Timothy Birdnow

I had a thought on this business of slow-walking Trump appointees. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated Congress passed something called the Tenure of Office Act, which essentially said that his successor - Andrew Johnson - could not appoint his own cabinet but had to keep Lincoln's contentious one whether he liked it or not. This is now fully understood to be unconstitutional, but nobody cared at the time. When Johnson tried to replace Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War (leading to an actual siege of the War Department offices which lasted two weeks and ended with Stanton surrendering with a white flag) he was impeached by the House of Representatives for 20 offenses, all bogus except for violating the Tenure of Office Act. (For example, Johnson was accused of being a drunkard, although the man did not drink alcohol; it was based on a cough medicine given him which led to his collapsing on stage, a result of the alcohol in the potion.) Johnson was acquitted by a single vote in the Senate.

The point is, there was a powerful cabal of swamp-dwellers in the U.S. government who wanted to remain there, and they tried to stop Johnson from enacting Abraham Lincoln's plan for reconstruction (which would have put them in a minority as the South regained it's political power.) The Tenure of Office Act was a tool to neuter Johnson.

While there is no Tenure of Office Act today, this is essentially the same problem Donald Trump is facing. Barack Obama embedded his own people in government, and even the GOP in Congress do not want to see Trump succeed, any more than they did Johnson. This is a battle between a reformer President and those seeking to maintain the status quo. While Johnson retained his office, he was impotent for the rest of his Presidency, and the Radical Republicans were able to punish the South as they pleased - and thus dragged Reconstruction on and planted the seeds of bitterness and hatred that plagued America for a century, and in some ways continue to do so.

See, swamps are the places where diseases thrive. It was true then and it is equally true now.

At any rate, this is pretty much the same problem, only Trump has to face the fury of an electronic media, something far more powerful than the local print journalism of Johnson's day. On the other hand Trump's supporters have not yet been beaten by force of arms as the South had been, but that may be coming if the Left gets it's way.

And while America went on to greatness after the Civil War, one cannot help but suspect America will go on to dissolution if we continue on the same course we have followed for decades. We can't keep spending the future's money. We can't keep empowering the surveillance state. We can't keep turning people into serfs of the great governmental Lord. These are the very things which brought down the Roman Empire, and more recently the Soviet Union. History must be learned from, not ignored.

Trump HAS to get his own people in. As long as he is held to an unspoken Tenure of Office Act he will be powerless - and America will continue to slide into the abyss. It's time for people like Mitch McConnell to get off their pillows and get us a new government. Sadly, too many people like McConnell are content to be Edwin Stanton.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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