Fascinating, disturbing but not surprising bit of American history I’d never heard about, from an op-ed in yesterday’s NY Times by Akhil Reed Amar (link to full piece here)
Mr. Trump’s lawyers legitimately ask what counts as a disqualifying insurrection. Section 3, they note, was clearly aimed at oath-breakers who had backed insurrections akin to the Civil War. In that calamitous insurrection, more than half a million people died. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot, they argue, pales in comparison.
But Section 3’s authors actually had not one but two recent insurrections in mind. Before the bloody insurrection that began when cannons roared at Fort Sumter in April 1861, there was the first insurrection of the 1860s, led by cabinet members of outgoing President James Buchanan, including John B. Floyd, the war secretary, and Philip Francis Thomas, the treasury secretary, among many others. A shadowy network of affiliates and co-conspirators aimed in several and nefarious ways — including mayhem, military subversion and even murder, if need be — to prevent the lawful counting of President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s electoral votes and to thwart his lawful inauguration in early March 1861.
From one angle, the first insurrection was even worse than the giant insurrection that followed. It aimed not merely to shrink the union, but to undo a legitimate presidential election for all Americans.
On Feb. 13, 1861 — the closest equivalent of Jan. 6, 2021 — Congress met to certify Lincoln’s victory. Malicious anti-Lincoln men congregated near the Capitol. But thanks to Gen. Winfield Scott’s steely defense, the Capitol held.
In some ways, the insurrection of 2021 was worse than the first insurrection of 1861. The Capitol did not fall in 1861, but it was breached in 2021.
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Lincoln won the Electoral College in the election of 1860, although he was not on the ballot in any of the eleven states that seceded and formed the Confederacy (to get on the ballot a certain number of signatures was needed, people collecting signatures for Lincoln were run out of town or lynched). I’d never heard, until today, about the MAGA-like machinations of sitting government officials, their henchmen and a mob to try to keep Lincoln out of office, two months before full scale Civil War broke out. The second time Lincoln won, of course, during the Civil War, he was shot in the head at close range, days after Lee surrendered to Grant, by an enraged Confederate shouting “sic semper tyrannis!” thus may it always be with tyrants.
History comes up with very similar ugly scenarios over and over, like disgusting burps from a meal that was right on the edge of food poisoning. The traitor who led the Confederate army in a war that killed more Americans than any other was honored years later with his likeness on a US postage stamp. The president of the Confederacy was tried criminally, for treason, but the trial was too divisive and political and the new DOJ, I guess, finally just threw up its hands on prosecuting him. Old Jefferson Davis walked away with a wry smile, no harm, no foul. Here’s a piece about that shameful failure of justice, first long delayed, then shadily negotiated, then denied.
During World War II pro-Nazi gangs in America and pro-Nazi members of Congress, literally calling themselves America First, who propagandized for, aided and gave comfort to actual German Nazis who had declared war on the United States, an enemy the US was then fighting… uh, no convictions, because there were passionate, angry people on both sides, particularly the violent, pro-Nazi side. Rachel Maddow did a brilliant audio series on this shit show, called Ultra, highly recommended. Steven Spielberg immediately bought the screen rights for this suspenseful film noir tragedy.
No trial for the antidemocratic masterminds, Bannon, Eastman, Giuliani, Kerik, Flynn and their ilk, who sat in the War Room at the Willard Hotel coordinating the “Green Bay Sweep” the plan by MAGA congressmen and senators to block the certification of Biden’s election and swap in fake electors, including incitement of a violent riot, based on incendiary lies believed by millions, to discard the ballots of millions of Black people and voters in Anarchist Jurisdictions and keep their leader in power? The stink of it all is sickeningly familiar.
Like the ongoing racist, misogynist attacks against the Black, female Fulton County DA who is now under fire, in our craven corporate bottom-line media, for calling the attacks against her racist. Her private life, her sex life, is fair game for these scumbag defendants, and the media takes it seriously, rattles on about some undefined appearance of impropriety and maybe she should walk away.
As I was taught early on in law school, if you have the facts, pound the facts, if you have the law, pound the law, if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table. These table-pounding fucks are trying to stir up enough of a foul stench that the court system itself walks away, as has happened before in our storied, often erased history.
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