Sung by the boys of Lichfield Cathedral
I've posted the Magnificat from the same Service in c minor a number of times but never the following canticle.
Here's another setting of the text in Latin by Paul Smith, sung by his group VOCES8. It puts a slant to the canticle I'd never considered while reading it. It reminds me of some of Schubert's heavier music for male quartet.
SUPREME COURT "justices" are required to take two oaths of office, from the Supreme Court website, those current are:
“I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
“I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as _________ under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”
On the basis of that the four "justices" who refused to uphold the Supremacy Clause in the federal government over Texas on the border issue should all be impeached and kicked off of that goddammned Court but, of course, they won't be. The impeachment provisions of the Constitution are a quite stupidly and naively believed in myth, never having protected us against even the most criminal presidents in our history, three or four of whom gained and kept office in my lifetime, Nixon having been the only one who was forced out of office but by a group of Republican senators because they were afraid of the electoral blood bath for their party if he had been impeached and put on trial, after. The impeachment provision hasn't protected us from some of the most obviously criminal presidents, vice presidents and "justices" on that jumped up court.
As that example alone proves, we are and have not been a "government of laws, not of men," certainly not after 1803 when that court in Marbury vs Madison gave itself powers never in the Constitution, one of the results of that, which started to become not only significant but having the most dangerous of consequences in the first example of that court using that power to nullify duly adopted and long standing laws when the Taney Court issued the Dred Scott Decision, nullifying the abolition of slavery in every state and territory - nullifying not only the Missouri compromise of 1820, but the abolition of slavery in the "Northwest territories" from before the adoption of the Constitution. That decision was what Abraham Lincoln both ran for president, against but which he flouted repeatedly as the slave power racist Taney tried to sandbag his waging of the Civil War. It recently came to my attention that Taney, in anticipation of Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, had a decision nullifying it in the ready, which he could not give because the evil old man died and went to hell before he could do that. So one of the, even now, respected members of that goddamned Court would have nullified one of the greatest and best things that any elected official of the United States did to protect, along with one of the two or three most evil things about the United States, slavery, but which also protected his own personal wealth as a slave holder from a slave holding family. In that he was doing exactly what most of the members of that Court, including the most lauded member in its history, the slave-holder, ever slavery-supporting John Marshall, who repeatedly sided with slave holders against even Black People who could provide evidence that the had never been a slave.
The claims of our pious grade-school civics and history mis-educations along with the NPR, Nina Totenberg hallowing of that goddamned Court and the cinematic bullshit that comprises our collective fantasies about our country are almost entirely lies. It is those lies and even bigger ones that fuel our native form of fascism, white-supremacist Republican-fascism. So, no, I don't regret anything I've said about that or the Constitution which they twist and turn and selectively read and deceptively "interpret." That the Constitution was inspecific enough for the Supreme Court to steal that power from themselves and which was stupid enough to rely on the "honor" of such men as the "founding fathers" were and knew each other to be - they were slave holders and crooked financiers, not saints and scholars - to allow this can't be rationally or morally held to have been what we are required to pretend it is.
In a pamphlet from Wendell Phillips, he pointed out that taking such oaths to the Constitution which was (and remains) riddled with pro-slavery provisions was impossible for an honest abolitionist as long as slavery was the law of the land. I couldn't honestly take an oath to it knowing not only what it actually says BUT WHAT IT HAS BEEN MADE TO SAY BY COURTS, ESPECIALLY THAT GODDAMNED SUPREME COURT, because of that.
There is no provision more obvious than the one which gives the federal and not state governments responsibility and what is naively called "the right" to control and enforce the borders of the country. Any federal officer, any office holder who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and who hasn't and will never be removed from office due to what four members of the Supreme Court did proves that, as Louis Boudin said, we don't have a government of laws but, exactly of men, not only the long dead ones who wrote the Constitution and its amendments but, in the final assessment, of nine or any number down to five who impose their will on the Constitution through their decisions.
I think it is necessary for the continuation of the United States as a republic instead of some form of self-crowned monarchy or assembly of the same for an honest President and an honest Congress to overturn that two hundred-twenty year usurpation of power by the Court and to once and for all turn it into what it was supposed to be, even if that has to be spelled out in an amended version of the Constitution AND A LONG NEEDED REVISION OF THE ORIGINAL ORGANIZING LAWS THAT FORMED THAT GODDAMNED COURT. First of all, they have to make it easier to remove the most corrupt of them, such as Thomas and Alito are known to be and others who I suspect are at least close to them in corruption. They also need to limit the term of office so that we don't suffer under the worst of them for as long as they choose to stay on into their dotage. As the tragic finale of the admirable Ruth Bader Ginsburg proves, even the best of them can't be trusted to know when it's time for them to leave. And there aren't many in that category, "best" of them.
The United States Supreme Court has to be reduced to the state of courts in other near democracies, ours having the worst and most lax and most permissive of boundaries of any of them. It is and has, since at least Marshall's chief "justice"ship of that body, been the most frequent source of significant corruption in our country. The tiny little list of times when it didn't play some kind of malignant role, the mostly symbolic Brown v. Board, the now Court nullified Roe v Wade, along with the frequently naive and, in the end, dangerous "free speech-press" rulings that produced, among other things, Trump, aren't the real and honest history of that body. Though you'll never know that from the naive and lying pop-civics lore surrounding it.
The slaveholders of the South have used the powers vested in them by the Constitution for their own interests, as every other selfish association of man would have done under the same circumstances, with the same powers and under the same temptations.
Josiah Quincy, Sr. August 16, 1854
MOST OF THOSE "same powers" are still there lying in wait to be used in the Constitution and "same temptations" have used them right up to today. Only today it's not only what would be the Confederate states but a number of states, many of which hadn't been in the country at the time. It is the combined powers of white supremacy and Republican-fascism whic uses those and the extra powers they get under the usurpations of the Supreme Court and the anti-democratic Senate rules. In the end, and in the ever slippery issue of the "interpretation" of the Constitution by legally trained "justices, it's those "same temptations" that have brought us some of the worst results.
I got that excerpt from Josiah Quincy, Sr., others below, and the one from J. Q. Adams given the other day from Wendell Phillips' book "The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact," third edition, 1856. I have looked at the pages around that date from Adams' enormously important and just plain enormous diary - maybe the most extensive diary ever kept - from November 4th 1844 when he was talking to a friend about going to North Bridgwater to give the speech to the entry for November 6th in which he describes the meeting at which he gave it. There's something chilling in being able to read a text and then read the author talking about what he was doing in the days he was writing it and, in this case, giving it as an address. You feel a real connection to him through reading his diarys. In the case of John Qunicy Adams, I doub there is anyone who could have given a more inside and intimate view of the years from the Revolution to 1846, he having been a public servant of the period, boy, man and old man, on the most initmate terms possible with one of the chief founders of the country, his father, on very intimate terms with many if not most of the most illustrious of them and a witness to the entire period who recorded so much of it in his decades long diary.
I should have kept on with the quote as given by Wendell Phillips because the paragraph after what I gave here the other day is even more obviously relevant to the actual corruption of the Constitution as we live under it today, not in small part because the constitution of the Senate and the Electoral College and other pro-slavery features of the Constitution have given small, often reactionary mostly lily white states such outsized power over states like California and New York. And the role that such things hold in the reimpoisition of neo-Jim Crow and the nationalization of the bodies of Women who were just as excluded from exercising the political power that was ennumerated through their numbers, under the Constitution. We still have no Equal Rights Amemndement.
Of the increasing abomination of slavery in the unbought hearts of men at the time when the Constitution of the United States was formed, what clearer proof could be desired, than that the very same year in which the charter of the land was issued, the Congress of the Confederation, with not a tithe of the powers given by the people to the Congress of the new compatct, actually abolished slavery forever throughout the whole Northwestern territory without a remonstrance or a murmur. But in the Articles of Confederation, there was no guarantee for the property of the slaveholder - no double representation for him in the Federal councils - no power of taxation - no stipulation for the recovery of fugitive slaves. But when the powers of government came to be delegated to the Union, the South - that is, South Carolian and Georgia - refused their subscription to the parchment, till it should be saturated with the infection of slavery, which no fumigation could purify, no quarantine could extinguish. The freemen of the North gave way, and the deadly venom of slavery was infused into the Constituion of freedom. Its first conseqence has been to inver the first principle of democracy, that the will of the majority of numbers shall rule the land. By means of the double representation, the minority command the whole, and a knot of slaveholders give the law and prescribe the policy of the country. To acquire this superiority of a large majority of freemen, a perserving system of engrossing nearly all the seats of power and place, is constantly for a long series of years pursued and you have seeen in a period of fifty-six years the cheif magistracy of the Union held, during forty-four of them, by the owners of slaves. The Eecutive departments, the Army and Navy, the Supreme Judicial Court and diplomatic missions abroad, all present the same spectacle; - an immense majority of power in the hands of a vary small minority of the peole - millions made for a fraction of a few thousnds.
. . . From that day (1830) SLAVERY, SLAVEHOLDING, AND SLAVE BREEDING, AND SLAVE TRADING HAVE FORMED THE WHOLE FOUNDATION OF THE POLICY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, and the slaveholding States, at home and aboroad; had at the very time when a new census has exhibited a large increase upon the superior numbers of the free States, it has presented the portentous evidence of increased influence and acendency of the slaveholding power.
Of the prevalence of that power you have continual and conclusive evidence of the suppression for the space of ten years of the righ of petition, guranteed if there could be a guarantee against slavery, by the first article amendatory of the Constitution.
I'm not exactly certain of what the 1830 date refers to, I suspect it was one of the many pro-slavery Supreme Court rulings that tried to make the entire country effectively slave-country. I've been looking for the entire text of that address because I think there must be far more in it relevant to my argument that the slave-power infection of the Constitution was known and exposed by John Quincy Adams who may have had the most comprehensive knowledge of the background of the drafing and adoption of, not only the Constitution but the Articles of Confederation and knew their relevance to the struggle against slavery and how the anti-democratic features of the Constitution held that abomination in place. What he said about the abolition of slavery in the Northwest territories (as they were then) by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation formed the main issue in the later Dred Scott case that allowed the Supreme Court under Taney to, effectively, extend slavery to even the free states om what he hoped for, was perpertuity. As I've pointed out here, the Dred Scott decision was the first real and effective use of the Supreme Court usurped powers, not found in the Constitution, to nullify duly adopted laws of the federal congress and executive banches. A power which the Court has continually used to overturn any effective remedy against our indigenous form of fascism, White Supremacy - probably mirroring somewhat the proportion of time that Adams gave as how much of the time the slave-power held a stranglehold on federal offices.
There is so much here that is of obvious relevance to the bending of the Constitution under the corrupt feature of the undemocratically constituted Senate (certainly part of what Adams called "the double representation," not based on the population but giving states with even the lowest numbers of people, far more than double the power to confirm or block the appointment of federal judges given to the most populous states, Supreme Court "justices," federal appointees of the kind that Adams noted were in the hands of slave holders for the large majority of his time up to and even after the Civil War. Today that designation might be given by what we call the same thing today, white supremacists. They certainly held the Supreme Court most of its existence, the Roberts Court is firmly held by the modern form of that, today.
Wendell Phillips went on to give other excerpts, not only from abolitionists but, also, to pointing out that Taney and the corrupted once-abolitionist James Storey who issued what was the prior abomination to the Dred Scott decision in the Prigg vs. Pennsylvania. It makes real eye-opening reading as, in fact, does the entire literature of abolitionist writing, especially when they talk about slavery under the Constitution, in the Congress (especially the Senate) and, most of all, under the most corrupt and least democratic of the branches, the Supreme Court and the lower courts under them. The Roberts Court is merely doing what is typical of most of the Supreme Courts in most of their decisions and actions have done, preserved the rights of privilege of the wealthy and powerful which were obtained by blackmail during the Constitutional Convention and inserted into the Constitution where most of it lays unchanged by the Civil War Amendments.
Wendell Phillips give an except from an Address on the Annexation of Texas, by Stephen C. Phillips, of Salem, in it he says.
Still, while I am reluctant to receive the Constitution from the hands of its framers as a bequest of slavery to their posterity, I am compelled to admit, that, in the light of the subsequent history of the country, I now see clearly, that, in its legislative and judicial interpretation, in the claims which have arisen under it, in the measures in which its authority has been exercised, the Federal Constitution has practically become the palladium of slavery, - that by fixture of its provisions, though it is not named in one of them, slavery has been accredited as an institution, and has been maintained as such on the basis of a compact binding upon all the States - and that the"compromises of the Constitution, " in the popular sense of that Shibboleth of the anti-abolitionists, comprehend the power to enforce the most odious pretensions of slavery, and especially to make the free States the instruments of guarding it against the influences of freedom, even to the extent to requiring of their citizens, in opposition to their moral and religious principles, to act as a police for the arrest of fugitives, and to expose their lives in military service in resisting the retributive consequences of insurrection.
In the subsequent history from then, it's clear that the structures of the federal government in the Constitution, and especially under "judicial interpretation" that the same privileging of a minority in the corrupt compromises of the Constitution have been put to use for white supremacy and the millionaires and billionaires who are the current players in the role that the slave-powers and "Eastern" financiers played in the late 18th and early 19th century when the book was published. All of the anti-democratic features of the Constitution have served that purpose, from the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate, the role given the second least democratic body to confirm people for the federal judiciary and other offices, the doubly corrupt Electoral College, etc. And those appointed and in the Senate have served that function more than they have egalitarian democracy. Adding to that are the previously mentioned usurped powers the Court took for itself and things like the filibuster which allows one senator from a tiny state to have the power to thwart any legislation or a supremely stupid senator and failed football coach from one of the most backward bastions of white supremacy to block hundreds of vitally important military appointments.
