Nikki Haley syndrome.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican leading one of the country’s most liberal states, won rare applause from the left but riled some of his conservative base with his decision to back the recent removal of a Civil War-era statue from the State House grounds.
The statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — author of the Dred Scott ruling in 1857 that reaffirmed slavery and denied citizenship to blacks — was caught up in the rush to topple Confederate monuments after deadly violence at an Aug. 12 white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The politics surrounding the removal of the 145-year-old statue of Taney, who never joined the Confederacy and early in his life freed slaves he inherited, proved as complicated as Maryland’s Civil War history.
Mr. Hogan, who had been opposed to the removal of Civil War statues, called it “the right thing to do.”