedy Jr. faked his death as a result of the alleged Washington D.C. satanic conspiracy targeting him. The idea that Kennedy Jr. was alive quickly took on a life of its own and merged into prior unsubstantiated beliefs spread by ‘Q.’ This was so much so that the poster after whom the conspiracy theory is named took to the message board to discredit — ironically — the sub-theory as bogus (via Twitter).

SOURCE: Grunge

This story was found on CNN.com and it’s about an ancient mosaic found buried under Rome.  It’s gorgeous!

From the article:

Rome, Italy CNN  — 

A five-year dig into the side of Rome’s Palatine Hill yielded treasure last week when archaeologists discovered a deluxe banquet room dating from around the first or second century BC, featuring a sizable, intact and brightly colored wall mosaic.

Estimated to be around 2,300 years old, the work is part of a larger aristocratic mansion, located near the Roman Forum, that has been under excavation since 2018.

Almost five meters long (16.4 ft) and featuring depictions of vines, lotus leaves, tridents, trumpets, helmets and mythological marine creatures, the mosaic scene was painstakingly created using mother of pearl, shells, corals, shards of precious glass and flecks of marble. The piece is framed by polychrome crystals, spongy travertine, and exotic, ancient Egyptian blue tiles.

What makes this discovery “unmatched,” said archaeologist Alfonsina Russo, head of the Colosseum Archaeological Park in charge of the site, is not only the incredible conservation of the mosaic, but its decoration which also features celebratory scenes of naval and land battles likely funded — and won — by an extremely wealthy aristocratic patron who commemorated the victories on their walls.

The intricacy of the mosaic’s depictions of victory have surprised the team working on the project. They show a coastal walled town with lookout towers and loggias — which Russo said could be an ideal or a real-life location — sitting atop a cliff designed with pieces of travertine rock. Scenes of sailing ships with raised sails also feature, alongside depictions of mythical sea monsters swallowing enemy fleets.

Archaeologists are trying to ascertain whether the delicate — and expensive, for the time — coral branches used in the display came from the Mediterranean or the Red Sea (the nearest and most common oceans used by Romans to extract materials). A rare bluish glass paste also featured in the design likely came from the ancient Egyptian city of Alexandria, the team believe.

“This banquet hall, which measures 25 square meters (270 square foot), is just one space within a ‘domus’ (the Latin word for house) spread on several floors,” Russo told CNN in an interview. “In ancient times, when powerful noble families inhabited the Palatine Hill, it was customary to use rich decorative elements as a symbol to show-off opulence and high social rank.”

The chamber, deemed a “jewel” by Russo, was an outdoor banquet hall overlooking a garden, likely used during summer to entertain guests.

Such an elaborate space would also have been used to impress guests with water games, which were very popular amongst nobility at the time. “We have found lead pipes embedded within the decorated walls, built to carry water inside basins or to make fountains spout to create water games,” said Russo.

Marco Rossi, professor of Roman antiquities and head of the mosaic lab at Rome’s Università degli Studi di Roma Tre pointed out that these summer banquet rooms were not only somewhere that hosts and guests would go to relax but also used by the mansion owner as a signifier of their wealth and rank.

“Mosaics are usually found on floors, but this runs across the entire front wall and has been incredibly well-preserved,” said Rossi of the piece. “It’s not been ruined by the weight of debris — as can happen to some mosaics on the ground — and despite being delicate, it hasn’t so much as chipped across the centuries.”

The discovery of an entire wall mosaic is extremely rare, Rossi added, not least because these pieces are more delicate than those for the floor which were designed to be walked upon and withstand pressure.

The location of the grand home has also helped the wall’s preservation, scientists believe. Positioned on the side of Rome’s famous Palatine Hill and subsequently covered over by centuries of mud and earth as the land has moved, the structure and treasures within it have been protected from the air and light by layers of ground.

While this new discovery still has a lot of secrets to reveal — why the property was abandoned and how long ago, for example — Russo believes there is one mystery archaeologists could perhaps solve: The identity of its owner, likely a Roman senator.

“The person was so rich they could afford to import such precious elements from across the empire to decorate this mansion,” Russo said. “We have found nothing so far to shed light on their identity, but we believe more research might enable us to pinpoint the noble family.”

Russo and her team aim to open the space to the public in early January. “We (will) continue to dig the other layers and areas of this evocative place (to try to discover more),” she said. “It is really an incredible display of Roman luxury.”

SOURCE: CNN.COM

By Silvia Marchetti

This article, from the Smithsonian, is from November of 2017 and details the “ironic” history of Mar-a-lago.

Within 48 hours after the presidential election last November, the Palm Beach Daily News headlined a question that “many in town” were asking: “Trump’s Mar-a-Lago: Another Winter White House?”

By January, the president-elect had an answer: “Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago,” he tweeted from his elite private club, along with a photograph of himself seated behind a large desk, legal pad and pen in hand.

Palm Beach might have been having déjà vu, and not only because President-elect John F. Kennedy wrote his inaugural address at his father’s estate in the town’s North End. The woman who built Mar-a-Lago in the 1920s and presided over it for almost half a century, Marjorie Merriweather Post, had gone to great lengths to turn the mansion into an official wintertime presidential retreat.

But even extreme wealth has its limitations, as my visit to the Post Family Papers suggests. They occupy 57 seldom-seen linear feet at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library and document the life of one of the most famous and consequential women of the 20th century. The files offer unusual glimpses of the girl who glued labels onto packages of Postum, the coffee substitute that made her family’s fortune, and of the woman who built the General Foods Corporation. Her four husbands, her bountiful philanthropy, her megayacht, her grand balls, her jaw-dropping jewels—all are documented in the archives.

And then there’s a volume bound in still-handsome red leather. A yellowing file card dated “February/March 1976” is taped to the cover: “Original Proposal for Disposition of Mar-a-Lago.”

The mansion dates to the 1920s, when Palm Beach’s wealthiest visitors were forsaking luxury hotels for their own digs, says Debi Murray, chief curator of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. Post herself explored the site of her future home, on 17 acres of scrub between Lake Worth and the Atlantic. (Mar-a-Lago means “Sea to Lake” in Spanish.) Construction began in 1923 and kept some 600 workers busy, even though, as Murray notes, “Florida entered the Depression earlier than the rest of the country.” The mistress ensured that her workers wouldn’t go hungry.

Even by Palm Beach standards, Mar-a-Lago was grandiose: 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms with gold-plated fixtures (easier to clean, Post believed), an 1,800-square-foot living room with 42-foot ceilings. Its 110,000 square feet glinted with gold leaf, Spanish tiles, Italian marble and Venetian silks. All told, Post spent $7 million—somewhere north of $90 million today.

It was finished in 1927. That March, Post and her second husband, Edward F. Hutton, had a few score guests over for dinner before the annual Everglades Costume Ball. The hosts wore costumes evoking the reign of Louis XVI. But there was also noblesse oblige: In 1929, when she hired the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to perform for a charity fund-raiser, she invited underprivileged children to attend. In 1944, she offered her grounds to World War II veterans who needed occupational therapy. In 1957, she opened Mar-a-Lago to the International Red Cross Ball, and the gala event has been held there many times since—but not this year. It was one of more than 20 charity events that were relocated from Mar-a-Lago or canceled after the president’s remarks on violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August.

As the social seasons came and went, however, Palm Beach tastemakers’ tastes changed. The grand houses they built in the 1920s were seen as “white elephants,” Murray says, and were razed in the ’50s and ’60s.

Except that isn’t how Post saw Mar-a-Lago—or Hillwood, her estate in Washington, D.C., or Camp Top­ridge, her retreat in the Adirondacks. She arranged to donate all three properties to government entities. The state of New York added some of Top­ridge’s acreage to a forest preserve but sold most of its 68 buildings to a private owner. The Smithsonian Institution, citing maintenance costs, returned Hillwood to the Post Foundation, which now runs it as a museum.

And the original Mar-a-Lago proposal, the one bound in red leather, was to donate it to the state of Florida for a center for advanced scholars, but state officials also balked at the maintenance costs.

By 1968, according to other papers in the archive, Post had turned to Plan B: Mar-a-Lago as winter White House, property of the United States. After she died, in 1973, at age 86, the Post Foundation pursued the idea. But in 1981, the federal government declined, for the same reason the Floridians and the Smithsonian did.

Thus Mar-a-Lago went on the market. Three potential sales collapsed before Donald Trump bought it in 1985, paying a reported $8 million for the estate and its furnishings—a small fraction of the original cost, no matter how you calculate it. And after three decades and the most confounding presidential election in living memory, Marjorie Merriweather Post’s wish for her mansion came true.

SOURCE: SMITHSONIANMAG.COM

On a site called Red Wave, I found and article written in 2023 by Chuck Norris: 7 Little Known Facts about the Declaration of Independence and I thought it would make an interesting read.

Happy Fourth of July, America! I was recently reflecting upon the history surrounding the Declaration of Independence and thought my readers would also be very interested to learn some often unknown aspects of the Declaration’s creation, distribution and legacy.

Several historical websites hold some fascinating facts about this national treasure, including the National Archives in Washington, D.C. History.com’s article, “9 Things You May Not Know about the Declaration of Independence,” by Elizabeth Harrison, has some intriguing information, too. Let me elaborate on some of those and convey a few others I’ve discovered.

1 Benjamin Franklin wrote the first “declaration of independence.”

In April 1775, the American Revolutionary War began at Lexington and Concord. On July 5, 1775, an entire year before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition, written by John Dickinson with the help of Thomas Jefferson. It appealed directly to King George III for reconciliation between the American colonies and Great Britain.

Though Benjamin Franklin signed the Petition for the sake of consensus, he radically differed with it and said that stronger sentiments were necessary because the Petition was destined to be rejected. Franklin was so appalled by British atrocities and exhausted of their rule that he planned the first articles of confederation and drafted a declaration of independence to be issued by none other than Gen. George Washington.

So strong was the language of the draft that Thomas Jefferson wrote, while some members of Congress like himself “approved highly of it,” others would be “revolted at it.” Jefferson explained in his private commentary that “proposing it to congress as the subject for any vote whatever would startle many members.” It seems Congress just wasn’t ready to throw down the gauntlet, yet. My, how things can change in a year!

2 Thomas Jefferson had problems with the adopted version of the Declaration of Independence – written largely by him.

On June 11, 1776, the Second Continental Congress appointed a committee of five men (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, Roger Sherman and Thomas Jefferson) to write a Declaration of Independence. The committeemen, in turn, appointed Jefferson to produce a first draft for their consideration, which he did by utilizing other documents such as his own draft of a Virginia constitution, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and state appeals for independence. The committee and later Congress made some revisions to Jefferson’s draft before formally adopting it on July 4, 1776.

In the end, Jefferson was troubled by their revisions, especially Franklin and Adams’ removal of a diatribe blaming British King George III for the transatlantic slave trade. Who knows? Maybe if that paragraph were left in the document, our founders might not be maligned as much today for being pro-slavery.

3 The Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed on July 4, 1776.

On July 1, 1776, the Second Continental Congress began meeting in Philadelphia at what is now known as Independence Hall. They spent the next few days debating and revising the Committee of Five’s draft. After adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4, they didn’t sign it for roughly another month because New York’s delegates weren’t authorized to vote in favor of independence until July 9, and it also took two additional weeks for the Declaration to actually be produced in its final printed form. Most delegates signed the official Declaration on Aug. 2, but at least six others didn’t sign it until later, and two more never signed it at all (namely, John Dickinson and Robert R. Livingston.)

4 The original Declaration of Independence wasn’t written on paper.

As the National Archives explains, the original was “engrossed on parchment, which is an animal skin specially treated with lime and stretched to create a strong, long-lasting writing support. The printed version on paper and was read aloud from town squares throughout the colonies, so that those who could not read would receive the news about intended separation from England.”

5 There are at least 26 surviving paper copies of the Declaration of Independence of the hundreds made in July 1776 for circulation among the colonies.

After Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, the Committee of Five was also responsible with overseeing its reproduction for proclamation to those living in the 13 colonies. The reproduction was done at the shop of Philadelphia printer John Dunlap.

“On July 5, Dunlap’s copies were dispatched across the 13 colonies to newspapers, local officials and the commanders of the Continental troops. These rare documents, known as ‘Dunlap broadsides,’ predate the engrossed [official] version signed by the delegates. Of the hundreds thought to have been printed on the night of July 4, at least 26 copies survive. Most are held in museum and library collections, but three are privately owned,” according to History.com.

6 When Gen. George Washington read aloud the Declaration of Independence in New York, a riot resulted.

Again, History.com explained, by July 9, 1776, a copy of the Declaration of Independence had reached New York City. At the time, tensions about the Revolutionary War ran very high, with Americans split between revolutionists and loyalists. And British naval ships actually occupied New York Harbor at the time.

When Gen. Washington read the words of the Declaration in front of City Hall, a large crowd rallied and cheered. However, later that same day, they fell a statue of King George III, melted it down, and converted the led into more than 42,000 musket balls for the Continental Army.

7 All 56 signers of the Declaration paid a price for their rebellion and our freedom.

For a number of years, an email widely circulated with some history, some legend and some falsehoods about what happened to the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. But here’s the real scoop, as I detailed in my Official Chuck Norris Fact Book, where I also cite the sources.

At least 12 signers had their homes and property taken, ransacked, occupied, or burned. Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of William Ellery, George Clymer, Lyman Hall, George Walton, Button Gwinnett, Thomas Heyward Jr., Edward Rutledge and Arthur Middleton.

Robert Morris’ home was overtaken as well, and Philip Livingston lost several properties to the enemy. John Hart’s farm was looted, and he had to flee into hiding.

Francis Lewis had his home and property destroyed. The enemy then jailed his wife, and she was held for months before being exchanged for wives of British soldiers. Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, lost his ships and cargo to the British navy.

Thomas McKean wrote to John Adams in 1777 that he was “hunted like a fox by the enemy, compelled to [move] my family five times in three months.”

Five signers were captured by the British as prisoners of war and had to endure deplorable conditions as such. One signer lost his son in the Revolutionary Army, and another had two sons captured.

On Nov. 30, 1776, one signer, Richard Stockton, a lawyer from Princeton and longtime friend of George Washington, was captured in the middle of the night by loyalists and jailed by the British. Stockton endured weeks and months of brutal treatment and starvation. When he was finally released, his health would never be the same. He is actually the only signer to recant his endorsement of the Declaration, followed by him swearing his allegiance to King George III.

Over the six years of war, more than 12,000 prisoners died in prisons, compared to 4,435 soldiers who died in combat. And that’s just a sampling of what these men sacrificed, and why we honor what they did for us annually on Independence Day.

May we never forget the sacrifices our founders made for our freedom. Happy birthday, America! God has certainly shed His grace on thee! From my wife, Gena, and myself, may you and yours have a wonderful, patriotic and safe Independence Day!

SOURCE: RED WAVE: CHUCK NORRIS 2023

I have always wondered about Congress voting for their own salary increases and so I researched the 27^th Amendment.  Here’s what I found at the constitutioncenter.org website:

The Twenty-Seventh Amendment has one of the most unusual histories of any amendment ever made to the U.S. Constitution. Congress passed the Twenty-Seventh Amendment by a two-thirds vote of both Houses, in 1789, along with eleven other proposed constitutional amendments (the last ten of which were ratified by the states in 1791, becoming the Bill of Rights). The Amendment provides that: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.”

During the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, congressional pay was a central topic, one that took up several days of discussion. Benjamin Franklin’s initial speech to the Convention was on the topic of public salaries: he was against them. Public servants should not get paid at all, Franklin argued, or we would get representatives with “bold and the violent” personalities, engaged in “selfish pursuits.” Franklin’s extreme argument did not prevail because the Framers wisely did not want only the wealthy to be able to afford to hold federal offices. This is a very good thing. 

Nonetheless, Franklin’s comments caused the Framers at the Philadelphia Convention to focus on the problem of making sure that people did not go into public office to make a lot of money. In England, at the time, the biggest problem of English democracy was the phenomenon known as “placemen.” Placemen were members of Parliament who the King simultaneously appointed to lucrative executive branch offices to buy their loyalty on votes in Parliament. The King had built up his power by corrupting these office holders, giving them easy and well-paid civil office jobs so that they would support him in Parliament. To prevent this problem, the Framers added Article I, Section 6’s Incompatibility Clause. That Clause says that “no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.” The Framers described the Incompatibility Clause as being “The Cornerstone of the Constitution.” But as to salaries for congressmen themselves, the Constitution simply said those salaries should be provided for by law—in other words, that Congress would set its own pay. This did not sit well with the general public, or with James Madison—it seemed like a big opening for Congress to pay itself too much.

In 1789, Madison proposed twelve amendments to the federal Constitution, the first ten of which were ratified in 1791 and became the federal Bill of Rights. One of the proposed amendments, which was not ratified at that time, was an amendment that became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment and which forbade congressional pay increases from taking effect until there had been an intervening election of members of Congress. Madison did not want Congress to have power over its own pay without limitation. But he also did not want the President to control congressional salaries, since that would give the President too much power over Congress. So instead, he proposed that an election had to happen before any pay raise could take effect. If the public opposed an overly generous congressional pay raise, the public could throw the offending congressmen out of office when they ran for re-election.

The congressional pay amendment was only ratified by 6 states initially. But the First Congress, which had passed the Amendment in 1789, had not attached a time limit within which the Amendment had to be ratified by the states. (Some subsequent constitutional amendments have provided for such time limits.) In the nineteenth century, one state joined this small group, and others in the twentieth, but no one thought it was going anywhere—or thought about it much at all.

In 1982, the Amendment was languishing before the states with only a tiny fraction of the number of states needed to ratify having ratified it. That year Gregory Watson, a sophomore at the University of Texas, was assigned to write a paper about a government process. He came across a chapter in a book on the Constitution, listing proposed constitutional amendments that had not been ratified. He wrote his paper on the congressional pay amendment, arguing that there was no time limit on when it could be ratified, and that it could be ratified now. He got a C on the paper. Maybe if he had received a better grade on his paper, the story would have ended there, but Watson was sure it was a better paper, so he appealed his grade, first to his T.A., then to his professor; and when he was unsuccessful, he decided to take the issue to the country. In an NPR report in May 2017, he said that after his teacher affirmed the C, “I thought right then and there, ‘I’m going to get that thing ratified.’”

Watson sent letters around the country to state legislators, who mostly ignored his idea. But Maine Senator William Cohen liked the idea—and he pushed it and it passed in Maine in 1983. After that, Watson kept pushing, and the Amendment picked up steam.

The fact of the Amendment’s passage through Congress in 1789 and of its non-ratification by the states came to public attention in the 1980s when there was tremendous popular disapproval of the performance of the Congress and the exorbitant salaries and fringe benefits members of Congress enjoyed. As a result, a campaign was launched to get three-quarters of the states to ratify the Amendment over the totality of the period between 1789 and the present day. In 1985, five states passed it, and by 1992, the 38 states needed for full ratification had all passed the Amendment. Thus, the three-quarters of the states’ consensus required by Article V of the Constitution was finally reached in 1992—more than 202 years after Congress had proposed the Amendment. The Archivist of the United States declared the Amendment to be legally ratified, and, subsequently, Congress on May 20, 1992, declared the ratification to be legal and the Amendment to be part of the Constitution.  As of today, forty-six states have ratified the Twenty-Seventh Amendment while four have not.

The main objection that has been made by scholars to the legality of the ratification process of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment is that Article V contemplates some kind of simultaneous approval of a proposed amendment between when Congress votes on it and when three-quarters of the states ratify it.  Proponents of this view point out that the size of the Senate and House of Representatives and the number of states in the Union have changed significantly between 1789 and 1992. Scholars who reject the Twenty-Seventh Amendment do so on the structural constitutional ground that there was never a “magic moment” consensus of two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states when a national and federal supermajority agreed to add the Amendment to the Constitution. Speaker of the House Tom Foley initially called for litigation to challenge the legality of the Amendment’s ratification process, but he quickly changed his mind on that point once he saw how popular the Amendment really was.

Moreover, these scholars add that there are a number of constitutional amendments that Congress has approved but that the states have not yet ratified, which could become law if the Twenty-Seventh Amendment process were to be held valid. In an effort to avoid the outbreak of the Civil War, Congress passed a constitutional amendment called the Corwin Amendment, which would have forever preserved slavery in those states where it was legal in 1861. Could this horrible old amendment, to which Congress attached no time limit for its ratification, be resurrected and ratified in the future simply by state action and with no new attempt to get two-thirds of both Houses of Congress to ratify it?

The argument in favor of the validity of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment’s ratification is that Article V’s text only requires: 1) two-thirds of both Houses of Congress pass the proposed amendment, which happened here in 1789; and that 2) three-quarters of the states ratify the amendment as it passed in Congress, which they did here in 1992. From a strictly textual viewpoint, the terms of Article V were satisfied, and Congress had no choice but to accept the Amendment as being a valid addition to the Constitution.

It is important to note here that the “precedent” that was set when Congress “approved” of the unusual process by which the Twenty-Seventh Amendment was ratified meets not only the textual requirements of Article V; it also met the structural argument about the need for a “magic moment” when there is a popular national consensus of super-majority proportions. Congress on May 20, 1992 voted by a unanimous vote of the Senate and by a vote of 414 to 3 in favor of “accepting” the Twenty-Seventh Amendment as having been validly approved. Forty-six out of fifty states ratified the Amendment, and no state that had once ratified the Amendment tried to “unratify” it. Both the textual and the structural concerns that underlie Article V had been satisfied. There was an Article V consensus in 1992 to ratify this most unusual amendment.

It goes without saying that there would NOT be such a national supermajority consensus for many other “dead” constitutional amendments that have been ratified by two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and sent to the states for ratification. In the unimaginable situation in which a state might try to ratify the Corwin Amendment constitutionalizing the right to own slaves, Congress would immediately rescind its approval of the Amendment as would most of the states, which had ratified it. It is thus important to note that the case of the 202 year-long ratification process of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment is really sui generis: It deals with a situation, which is very unlikely ever to rise again.

One final question is raised by the odd ratification process of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment: What role, if any, should the U.S. Supreme Court play in passing on the validity of the ratification of constitutional amendments? Such amendments are the supreme law of the land, as is Article V, and Chief Justice Marshall said in Marbury v. Madison (1803), “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is.” In Coleman v. Miller (1939), Justice Hugo Black wrote a concurrence joined by Justices Roberts, Frankfurter, and Douglas arguing that cases that go to the validity of the ratification of a constitutional amendment should be said to raise a political question and that only Congress can resolve that question.

Professor Calabresi agrees with Justice Black on this point because over the last 228 years of American history the federal courts have never been in the business of reviewing the legality of the process by which an amendment was ratified, and there is no reason they should get into that process now. There were serious questions about the legality of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment since the eleven rebel states were compelled to ratify the Amendment before they were allowed back into the Union. Congress declared this was legal and that the Fourteenth Amendment had been validly ratified, and Professor Calabresi heartily agrees. Suffice it to say that no court has ever or should ever question Congress’s judgment and decision on that measure.

The Twenty-Seventh Amendment was accepted as a validly ratified constitutional amendment on May 20, 1992, and no court should ever second-guess that decision. Constitutional amendments are one of the few checks and balances that “We the People” have on the Supreme Court, and it would thus be unconstitutional for the Supreme Court to adjudicate the legality of the ratification of an amendment that might be overturning a Supreme Court decision. That would violate a fundamental axiom of Anglo-American law, which is that no man should ever be a judge in his own cause.

SOURCE: CONSTITUTIONCENTER.ORG