Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Thursday that the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford - which held that no African-American, freed or enslaved, could be considered an American citizen - is still the law of the land, even though no state abides by it.
Huckabee made the comment on Michael Medved's radio show in defense of Kentucky clerk Kim Davis' defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage and her refusal to issue marriage licenses, reported Buzzfeed.
He claims Davis does not need to follow the court's ruling because there is a legal precedent for individuals and states to ignore such rulings, according to the New York Daily News.
"Michael, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land, which says that black people aren't fully human," Huckabee said. "Does anybody still follow the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision?"
Medved reminded Huckabee that the Dred Scott ruling was overturned by the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment upon ratification in 1868.
"In the case of this decision, it goes back to what Jefferson said that if a decision is rendered that is not borne out by the will of the people either through their elected people and gone through the process, if you just say it's the law of the land because the court decided, then Jefferson said, 'You now have surrendered to judicial tyranny,'" Huckabee responded.
Huckabee has long argued that the Supreme Court only offers legal opinions and does not have the power to actually make law.
"The Supreme Court in the same-sex marriage decision made a law and they made it up out of thin air," he added. "Until Congress decides to codify that and give it a statute it's really not an operative law and that's why what Kim Davis did was operate under not only the Kentucky Constitution which was the law under which she was elected but she's operating under the fact that there's no statute in her state nor at the federal level that authorizes her."
