At his presidential inaugural on March 4, 1857, President James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat aligned with the Souths slavers, took to the steps of the Capitol and preemptively announced the result of an as-yet-unreleased Supreme Court decision that would give a settlement of the question of domestic Slavery in the Territories.

Two days later, Chief Justice Roger Taney read his majority opinion in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Black people, Taney wrote, are to be regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

The pro-slavery court majority leaked the outcome of the case to Buchanan months earlier. They wanted his help in securing the vote of Justice Robert Grier, a Pennsylvanian like Buchanan, for Taneys decision. As a Northerner, Grier could give the decision a patina of national support, as opposed to coming from an all-Southern bloc. Grier, a supporter of slavery, happily complied.

By repealing the national ban on the establishment of slavery in territories located north of the Mason-Dixon line and returning the decision to the territories, Taney hoped the decision would end the agitation around the slavery issue in favor of his pro-slavery views. For his part, Buchanan hoped it would also destroy the new and growing anti-slavery Republican Party by taking their main issue, prohibiting slavery in the territories, away from them.

Today, another counterrevolution is under way at the Supreme Court. Five conservative justices, led by Justice Samuel Alito, overturned the the 49-year-old decision in Roe v. Wade granting women the right to an abortion. The decision largely hews to a draft opinion published by Politico in May.

Like the court in Dred Scott, todays robed counterrevolutionaries reveal themselves and the court as nakedly political and partisan actors. The court has always been a political entity, but it seeks to mask this nature with a mythology hiding its political nature in legal theories, citations to precedent and popular conceptions of the rule of law. It occasionally bares its political teeth to the public in cases like Dred Scott. And now its done the same with its opinion overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.