Reckoning With the Children Buried in ‘Secret Cemeteries’ Across the US

There are more than 1,000 graves of children who died in state custody that are slowly being identified, forcing the nation to confront legacies of racism and child exploitation.


Cinder block markers mark the graves of children buried at the Maryland House of Reformation & Instruction for Colored Children Burial Site.
(Photo by Marc Schindler)

Emma Cieslik
Oct 12, 2026

Common Dreams

Last year, Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice, broke the news that 230 or more incarcerated Black children died at the Maryland House of Reformation & Instruction for Colored Children. These children died and were buried between 1877-1939 in nearby unmarked graves. Last month, the Center released research finding that there are 40 similar “secret” burial sites in 29 states where over 1,000 children were buried after they died while under the care of youth institutions. The news went viral when shared in a Washington Post piece.

Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice undertook this research as part of the Forgotten Children Initiative launched back in February 2026. Back in 2023, the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services started to document and report how the department has functioned, including reckoning with histories of physical and emotional abuse, exploitative labor practices, and racial discrimination. The House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, which was open and operational from 1870-1937, is just one example.

Georgetown University’s report indicates that House of Reformation served as the first reform school for delinquent Black children in the American South. The house was originally created by the Maryland General Assembly because Black children were sent to adult jails and state prisons for criminal offenses, some as light as running away from home. Maryland children were sent to the House of Reformation for many reasons—sometimes because they were orphaned or had lost a parent or did not have a parent deemed “fit” to care for them, because they lived in poverty or were unhoused or because they were accused of minor offenses.

This latest report reveals a devastating but not entirely unknown truth—that children continue to be exploited, killed, and buried in secrecy under the “protection” of the state and federal government.

Nineteenth century prison reformers argued that children should be placed in facilities that offered religious, vocational, and personal education, but despite this arguably white saviorist goal that these institutions not be places of punishment, reform schools like Maryland’s House of Reformation became places where children were pushed into overcrowded facilities without proper food and medical care. Many children were then forced to labor without pay (often solely to enrich the institutions rather than to teach them vocational skills), to live and work in isolation, or were subject to corporal punishment.

As Georgetown University’s report indicates, a child’s reform school experience was largely based on their race, class, and age. Black and white children were placed in segregated facilities, often also separated by gender. Young Black girls specifically were especially subject to sexual violence and assault in these facilities. As expected, reform schools—later called training schools, industrial schools, juvenile reformatories, and eventually juvenile detention centers—were radically different based on whether Black or white children were living and working there.

Because of the horrific working conditions; a systemic lack of medical care; and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, hundreds of children died at these schools. Approximately 230 Black boys died at the Maryland House of Reform & Instruction while it was operational, and when they died, they were buried in hidden or unidentified graves, likely to cover up the rampant child abuse and death that occurred under the state’s watch. In fact, the secret cemetery was only discovered through a former Maryland Department of Juvenile Services staff member, and while the first section of the cemetery dating to the 19th century included headstones with the names of the boys buried at the site, the second section (dated from the early 20th century) only has rows of cinder blocks with no name or other identifiable information.

The Department of Juvenile Services is working to identify living relatives of the boys buried on site, restore and maintain the site to an official cemetery, and erect historical markers that acknowledge how children were exploited at the site. As the Forgotten Children Initiative report reads, “The overall goal was to properly honor the youth who died or were killed at the House of Reformation and are buried at the site, and provide a more holistic and accurate understanding of the racial inequities that we see today and help with efforts to reduce these inequities moving forward.” This is key because the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services runs the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, a successor to the House of Reformation where almost 250 boys died and were buried in unmarked graves.

But as Georgetown University undertook this study, the researchers realized this was a much more widespread problem. More “secret cemeteries” have come to light, specifically at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida and the New York House of Refuge in New York. These are just three of hundreds of reform schools and institutions that received federal funding to effectively abuse children for decades. At its core, these reform schools were racist institutions meant to police, mold, and erase children of color across the country.

These patterns of child death and secretive burial are also deeply connected to Native American boarding schools throughout the United States and Canada. As Georgetown University’s latest report notes, there are more than 1,000 graves of children who died in state custody that are slowly being identified. The Forgotten Children Initiative questions how many more “secret cemeteries” will be discovered and how many will still be hidden to protect the state that literally enabled their deaths.

This research is part of a global reckoning about the outright murder and covert burial of children in state and religious-run youth institutions. This summer, survivors of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes and their allies rallied in downtown Cork against the impending development on the lands of the Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute where hundreds of infants and children are believed to be buried. These institutions, strikingly similar to those in the United States in the 1960s during the “Baby Scoop” era, were homes for unwed mothers who would have their babies in these facilities. Their children would then be adopted out to neighboring families or would be put into a religious-run institution where abuse and neglect were rampant.

To be clear, this still exists to this day with the Liberty Godparent Home where young, single, pregnant women are coerced into giving up their children to be adopted by affluent Christian families in exchange for a full tuition scholarship to Liberty University.

This violence is also indicative of a much larger history of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States, where people whose bodies are not claimed or whose families cannot cover the expenses to prepare and bury their loved one, are buried in prison cemeteries with simple concrete slabs or metal markers with the incarcerated individual’s name rather than traditional headstones, or their bodies might be cremated and stored or scattered according to The Marshall Project. It’s one final denial of an incarcerated person’s humanity and dignity reminiscent of what the young Black boys at the House of Reformation experienced.

The children who died (or more accurately who were killed due to abuse and neglect in state-run institutions) are the direct ancestors of the modern Prison Industrial Complex. The Prison Industrial Complex tethers together histories of slavery and sharecropping with modern prison systems where prisoners are forced or coerced to work for subminimum wages, with no employee protection. Like modern juvenile detention centers and even group homes, the House of Reformation and other reform schools served as pipelines to prisons, keeping people of color incarcerated in systems of exploited labor for their entire lives.

It’s worth noting that the House of Reformation admitted its first occupants in 1873, only six years after Maryland had abolished slavery, so at least some of the first children admitted into the House of Reformation were formerly enslaved. During a time when courts were still segregated and Black Americans were systematically denied due process, any criminal accusation against a Black child (in the time before Emmett Till’s horrific lynching) would be difficult to fight. Even before (and after) Maryland outlawed slavery, free Black individuals could be easily declared unsuitable to raise their children under discriminatory statutes, forcing minors into unpaid indentured servitude under white masters and later these reform institutions.

This latest report reveals a devastating but not entirely unknown truth—that children continue to be exploited, killed, and buried in secrecy under the “protection” of the state and federal government. It will take decades if not centuries to locate or recover the remains of children, especially children of color, whose lives and deaths were erased by the state to cleanse itself of systemic violence, if all of these children can be found at all. But as more information comes to light, this news is indicative of a much longer, and darker American history of exploiting children, especially children of color, and how this violence continues in the modern juvenile detention and prison systems.


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Emma Cieslik
Emma Cieslik is a museum worker and public historian based in Washington, DC.
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How War Propaganda Justifies Conscription Into Unjust Wars – OpEd

September 23, 2026

MISES

By Dr. Wanjiru Njoya

Key Takeaways:

Drawing on Murray Rothbard, the author calls conscription indentured servitude: no one may coerce another to fight; hazardous service should be paid, not seized. The debate revived when Britain floated drafts amid Russia fears and a 13-group petition demanded a ban.

New York’s July 1863 draft riots after Lincoln’s Enrollment Act are the cautionary tale: $300 exemptions for the rich, Irish and German immigrants who saw the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure that skipped Union slave states and occupied South, plus more than 100 dead and a sharp drop in the city’s Black population.

Abolitionists such as Garrison often stayed home while others fought. Mises, the piece says, allowed a draft only for true home defense. A YouGov poll of 3,044 Britons found 38% of under-40s would refuse a world war and 30% even an invasion. Unpopular governments, Lew Rockwell is quoted, should not say “we” when they make war.

Conscription is a form of indentured servitude. Murray Rothbard argued that everyone has a natural right to self-defense, but “we have no moral right to use coercion—the bayonet or the revolver—to force someone else to defend us.”

Rothbard argued that if we want men to stand in our defense, “the way to induce people to volunteer for hazardous jobs is to pay them extra as compensation.” And yet, instead of offering a wage that would reward men who sign up willingly, governments rely on force to press conscripts into service. The conscript is,

. . .seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. There his body and will are no longer his own: he is subject to the dictates of the government; and he can be forced to kill and to place his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree.

This debate recently returned to public attention when it was reported that the United Kingdom is reconsidering conscription due to what the UK government sees as escalating hostilities with Russia.

Campaigners are protesting over the prospect of conscription returning amid mounting Russian threats against Britain. A coalition of 13 British peace and faith organisations has launched a petition demanding the Government rule out military conscription, or any compulsory form of national service involving the armed forces. . . There is currently no conscription in Britain, although concerns about World War 3 have fuelled renewed discussions on how the armed forces could be expanded.

For conscription to be even remotely tolerable by the public, it is, at the very least, necessary for warmakers to persuade the public that the war is just, and worth fighting. Otherwise, people are likely to revolt, as happened in New York when the Enrollment Act of March 1863 drafted men to fight Lincoln’s war.

On July 11, 1863 the first names for induction into the army were called. The next day, New York erupted into some of the most violent riots in American history. The office of the provost marshal—charged with enforcing the draft—was burned, railroad lines were destroyed, and telegraph lines cut. . . . Over one hundred people died in the rioting, thousands were wounded, and thousands of African Americans fled New York.

This attempt to corral New Yorkers into the war against their will followed soon after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. The implication, following the Proclamation, was that what had started out as a politically-driven war to save the Union was now a moral crusade to free the slaves of the South—surely a just cause! But very few were convinced. John M. Taylor observes that, under the Enrollment Act of 1863,

Wealthy Northerners could either fight or pay a $300.00 exemption from the draft. The Irish, mostly coming from meager circumstances, typically lacked the funds to buy exemptions. Whereas large numbers of wealthy Southerners fought, few wealthy Northerners did. William Tecumseh Sherman alluded to this, stating, “that without conscription there would have been no way to ‘separate the sheep from the goats and demonstrate what citizens will fight and what will only talk.’”

The Emancipation Proclamation was not seen by the draftees as moral justification to fight. For one, the Proclamation belied its own moral authority by failing to free all slaves and only purporting to free those under Confederate control. Freeing only the slaves of one’s enemies, almost two years into the war, marked the Proclamation as a war measure rather than a humanitarian edict.

Further, the Proclamation did not apply to the five slave states fighting on the Union side—Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—nor did it free slaves in parts of the South that had already been brought under federal control. For example, Tennessee and parts of Louisiana—New Orleans and Union-held parishes—were excluded from the Proclamation.

Far from the Emancipation Proclamation persuading the rioters that Lincoln’s cause was just, they saw emancipation as a threat to their own precarious socioeconomic circumstances. They turned their ire against the authorities and Lincoln’s friend Horace Greeley, but also against the black population who were not to blame for Lincoln’s stratagem.

The long term damage to New York’s black population was significant: In the aftermath of the riots, the city’s black population plummeted by more than 20 percent, to below 10,000 (the lowest number since the 1820s), as blacks fled the city in droves.

It is often observed that warmakers do not personally tend to show up to fight in their own wars. This gives them further incentive to rely on conscription. Many New Yorkers were against the war in the first place, but, in total numbers, far more of them ended up fighting in the war compared to the abolitionists of Massachusetts who had backed the war from the beginning. Professor Clyde Wilson observes that,

Historians have often noted that, generally speaking, the best generals and soldiers in the “Union” armies were not supporters of the Republican Party or the Lincoln administration. Republicans and especially abolitionists tended to avoid military service in the war they had initiated.

For example, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a pacifist, and so were his fighting-age sons. They declared that they were conscientious objectors and would not serve even if drafted. Although Garrison was a vocal supporter of Lincoln’s war, he regarded pacifism as his Christian duty and denied that it was hypocritical to refrain from personally joining the war he publicly supported.

One of Garrison’s sons did acquiesce to serve if drafted. He was eventually offered an officer’s commission, which, coincidentally, worked out as an opportunity for him to burnish his racially-enlightened credentials by leading an all-black unit.

One concern many have is that without conscription a country might come under attack and lack the manpower to mount a defense. However, when the cause is just, and seen by citizens to be necessary in their own defense, a government that rules by consent need not fear that no one would be willing to stand defense. In this context, fighting defense of hearth and home, Ludwig von Mises saw conscription as justified. This justification would not apply to an aggressive war.

In “Did the South Have to Fight,” Thomas Fleming observes that, “Many Southerners resented conscription not because they were unwilling to fight but because they wanted the honor of fighting as volunteers.” They saw the cause for which they fought as one for the defense of the South, not just for the selfish interests of a few warmakers.

The case is entirely different when an unpopular government already knows that many people do not trust its motives and would therefore be unwilling to fight its wars. In the UK, the Daily Express reports:

A YouGov survey of 3,044 people found 38% of under-40s would refuse to serve if a new world war broke out, while 30% said they would refuse even in the event of an imminent invasion of the UK.

Unpopular governments that rule by the bayonet are most likely to resort to conscription. In the case of the New York Draft Riots, many of the conscripts were immigrants who had recently arrived from Germany and Ireland and did not see any reason to get involved in Lincoln’s war.

As Lew Rockwell has observed, often the warmakers wage war for reasons that have little to do with popular opinion. It is no surprise that they deem war propaganda and use of force against their own citizens to be necessary, after the fact, to persuade people to support their war effort. As Rockwell counsels,

The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. We must never say “we” when discussing the US government’s foreign policy. For one thing, the warmakers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Americans. It is silly and embarrassing for Americans to speak of “we” when discussing their government’s foreign policy, as if their input were necessary to or desired by those who make war.

About the author: 

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow for the Mises Institute. She is the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, with David Gordon), “You Stole Our Land: Common Law, Private Property, and Rothbardian Principles of Justice” (Journal of Libertarian Studies, 28 (1): 91–119 (2024) and “Individual Liberty, Formal Equality, and the Rule of Law” (Palgrave Handbook of Classical Liberalism, forthcoming, 2026).

Source: This article was published by Mises


About MISES
The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, the Mises Institute seeks a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. The Mises Institute encourages critical historical research, and stands against political correctness.
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Usury is Politics, Not Economics

David S. D’Amato

 August 14, 2026

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Photo by Francesco Alberti

Last fall, Pope Leo made an address in which he stated that “[t]he phenomenon of usury points to the corruption of the human heart,” condemning the practice as bringing crisis to families and enslaving the poor and powerless. Though it is almost never discussed today by those who comment on matters public and political (they are afraid to offend their captors), usury is among the defining features of our entire social, political and economic system.

Recent court cases have put a spotlight on usury and state laws meant to combat it. Earlier this month, for example, the Fourth Circuit denied an attempt by the lender TitleMax to stop a consumer protection lawsuit, opening the way for a Pennsylvania government agency to pursue over $50 million in penalties for the unlawful practice of usury. In one of the instances covered by the case, TitleMax issued a loan of $7,751.39 to a Pennsylvania man, charging an interest rate of over 132%, with the result that his interest on the loan was over $33,000. He took out the loan in Delaware, but under Pennsylvania’s usury law, the interest on the debt would have been less than $1,000.

A case out of Colorado, currently before the Tenth Circuit, implicates a similar fight over a state usury law that sets a cap on interest rates; the case involves state-chartered banks partnering with fintech companies to give personal loans all over the country. These banks and companies argue that they have a right to export interest rates applicable and legal within their own states, and that Colorado’s local usury rules cannot apply. One of the implicated banks, FinWise Bank, approved loans with interest rates of 160%, legal in Utah, for example, but a felony in Colorado.

Importantly, one need not accept the Pope’s Christian faith in order to oppose usury as a social relationship of unjust, exploitative power. And it is a relationship of power rather than one of mere economics, as if the latter exists in a sphere separate from the former. It may surprise some that one of American history’s most ardent and consistent proponents of free markets and individual liberty was also one of its greatest critics of usury. The anarchist Benjamin Tucker set forth to confront “a most momentous question,” the question of who receives “the surplus wealth that labor produces and does not consume.” For Tucker, usury was the key characteristic of capitalism, but it was the result of political power, not economic relationships of free and voluntary exchange.

The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously wrote a lengthy Defence of Usury near the end of the eighteenth century. For Bentham, usury was not a proper subject of legal prohibition, because, he argued, free adults should be able to engage in whatever kinds of economic activities and exchanges they like. Yet Bentham reckoned only half of the whole story, much like those who still today misguidedly defend capitalism on the grounds of freedom and strong individual rights. They are not sufficiently careful to keep context; their mistake is to believe that the relations described by this apparently innocuous term, relations of domination and coercion, emerge from conditions of mere voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. But it would be very strange indeed for such an authoritarian arrangement to grow up out of libertarian ideals and means. In fact, historically, the usurious conditions of our system of political economy, whatever called, are right in line with bygone systems of power and privilege, with those of feudalism and mercantilism, for example.

Defenders of capitalism seem to be able to apply the much-vaunted economic law of supply and demand to everything but capitalism itself. The defenders of usury are not liberal in any meaningful sense; they deploy the language and concepts of economic rights and freedom in the service of a system that is akin in its actual, material dimensions to forced labor. That is, they stand liberalism on its head and make it a cynical, ideological cover for what is actually a program of political extraction and indentured servitude. This state of affairs passes unremarked upon because the right wing of our current politics says that this is a system of freedom with which the state must not interfere, and the left wing of our politics insists that only the state can hold capital at bay. Both of these narratives are fundamentally confused, preventing a proper understanding of the system’s history and dynamics.

To wrap a violent system such as capitalism in the language of freedom and “free markets” is a high crime, based on the confusion of useful idiots and the malice and contempt of the ruling class, always shrinking relative to the size of the population, always distancing themselves from the people. Very few of today’s liberals have cared to notice what Benjamin Tucker and other anarchists did, because they are often members of a class of laptop “professionals” who serve to protect the power of that ruling class. This is sadly among the major structural reasons that Donald Trump was able to pull the wool over the eyes of so many in the working class. Liberalism on its face became less about justice, freedom, and equality than about protecting the unearned social prestige of the puppets of a billionaire ruling class—a class that has never had any use for free markets and uses the state however and whenever it can.

If the objective and mechanism of actual free markets might be something like equilibrium and the efficient allocation of resources, then capitalism historically has meant the endless and auto-reproductive accumulation of surplus value. If free markets would mean that rent, interest and profit always tend toward a zero value, then capitalism means they must always grow and accumulate without end or limit. If free markets would mean no barriers to market entry and infinite substitutes of products and services, then capitalism has always seen high, state-manufactured barriers and deep structural and legal moats around powerful capital.

If the role of the law in a free market is to play the exogenous and neutral referee, then in capitalism it is to be an endogenous and active architect of legal inequality. If in a free market, information and ideas cannot be owned and belong to humanity as a natural birthright, then in capitalism they are made the exclusive property of a privileged few through so-called intellectual property rights. And if participation in any organization or firm is fully voluntary in free markets, then under capitalism, participation is structurally coerced by extra-economic violence (peasant dispossession and land monopoly, police and private security attacks on strikers, etc.). If risk in free markets is borne by those who create it, then in capitalism it is foisted through the state onto the population at large, with only benefits concentrated. In short, these systems, freedom and capitalism, are opposites, if we care to take the historical record at all seriously. In genuine free markets, the presence of usurious profits itself acts as an immediate signal and spur to eager competitors. Capitalism is a system that outlaws competition, as Tucker once said. Capitalists work “by abolishing the free market,” not working fairly within it.

A free market is measured, in the final analysis, by one’s right to leave it, as a truly voluntary system could only be one it is possible to exit at will. In our political and economic system, the state prohibits, or limits, or licenses, or otherwise meddles with any shred of a possibility of independent survival or self-sufficiency. Its laws cover everything and draw power to organized capital and corporate special interests. Subsidies, privileges, restrictions and professional licenses give the individual no power and no choice but to participate in a centralized, financialized corporation economy that is fully the creation of state power. Even the most cursory examination of the history of the corporate system reveals that its reason for being was and remains the prohibition of free-market competition for the benefit of a small privileged class.

Participation being mandatory for survival, there is no free market as such, and the relationship between the individual and the corporate system is not in the nature or form of a real contract. It is a relationship of political capture and submission. Defending capitalism with the language of pure economics or liberal freedoms is a ridiculous and cynical narrative for a ridiculous and cynical system. We must notice again what Tucker did, that liberty and equality—and thus libertarianism and socialism—are natural complements. Perhaps it would be appropriate to adopt Bentham’s defense of usury in a free-market system. But we don’t have such a system. We have capitalism.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.

INDENTURED SERVITUDE DESERVES A LIVING WAGE

Long hours, lack of social support undermine caregivers’ well-being, study finds

McGill researchers say spending more than 20 hours a week on caregiving is associated with poorer mental health, and that policymakers should take note

McGill University

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While caregiving can be meaningful and rewarding at manageable levels, those who spend more than 20 hours a week delivering unpaid care to others have poorer mental health outcomes, a McGill study has found.

However, the researchers also found that the provision of social support to high-intensity caregivers mitigates negative impacts.

“Programs that connect intensive caregivers to emotional, informational and practical support (respite care, caregiver support groups, community services) could make a real difference,” said Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, Professor and Chair of the Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy and senior author of the study.

“Policies that focus solely on who is a caregiver miss the point: how much someone is caregiving matters enormously for their well-being,” Quesnel-Vallée said.

“Factors we often assume matter (gender, income, education, where you live) did not significantly change how caregiving affected mental health once intensity was taken into account,” she added.

Long-term data reveal patterns

The team used data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), a large, nationally representative cohort of over 51,000 Canadians ages 45-85 at baseline. The study followed them over three time points, roughly from 2011 to 2021.

The researchers categorized the participants into four groups (non-caregiver, low, moderate, intensive) and tested whether factors like gender, income, education and social support affected the relationship between the participants’ caregiving activities and their mental health. They also controlled for stable personal characteristics that might otherwise distort results, such as personality or early-life health issues.

“Intensive caregivers (who spent more than 20 hours a week on caregiving) had worse mental health – lower life satisfaction and more depressive symptoms – while low-intensity caregivers (under 10 hours a week) actually reported higher life satisfaction than non-caregivers,” Quesnel-Vallée summarized.

The research also showed that, for high-intensity caregivers, the only factor that buffered against the mental health toll of caregiving was how much social support they reported receiving.

Practical implications

The researchers maintain that, given that more Canadians will take on unpaid caregiving roles in the future due to the country’s aging population, the results have practical implications for policymaking.

For Zilin Li, a postdoctoral researcher in the Consortium on Analytics for Data-Driven Decision-Making and lead author of the study, it’s important that policymakers highlight the positive aspects of caregiving in offering support.

“Policies should invest in strengths-based supports that empower caregivers through training and recognition of their skills and values,” she said.

The researchers said they hope future research can track the caregiving journey and its long-term mental health impacts in more comprehensive ways, identify the types of caregiving support that would be most beneficial and collect data on caregivers under 45, who were not included in the CLSA.

About the study

“Social disparities in associations between informal caregiving intensity and mental health: Evidence from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging”, by Zilin Li, Isabelle Vedel and Amélie Quesnel-Vallée was published in Social Science & Medicine.

This research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

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Journal

Social Science & Medicine

DOI

10.1016/j.socscimed.2026.119188 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Social disparities in associations between informal caregiving intensity and mental health: Evidence from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging

The US Supreme Court: Our Surrogate King for 223 Years

Richard W. Behan

June 1, 2026

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Photo by Tim Mossholder

A king is a study in absolutes. His word is final, the law of the land, and he is accountable to no one, possibly excepting God.

Isn’t that a credible description of our Supreme Court? Its word is final, the law of the land, and its justices serve for life, unaccountable even to the presidents who appoint them.

Limitless in power, totally isolated, the Court can inflict great harm to the nation. It has for example eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in two subsequent decisions, Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 and Louisiana v. Callais just this year. And now the former Confederate states are Jim-Crowing their black citizens all over again, kneecapping the impact of their votes. Discriminating against black voters in the South is once again, incontestably, the law of the land.

The Supreme Court can do such things by declaring laws or parts of laws to be unconstitutional and therefore invalid. The Court can do this because today it holds a power known as judicial review. It can tell the makers of laws—an elected Congress and an elected President—“You were wrong and we are right in saying so.”  How absolute is that?  Supreme Court justices were never elected, but they nullify laws emplaced by people who were. How anti-democratic is that?

This is not remotely what the Framers of the Constitution intended.

Article III Section 2 specifies what the Supreme Court can do. It functions all but exclusively with appellate jurisdiction. In street language that means the Court can do either of two things: it can uphold a lower court decision, or overturn it.  Nothing else. That’s it. The Court is empowered to sit in judgment of law cases. Nowhere is it empowered or even obliquely allowed to sit in judgment of the laws. The Constitution simply does not grant the Supreme Court the power of judicial review.

The Framers meant the Court to be subordinate.  In Federalist 78 Alexander Hamilton said this:

“The Judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of powers…it can never attack with success either of the other two [branches]…”

And in Federalist 81 he was explicit:

“…there is not a syllable in the plan under consideration [i.e. the Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution…”

 Today’s Supreme Court invalidates laws without a speck of Constitutional authority, and it has done so for 223 years.

That takes us back to 1803 and the infamous Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison.

Federalist President John Adams in the last days of his term appointed 16 new lower court judges—all of Federalist persuasion. Among them was one William Marbury. Their commissions were to be delivered by the Secretary of State, as specified in the Judiciary Act of 1789, but in the scurry of a departing Administration they were not. In March Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as President. Intending to appoint judges of his own party instead Jefferson ordered his Secretary of State James Madison not to deliver the commissions.  Marbury sued for his, citing the 1789 law. John Marshall’s Supreme Court found Madison guilty but—wait for it—also saw the Judiciary Act as slightly askew of the Constitution. It was the skinniest technicality, but on that basis the Court dismissed the case.

Chief Justice Marshall said in the Court’s written decision, “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is…a law repugnant to the Constitution is void.” So said John Marshall, but nobody else, certainly not the writers of the Constitution.

Marshall’s Supreme Court claimed judicial review simply by fiat and vaulted from the weakest branch of federal governance eventually to kinglike supremecy.

Note where our Supreme Court is today: by neutering the Voting Rights Act (and, incidentally, encouraging gerrymandering) it is up to its enrobed necks in rigging the upcoming elections, the mid-terms and the general election in 2028.

Judicial review was initially benign. It wasn’t invoked again for 57 years, and might have remained tolerable had not the Court paired it with another irresponsible decision.

In the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad the Supreme Court set a precedent with devastating consequences. It simply declared chartered corporations are persons as defined in the 14^th Amendment, with rights guaranteed by the Constitution: free speech, equal protection under the law, and others. By a technical error of the Court the precedent is legally flawed, but later Courts cited it anyway. And  now corporate personhood, prima facie preposterous, is the law of the land.

Think about corporate personhood for a moment. If corporations have Constitutional rights and if they can prove in court those rights are violated by a law, they can sue to have the law overturned. They can use judicial review as a weapon.

And after Santa Clara County they did.

The 14^th Amendment was meant to grant citizenship to black Americans, freed from enslavement by the Emancipation Proclamation, and to guarantee their equal treatment under the law. But now, after Santa Clara County, corporations became citizens, too.

377 cases based on the 14th Amendment were heard by the Supreme Court over the 27 years following Santa Clara County.  19 of them dealt with black Americans seeking equal protection. 288 were initiated by corporations claiming Constitutional rights—primarily to invalidate irksome laws.

As the centuries turned corporations succeeded in overturning minimum wage laws, child labor laws, laws limiting the workday, workmen’s compensation statutes, laws limiting corporate lobbying, and laws regulating utility companies. They sued for and won additional Constitutional rights, those granted by the 4th, and 5th Amendments—rights of privacy and the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Between 1905 and the mid-1930’s the Supreme Court found some 200 laws and regulations to be unconstitutional.

As the 20^th century progressed the toxicity grew. The caustic combination of judicial review and corporate personhood would prove in time to be fatal to democracy.       In a 1976 case, Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional the 1910 Corrupt Practices Act. It placed parsimonious limits on how much political candidates could spend on their campaigns. No, the Court said, spending money is a form of free speech, and the Congress cannot “abridge” that right. Dollars are words? Isn’t that also prima facie preposterous? Two years later in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti the Court overturned the 1907 Tilman Act, prohibiting corporations from spending money on political campaigns—because corporations have free speech rights, too. In seeming contradiction a law limiting how much corporations could spend remained in place. (The law was FECA, the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1972.)

In 2010 Citizens United v. FEC removed the contradiction. If corporations could not be restrained at all from spending for political purposes, then how much they spent was immaterial. Section 441b of FECA was unconstitutional. Out with it. Corporations can spend as much as they please.

But not to worry, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

“…independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption…..The appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in democracy.”   

Prima facie preposterous?

A tsunami of corporate money flooded expeditiously into the political campaigns of both parties (protected by the right of free speech) and lobbying activities as well (protected by the right of petition).

Corporations today outspend citizen interest groups in lobbying Congress and executive agencies by a factor of 86:1. In the 2024 election cycle corporations contributed 71% of the total of campaign donations, about $10.65 billion. Closely allied billionaires contributed another $2.85 billion, 19% of the total. Small individual donations came to $1.5 billion, about 10%.

By any measure, corporate citizens are the dominant influencers of federal governance today. Their financing of political campaigns renders elected officials into indentured servitude, amiably open to corporate requests. Then corporate lobbyists specify the details.

Public policy today routinely favors not the public interest, but the preferences of corporate America.

Oligarchs are commonly thought to be men and women of immense wealth with close ties to governments. We have those: Elon Musk gave $250 million to the Trump campaign in 2024. But the oligarchs dominating us today are corporate. It is not inaccurate to say our democracy was displaced by corporate oligarchy—after judicial review, after Santa Clara County, after Buckley, after Bellotti,after Citizens United. All thanks to a Supreme Court emulating royalty.

And then Donald Trump showed up, and overrode corporate oligarchy: Trump made himself a king.

The Supreme Court, the stand-in, stepped up to help. First the Court empowered Trump to ignore the rule of law: in Trump v. United States presidents became immune from prosecution for breaking laws while in office, if they do so in “official” actions. Then the Court fell into lockstep with the Republican Party, to tilt the elections of 2026 and 2028 to favor Donald Trump.

If Trump wins a third term, we will still have a king.

If he doesn’t, we’ll still have the stand-in.

This article is drawn from  a book the author is completing, The Triumph of Corporate Oligarchy: How It Defeated Democracy, Normalized Fraudulent Warfare, Devastated a Thriving Nation, and Brought Forth Donald Trump.

Richard W. Behan lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He can be reached at: richard.behan@icloud.com

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