Weekly Mind Dump, 10/22-10/28, 2023: The Lost Cause Shall Rise Again!
House Speaker Mike Johnson channels fellow insurrectionist Dixie V-P Alexander H. Stephens.
It’s amazing how much unfinished business is left over from the Civil War. One piece came to fore this week when House Republicans elected as Speaker the chief legal/ideological proponent of Trump’s Big Lie relating to the January 6 insurrection to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It’s as if the spirit of Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, a leading intellect behind secession, has been channeled into fellow lawyer and Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson.
In his March 21, 1861, Cornerstone Speech, Stephens outlined the fundamental differences between North and South and invoked a “revolution” from which the newly hatched Confederacy would emerge, with slavery at its core.
Congressman Mike Johnson, drawing on his legal training, legitimized the myth of a stolen election. Joshua Benton writes in The Atlantic:
About three-quarters of the House Republicans who objected to the Electoral College count on January 6 cited legal arguments Johnson had made, leading The New York Times to call him “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.” He gave what one fellow Republican member called “a fig-leaf intellectual argument” for overturning the election.
Mike Johnson wasn’t a lowly foot soldier stuck in a war he played no role in starting. He was its architect, its author and finisher. And yet the only oath he’s been asked to take is as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Benton reveals that sedition runs in Mike Johnson’s family. His great-great-great grandfather fought for the Confederacy. As a lowly private who had never held public office before the war, he merely had to swear an oath of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution to be allowed to vote after the war.
Mike Johnson falls into an entirely different category. As a lawyer and public official who has sworn to defend the Constitution but then participated in the January 6 insurrection against the government, the argument is made by legal scholars that he must be disqualified under the article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment from assuming the House Speakership. The same frankly goes for Donald Trump and the 146 other members of Congress who voted to overturn the election. Several lawsuits have been filed in state courts and with the Supreme Court moving to disqualify members of the Sedition Caucus from holding office. Don’t hold your breath for positive outcomes.
This is part of the unfinished business stemming from Reconstruction. I’ve been reading Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, an essential read if you want to understand that era. He reminds us that:
Reconstruction is part of our lives even today. Issues that agitate American politics— who is an American citizen and what rights come along with citizenship, the relative powers of the national government and the states, affirmative action, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism — are Reconstruction questions. Reconstruction is embedded in our judicial processes. Every session of the Supreme Court adjudicates issues arising from the Fourteenth Amendment and the civil rights legislation of Reconstruction.
When a reporter confronted Johnson with his role in the insurrection, he refused to respond and his fellow GOP seditionists jeered and booed the reporter. This one act speaks much to the lawlessness of today’s Republican Party.
God help us in 2024 with Alexander H. Stephens’s intellectual heir calling the shots in the House of Representatives. When Trump again cries foul after being trounced for the second time by Joe Biden, expect the Sedition Caucus to kick back into action to overturn the results with smiling Mike Johnson spearheading the effort. “Stop the Steal” is just a dusted off variation on that other myth, The Lost Cause.
Thomas Edsall explores the consequences of an increasingly radical right GOP in the New York Times. In interviews with political scientists, a perilous picture emerges of what passes for the few “moderate” Republican House members providing less and less resistance to the fanatics and their cowardly camp followers on the Hill. Yes, they managed to torpedo Jim Jordan’s ascension to the Speaker’s job. But, as the experts tell Edsall, most of the so-called moderates actually voted for Jordan. It was a dwindling number who held out, largely out of personal animus toward the sex crime-adjacent, bullying ex-wrestling coach.
At what point does the GOP drift into full-blown Third Reich territory? University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato responded:
I’ve long thought that a party’s drift to the ideological extreme would inevitably be stopped and reversed to a certain degree by big defeats that force party voters to come to terms with pragmatic reality. These days, I’m starting to believe that Republicans moving headlong to the right may just give in to the inertia of motion and continue their lunge toward extremism until they can no longer win an overall majority. I’m not convinced of this yet, but the GOP has put the idea on the table.
Meantime, the Lost Cause shall rise again! — with a huge assist no doubt from one great-great-great grandson of the Confederacy.
N.B: President Jefferson Davis was the only CSA leader to do jail time, and only for two years. V-P Stephens, though initially barred by law from taking a seat in the House to which he was elected, went on to serve four terms. If you’re looking for accountability for the 147 January 6 Hill insurrectionists, all you have to do is to consult U.S. history.