I showed it year after year in my classroom, so I remember parts of it well.
When we would get to the part of U.S. history that covered Reconstruction, I would show the kids an excerpt from the TV series "Profiles in Courage," written by John F. Kennedy (well, that's the name on the book; Ted Sorenson probably wrote most of it). The book detailed short non-fiction about members of the U.S. Senate who had shown particularly deep and abiding political courage, when many others took the easy way out and did the popular thing.
Such an opportunity presented itself in 1868, when the Senate put President Andrew Johnson on trial for violating a law (later deemed unconstitutional) they had dreamed up and could pass over his veto. Such a law would take away any power he had over the Cabinet, and thus render him powerless; this despite a greater than 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress, a veto-proof majority. That wasn't enough; they hated him that much.
Granted, he was terrible. He was a racist and sought to block the path of Congressional Reconstruction just months after a horrible civil war which led to over 600,000 deaths. He compromised with no one. He insulted anyone who didn't agree with him. He was obnoxious and crude. (Yeah, I know)
But the law had gone too far, even though it had been passed. Johnson openly violated it and, as he said, "want(ed) it in the courts." Republicans, afraid of exactly that, impeached him instead.
Kennedy's version was compelling, and that version made the TV series. It involved the one person who hadn't already decided on the case, Edmund G. Ross of Kansas.
Kansas had only been a state for seven years. It had gone through its own civil war in the 1850s when both slave and free forces had sneaked people over the border to try to vote in their favored version of a state constitution that would be presented to Congress to admit the territory as a state. So again, a contested election.
Kansas and its neighbor, Missouri, had been the scenes of some of the most vicious, neighbor-to-neighbor fighting of the war. Emotions were boiling beneath the surface.
As a political animal, Ross' choice was clear: He would have to convict Johnson. But he had a legal and moral core and was ambivalent: Should the president be removed for violating a clearly unconstitutional law? By the day before the vote to convict, every other Senator had committed himself. It was down to a one-vote margin. Ross would decide.
The show depicted a demonstrative conversation, perhaps apocryphal, between Ross and General Sickles, in whose army Ross apparently served during the Civil War; remember, it was only three years since it had ended. Sickles apparently had been sent by "friends" to persuade Ross to vote for conviction or just make sure he was going to do so.
It became a clearing house for the issue. They went up, down, and sideways. Sickles reminded Ross of some of the more outrageous things Johnson had done, things that had not come up at trial, but things that everyone knew. "General," Ross says with measured but ebbing patience, "the President is on trial. I must made a judgment based on the evidence presented, nothing more."
Such high-minded ethics land badly. Sickles begins to panic. He realizes that it's slipping away. If Ross votes to acquit, it will make the 1/3 bar--admittedly low, but it will constitutionally keep Johnson in office. Never mind that it's 1868 and an election is coming up, so the country can (and did; he didn't even get the nomination) turn Johnson away from a full term (he had succeeded the assassinated Lincoln). "Say it isn't a trial," Sickles says with quickened tone. "Say it's a political act in the national interest."
A political act in the national interest. That phrase keeps echoing through my head. We have, one more time, just witnessed exactly that. Mitch McConnell just gave 43 members of the Senate, including the thoroughly awful Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, that narrow, conjured off-ramp and they took it.
A trial, a real trial, would have gone otherwise. The Republicans tried to declare the whole thing unconstitutional from the get-go, proposed by the unctuous Rand Paul of Kentucky, but the Democrats and five Republicans weren't biting. So the proposal of a mis-trial had been rejected.
When a defendant's lawyer does that in real court, the judge decides. If she says no, the trial goes on and the previously proposed standard goes bye-bye. It can't be brought back. The jury must act as if it were never considered.
Mitch McConnell also knew he couldn't bring it back, so he grabbed another technicality. But the 42 other Senators who betrayed the Constitution, common sense, and any sort of propriety could keep their counsels to themselves and consider any old justification.
We knew this would be a hung jury. McConnell even admitted that on the facts, the former, awful, disgusting president had lost, and badly. He really did inspire, encourage, and by passive resistance try to prevail, in an insurrection so he could have tried to rush in and reclaim power. McConnell helped let him off the hook.
This betrayal must be expressed as such. We are betrayed. The Constitution means so much less than it did 24 hours ago. This awful, stinking bag of garbage may yet get jail time, as McConnell suggested. But he doesn't know any more about that than anyone else. And by his lies, the awful, disgusting bag of garbage has plenty of money to defend himself.
Thou doth protest too much: Nice try, but in the end, all we really have is McConnell's vote. He voted with the other cowards. He drew an arbitrary line in the sand and said that the awful bag of garbage committed these heinous offenses and crimes too late for us to bother with it. He created a fait cocompli--even though the impeachment vote did take place before the bag of garbage left office--by refusing to convene the Senate while the last presidential term was still in effect.
Yes, it would have taken immense courage, the kind that sometimes you must pay for by relinquishing enormous egos and putting your power on the line, to have stood for justice and convicted this monster. Ross and six other Republicans who crossed over and acquitted Johnson were never elected to the Senate again. Ross suffered abuse and poverty in Kansas, but bounced back to become territorial governor of New Mexico some years later, under a Democratic president. So yes, democracy was just as emotionally messy back then. But yes, there were second acts, too.
Sometimes you just have to do what you must to save the republic and keep its meaning. Seems to me that's why you get elected. If you don't, you're just a lemming with a big title that now means nothing. We saw 43 of them today. I wouldn't care, but it's my country, and we will all pay, starting very soon, for this cowardice.
There will be new attempts to get past this. Resist. Do not forget this, and never be afraid to bring it up. Tell them Mitch, and Edmund G. Ross, sent you.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. One more day to a second vaccine. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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