President Andrew Johnson – immigrationcourtside.com

150 YEARS AGO, ANOTHER WHITE NATIONALIST DEMAGOGUE PUSHED AMERICAN DEMOCRACY TO THE PRECIPICE – Trump Following In A. Johnson’s Shoes! — Learn About The Johnson Impeachment With “Going To The Devil” A New Docudrama From The Great Courses!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/opinion/sunday/andrew-johnson-donald-trump.html

Professor Manisha Sinha writes in the NY Times:

Opinion

Donald Trump, Meet Your Precursor

Andrew Johnson pioneered the recalcitrant racism and impeachment-worthy subterfuge the president is fond of.

By Manisha Sinha

Ms. Sinha is the author of “The Slave’s Cause: a History of Abolition.”

Nov. 29, 2019

Last week, in defense of her father, Ivanka Trump tweeted out a quotation she wrongly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: “A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.”

The misquotation came from an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that has since been corrected. What is fascinating about this incident though, is that the quotation actually comes from an 1889 book, “American Constitutional Law,” that defends Andrew Johnson against his impeachment in 1868. By the time the book was written, emancipation and the attempt to guarantee black rights lay in shambles, and conservatives rallied to the defense of Johnson, one of the most reviled presidents in American history.

Much more than impeachment connects the presidencies of Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump. No one expected either man to enter the White House. Both presidencies began with a whiff of illegitimacy hanging over them: Johnson’s because he became president when Lincoln was assassinated, Mr. Trump’s because he won the Electoral College despite having nearly three million fewer popular votes than his opponent, the largest losing margin of any president who actually won the election. The size of the gap did not bode well for American democracy.

Historical parallelism rarely works in a simplistic manner. But it does work when historians discern broad similarities and patterns that link our present moment to the past. Many fallible men have inhabited the office of the presidency. Only a handful have been so oblivious to the oath they took that they have met the constitutional standard for impeachment.

The first president against whom impeachment proceedings were considered was John Tyler, who like Johnson became president after an untimely death, that of President William Henry Harrison. A proslavery zealot, Tyler has the unique distinction so far of being the only president to commit treason against his country. He voted for Virginia’s secession from the Union.

Unlike Tyler, Johnson refused to go with his state, Tennessee, when it seceded from the Union. For this, he was appointed military governor of Tennessee and then rewarded with the vice-presidential spot on the National Union Party presidential ticket headed by Lincoln in 1864. Johnson came closest to being removed from the presidency when his conviction fell one vote short of the required two-thirds majority needed in the Senate.

If the recent House impeachment hearings have revealed anything, it is that Mr. Trump’s actions clearly meet the criteria laid out in the impeachment clause, “Treason, bribery or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” While Mr. Trump’s criminality is of the same order as Richard Nixon’s, trying to interfere in a presidential election, like Johnson, he exhibits no public or private decorum. Johnson’s and Mr. Trump’s biographies could not be more different but their lack of presidential demeanor was evident from the start. As the historian Eric Foner has put it, “Americans, more often than not, choose mediocre presidents, but require of them a decorum foreign to other aspects of their life.” Johnson, a poor white Southerner, became a slaveholder and successful politician, occupying local, state and national office. Mr. Trump, brought up in the corrupt and highflying world of New York’s real estate business, is an oddly successful political neophyte.

Both Johnson and Mr. Trump amply displayed their unfitness for the presidency before getting the job. Johnson so fortified himself with whiskey on taking his oath of office for the vice presidency that his rambling, drunken speech mortified all who were present. Lincoln, who gave his memorable Second Inaugural Address the same day, noted, “This Johnson is a queer man.” Mr. Trump is a teetotaler but ran a presidential campaign full of grotesque insults, ridicule, lies and vulgarity. His crude and cruel pronouncements after his ascent to the presidency are too many to recount. Ambassador Gordon Sondland, a Trump pick, in his testimony at the impeachment hearings in the House, uses the term “TrumpSpeak”: profanity-laced language that guided a personal political agenda and undermined United States foreign policy and national security. Both Johnson and Mr. Trump, neither blessed with literary or oratorical skills, succeeded two of the most gifted presidential wordsmiths.

But most significantly, both men made an undisguised championship of white supremacy — the lodestar of their presidencies — and played on the politics of racial division. For Johnson, it was his obdurate opposition to Reconstruction, the project to establish an interracial democracy in the United States after the destruction of slavery. He wanted to prevent, as he put it, the “Africanization” of the country. Under the guise of strict constructionism, states’ rights and opposition to big government, previously deployed by Southern slaveholders to defend slavery, Johnson vetoed all federal laws intended to protect former slaves from racial terror and from the Black Codes passed in the old Confederate states. This reduced African-Americans to a state of semi-servitude. Johnson peddled the racist myth that Southern whites were victimized by black emancipation and citizenship, which became an article of faith among Lost Cause proponents in the postwar South.

It is a myth that Mr. Trump seems to have fully bought into, given his defense of “beautiful” Confederate statues and monuments. Like Johnson, he uses derogatory language for people of color and he has expressed his preference for Nordic immigrants. Mr. Trump’s handpicked man in charge of immigration policy, the brain behind the separation of families in immigration detention camps, is Stephen Miller, who has recently been publicly revealed to be a white nationalist. The abolitionist feminist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper called Johnson an “incarnation of meanness,” words that are still applicable today.

Both Johnson’s and Mr. Trump’s concept of American nationalism is narrow, parochial and authoritarian. Johnson opposed the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, that guarantees equality before the law to all persons and citizenship to all born in the United States. Mr. Trump has threatened both to revoke its constitutional guarantee of national birthright citizenship and have the entire amendment overturned. Johnson’s highhanded actions and disregard of Congress led to Thomas Nast’s famous “King Andy” cartoon in Harper’s Weekly. Today Mr. Trump’s unaccountable style of governing reflects his Attorney General William Barr’s doctrine of unitary executive power, oblivious to the checks and balances and separation of powers in the Constitution.

The American republic was founded on the repudiation of the divine right of kings to rule. That is the reason that the impeachment clause of the Constitution holds elected officials, including the president, accountable for bribery and criminal wrongdoing.

Johnson and Mr. Trump not only managed to diminish their office but also engaged in actions that have dangerous repercussions for American democracy. Their crimes are not just specific impeachable acts but also the systematic undermining of the rule of law, democratic governance, human rights and the national interest. Johnson pardoned nearly all high-ranking Confederates who had taken up arms against the United States government. In one case, he also pardoned a white Virginian who murdered a black man in broad daylight and looked the other way at reports of massacres of freed people and harassment of Southern white unionists. Mr. Trump, against the advice of the Defense Department and the Navy, has just pardoned a Navy SEAL, Edward Gallagher, who violated the military’s rules of conduct. He has even hinted that he wants the disgraced Chief Gallagher at his rallies.

What Mr. Trump and his enablers call the “deep state” is nothing but the rules and norms of democratic government. It has become clear from the testimony of upstanding national security and foreign service officials like Ambassadors Marie Yovanovitch and William R. Taylor, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill and David Holmes that he undermined the very fabric of the United States government in seeking to profit personally from the conduct of foreign policy, by withholding aid from a democratically elected anti-corruption Ukrainian government unless its officials investigated his domestic political rivals, the Bidens. Over 150 years ago, the testimony before Congress of ordinary patriotic Americans, former slaves, Southern unionists, Northern travelers to the post war South, Union Army officers and federal officials completely discredited Johnson’s racist policies.

Mr. Trump openly invites and, now we know, privately demands foreign interference in our elections, a scenario that the men who founded the American Republic and wrote its Constitution repeatedly warned against. He attacks his opponents and even supporters who do not agree with him on Twitter. Johnson, too, loved to vilify his opponents, like Frederick Douglass and Radical Republican congressmen. Both presidents precipitated a constitutional crisis that could be solved only through an impeachment process. The author Brenda Wineapple has written that Johnson was “the chief architect” of his own impeachment. The same is true of Mr. Trump.

Unlike with Nixon and Mr. Clinton, attempts to impeach Johnson and Mr. Trump preceded the actual impeachment inquiry because both systematically undermined federal laws and democratic institutions the moment they took office. Their personal narcissism and disregard for the principles of democratic governance led to early calls for impeachment. In Johnson’s case, violation of the Tenure of Office Act when he removed Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, led to his impeachment. While this law encroached on executive privilege, it was intended to prevent Johnson’s interference in congressional Reconstruction and his increasingly dangerous obstructionism. It was the law of the land when Johnson violated it by firing Stanton. Similarly, while it is certainly a president’s prerogative to appoint and fire American ambassadors, the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch was the result of a sleazy attempt to pressure Ukraine’s government.

In 1866, a Northern public sickened by Johnson’s antics and vitriolic rhetoric elected a thumping majority of his opponents. In 2018, the country handed a rebuke to Mr. Trump by electing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, which has now begun impeachment proceedings against him. Trump has handed his own smoking gun to them, his infamous call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Johnson removed and belittled Union Army officers. The Purple Heart-wearing Lt. Col. Vindman has been subject to nativist, anti-Semitic slurs and death threats after his moving testimony.

Johnson’s defenders, like Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, the one man who could drink him under the table, and Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky, were as oblivious to facts, reason and propriety as their modern counterparts, Senator Lindsey Graham and Representatives Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan. The vote to convict Johnson lost as a handful of moderate Republicans voted to acquit when he promised not to interfere in Reconstruction any longer, though he remained unrepentant, continuing to criticize the attempt to establish black citizenship until the day he died in 1875. But Johnson was damaged goods after impeachment, and neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wanted him anywhere near their presidential tickets in 1868.

House Democrats face a different scenario today given a Republican majority in the Senate. The likelihood of convicting Mr. Trump is much lower than it was for Johnson. The Republican Party, no longer the party of Lincoln, refuses to be persuaded, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Like the Republicans in 1868, House Democrats are not waiting for a presidential election to send a rebuke to a president who behaves with impunity against his country, its ideals and interests. The House Judiciary Committee would do well to develop articles of impeachment not just on narrow legalistic grounds but also on the broad ground of violation of the Constitution and the undermining of American democracy.

In drawing up 11 articles of impeachment against Johnson, House Republicans focused narrowly on violation of the Tenure of Office Act in the first nine. But the last two articles accused Johnson of opposing Reconstruction and bringing “disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach,” onto “the Congress of the United States” and for his “intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues, and therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces, as well against Congress as the laws of the United States duly enacted thereby, amid the cries, jeers and laughter of the multitudes then assembled in hearing,” language that could be used verbatim against Mr. Trump. As Representative George Julian pithily put it, Johnson ought to be impeached for “his career of maladministration and crime.”

Some of the most damning testimony against Mr. Trump has come from impressive women like Ambassador Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill. Their 19th-century counterparts were abolitionists like the stalwart Lydia Maria Child, who wrote words as true today as then: “Every true lover of the country must want to creep into a knot hole and hide himself, wherever the name of our president is mentioned.” Johnson and Mr. Trump are both authoritarian demagogues who threatened the world’s longest lasting experiment in democratic republicanism. Democrats must convince the American people not only of Mr. Trump’s specific crimes, but of the very real danger that his continuing presence in office presents to the Republic.

Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, is the author of “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Want to know more about the Johnson impeachment?

Check out this new 1 hr. 15 min. docudrama from The Great Courses: “Going To The Devil.”

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Either way, you can check out the free trailer here:

https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/show/going_to_the_devil_the_impeachment_of_1868

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PWS

12-01-19

THE UGLY SIDE OF AMERICAN HISTORY: Trump’s Paranoid Racist Midterm Campaign Evokes Memories Of Andrew Johnson’s 1866 Racist Rant!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-midterm_us_5bdca52ee4b01ffb1d0228e1

Paul Blumenthal writes in HuffPost:

President Donald Trump has ramped up his inflammatory racist rhetoric in the final days before the pivotal midterm elections that will determine if his corrupt administration will face any oversight from Congress.

Betting that fears of racial minorities will drive Republican voters to the polls, he has centered his closing pitch on a caravan of Central American migrants fleeing violence and poor crop yields in their home countries. He said, without evidence, that the caravan is filled with “many gang members” and “unknown Middle Easterners,” dropping the previous pretense (“terrorists”) to reveal a fear of all members of a minority group. “Women don’t want them in our country,” he added, a not-so-subtle suggestion that the migrants are rapists (similar to a claim he made upon launching his presidential campaign).

Guests on Fox News have speculated that migrants are carrying diseases like leprosy and that the caravan is a plot conceived of by rootless Jewish financiers seeking global domination like George Soros — the latter a paranoid conspiracy the president has also entertained. The president followed this up with a blatantly racist advertisement blaming Democrats for murders committed by an undocumented immigrant.

This racist closing pitch is not just rhetorical. The president deployed thousands of U.S. troops to the country’s southern border to repel “an invasion.” He said that soldiers should shoot any migrant who throws rocks at them. He announced plans for indefinite detention of asylum-seekers. He expressed a desire to repeal the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Donald Trump rallies his fans in Columbia, Missouri, by blaming unknown forces for organizing the migrant caravan that he deems “an invasion.”

In all of this, Trump has emulated the outrageous, bigoted and violence-encouraging campaign waged by President Andrew Johnson in the 1866 midterms. In his “Swing Around the Circle,” the first time a sitting president campaigned around the country for candidates, Johnson made the election a referendum on himself, with unprecedented barnstorming speeches featuring paranoid conspiracy theories, racist demagoguery and incitement to violence.

Johnson, an accidental president who came to power after an assassin killed President Abraham Lincoln and another failed to kill him, was a boorish drunk, a former slaveowner and a racist who held sympathies with the now-defeated Confederates. He vetoed legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, opposed the 14th Amendment, opposed giving freed black people voting rights in the South and mass-pardoned most Confederate soldiers and officials and offered them property while denying it to freed black people. All of this brought the ire of the Republican Congress, which overrode his many vetoes and passed the 14th Amendment.

And so Johnson took to the campaign trail to defeat congressional Republicans and replace them with proponents of white supremacy. Johnson’s tour began on the East Coast. As he moved westward and faced Republican-heavy districts in the Midwest that opposed his policies, he became increasingly unhinged.

He began by comparing himself to Jesus Christ and Thaddeus Stevens, the anti-slavery leader of the Republicans in Congress, to Judas Iscariot. He attacked Sen. Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, two abolitionists turned advocates for black suffrage. Then, at a stop in Cleveland, a heckler yelled out, “Hang Jeff Davis!,” a call to execute the former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis. Johnson could not resist a reply, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips? … Having fought traitors at the South, I am prepared to fight traitors at the North.”

The “Swing Around the Circle” degenerated from there. Johnson continued to call for the execution of his political opponents Stevens, Phillips and Sumner. He defended recent riots in Memphis and New Orleans where white mobs killed dozens of black Americans in a racist fury by claiming that his political opponents had radicalized black Americans. They had it coming, essentially.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, was a white supremacist drunk who called for the execution of his political enemies.

“If you will take up the riot at New Orleans and trace it back to the radical Congress, you will find that the riot at New Orleans was substantially planned,” Johnson said at a stop in St. Louis.

Johnson roped in the famed and beloved Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to support him on his “Swing Around the Circle.” Grant, disgusted by Johnson’s speeches, fell ill and excused himself from the tour. According to a biography of Grant written by his aide Adam Badeau, the general believed the president “fostered a spirit that engendered massacre, and afterward protected the evil-doers.”

President Johnson’s defense of white massacres of black people as the product of his opponents supporting black civil rights only encouraged more violence — violence that would ultimately overtake the country and re-establish official white supremacy over the former Confederate states until the 1960s.

Much as Johnson’s rhetorical leniency toward white mobs killing black Americans inspired further violence, Trump’s racist midterm campaign has done the same.

The constant drumbeat of fear-mongering news about the Central American migrant caravan from the president’s mouth and amplified by conservative media triggered a virulent anti-Semite, who believed that Jews like Soros and the refugee resettlement nonprofit HIAS were funding the caravan, to take up arms and attack a synagogue, killing 11 people. It was the worst anti-Semitic attack in the history of the United States.

That same week, police arrested a Florida man for mailing bombs to a litany of political figures that Trump claims as his enemies and, in some cases, promised to jail, including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and, of course, Soros.

The president and his supporters claim to be outraged by assertions that their rhetoric and policies have in any way incited violence from right-wing terrorists. That same week, the lawyers for a Trump-loving right-wing terrorist who planned to bomb mosques in 2016 filed a brief asking for leniency from the court because their client was seduced into terrorism by Trump’s bigoted rantings.

GUILLERMO ARIAS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Two children who are part of the migrant caravan of Central American refugees that the president claims are attempting to invade the U.S. The caravan is currently stuck in southern Mexico.

“Trump’s brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions,” the lawyers wrote. “A personal normally at a 3 on a scale of political talk might have found themselves at a 7 during the election. A person, like Patrick, who would often be at a 7 during a normal day, might ‘go to 11.’ See SPINAL TAP. That climate should be taken into account when evaluating the rhetoric that formed the basis of the government’s case.”

None of this is pushing Republicans away from Trump. If anything, they are drawing closer to his brand of paranoid racist incitement. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declared on Friday that his Democratic opponent Rep. Beto O’Rourke may be funding the caravan with his campaign funds. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is running campaign ads fear-mongering about the “invasion” of migrants in an election in Tennessee, which is further away from the U.S.-Mexico border than the migrant caravan is currently.

Johnson’s campaign of racist incitement didn’t work in 1866. Instead, it became a referendum on the president’s reactionary encouragement of white supremacists in the South and the passage of the 14th Amendment. The Republican Party increased its congressional majorities and, having seen the worst of the president, impeached him after further fights over the future of black civil rights in 1868.

But Johnson survived impeachment, and the white supremacist regimes he helped foster in the South ultimately won full control and acceptance from the national government after a wave of terrorism and murder. “You will not replace us!” the white supremacists promised. A century and a half later, they marched on Charlottesville chanting the same thing. The president of the United States must’ve thought it sounded nice and decided to run on it.

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Donald Trump, the ugliest of Americans, and the leader of the kakistocracy, has brought out all the worst in contemporary America. He diminishes each of us and our country every day he is in office.

Start the democratic process for regime change by voting the GOP out of every office on Tuesday!

PWS

11-03-18

Donald Trump, Meet Your Precursor