Oh, Yes, Robert Ray. Let's Talk About Edmund G. Ross.

I'm not listening to every single minute of 45's defenders. I already pretty much know what they're going to say.

They're going to try to wrap the Constitution around themselves in pretentious blather, trying to get us to believe that they have it better in mind than Adam Schiff and the other House managers. If it's the Constitution, though, it's a version that's evolved poorly since 9-11, and by which 45's lawyers are trying to disguise his clear and unmistakeably high crimes against it with legal legitimacy.

They're doing it by pretending that the president has absolute immunity to reveal any information which might incriminate him in this trial. No president has had that privilege, not even close. Nixon tried but the Supreme Court turned him back.

The House managers decided not to wait for the Court to rule upon this obvious piece of constitutional extremism and impeach him anyhow. Clearly and obviously, 45 was playing for time, to get re-elected and utilize his admittedly effective power of persuasion to take care of the rest, much in the way of how the Mueller Report became reduced to ink and paper.

But John Bolton's getting in the way. Bolton's book says that 45 very definitively tried to hold up military aid to Ukraine until its president promised, and actually began, investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden, regardless of their legitimacy; he was in the room when it happened. The ensuing negative publicity would, it was hoped, have reduced Joe Biden's presidential campaign against 45 and smoothed the way for what would be a disastrous (far more than now, though disastrous enough) second term.

It's out there in print now--the report, if not the actual book. The Republicans are trying their best to reduce the impact by saying that all Bolton's trying to do is sell his book. But facts can be utilized by all kinds of authors to sell all kinds of books (which is exactly what I'm trying to do), so that's trying to boil tea with a single match.

Now the question looms: Shall Bolton be put on the stand? If so, shall others? If so, shall a majority of Senators subpoena 45 to turn over relevant documents?

That fate rests, and rests for the next four days when a vote will take place, in the hands of Republican Senators. (which isn't exactly true; see below) We know what the Democrats will say. Four Republicans must cross over and join them. They must respect what impeachment really means. They must respect the Constitution.

They must do what Edmund G. Ross did. Robert Ray, one of 45's lawyers, caught my attention when he sanctimoniously evoked Ross' name as being the single Senator who saved Andrew Johnson from conviction in 1868. He said, or implied strongly, that Senators had to follow his famous lead, vote to acquit 45, and uphold our sacred document.

Disingenuousness squared: In a sense, they have to do the opposite in defiance of a majority. The situation is quite similar, but the origins are reversed. In 1868, the veto-proof Republican Congress boxed Johnson into a political, and then legal, corner by passing over his veto the Tenure of Office Act, which demanded that the president ask the Senate whether to remove a member of his Cabinet. Nothing like this had ever been proposed, but since Johnson still had a number of appointees from the late Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet, they figured that those Cabinet members would refuse to do what Johnson told them, and then resist firing without consequences. Thus would Johnson's resistance to Congressional Reconstruction, now much underway, be thwarted at every turn and render the presidency completely helpless.

It was a commensurate, Congressional coup d'etat in real time and in plain sight. It was unconstitutional--indeed, the Supreme Court declared it so--but while in effect, violating it would expose Johnson to the trap prepared for him (though he himself said when he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, "Very well. We want it in the courts."): impeachment by openly defying a Congressionally passed law, however unfair or power-grabbing.

Johnson was extremely unpopular and not without reason. He ran with Lincoln in 1864 for geopolitical reasons. He had a bad cold at the inauguration, had one or two too many whiskeys, and made a general ass of himself. He was from Tennessee--though Confederate, most of it was occupied at the time by Union troops--and favored a very relaxed treatment of Confederate troops and government officials after the war. This infuriated the Radical Republicans, who had the bloody shirt of freeing the slaves and avenging the murdered Lincoln to carry with them. Johnson used the 'n' word within hearing distance when meeting with the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Very much like 45, he had the social skills of a rhinoceros.

So when he was impeached, the House had a long, long list of grievances against him which made those of the present House managers seem genuinely polite. The public's support for Johnson was meager, nothing like the hard-core 38-to-45 percent who back 45 no matter what he does or why. Passions were inflamed. Who gave a hoot about Andrew Johnson? Send him home.

No less so than in Kansas, where Jayhawkers had fought to put slavery into the state's constitution in a pre-Civil War civil war nicknamed "bleeding Kansas." They lost, but the bitterness obviously lingered just ten years later. Anybody who stood in the way of removing Johnson would pay dearly.

Along came Edmund G. Ross, Senator from Kansas. Ross, who owned a newspaper, was known as solid Republican all the way. But the impeachment trial unsettled his conscience. He knew that what his cohorts were doing would ruin the Constitutional legal framework.

It did so for six other Republican Senators who crossed over and, despite their personal distaste for him, kept Johnson in office. Ross' notoriety came because he did not announce how he would vote until the very last minute. He 'saved Johnson' no more and no less than did the other six, but by waiting so long he brought drama upon himself he didn't need.

This is noted in John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage, which was probably ghost-written by Ted Sorenson and to which Robert Ray referred. Ray noted how courageous Ross was. Indeed, but what he didn't add was that--

• None of the seven were elected to the Senate again; 
• Ross' Republican colleagues openly snubbed him on the street; and
• When he returned to Kansas, he and his family "suffered social ostracism, physical attack, and near poverty".

We have now come full circle. It is now not a Congressional coup but a presidential one that our Senators can pull us away from if they only would consider the damage to the Constitution and our way of life that a helpless Congress would create. The result of an acquittal, especially one without evidence that we have every right to see from the White House, would be a power grab of the presidency which, though building up through time (the same way Congress built up its power against Johnson through time; it didn't happen all at once), would now find a quasi-legal bulwark that would make 45 all but dictatorial.

Johnson ran for election later in the same year in which he was impeached, like 45 is doing, but with little if any power. He was quickly brushed aside and the nomination was given to Ulysses S. Grant. No such possibility exists today, with 45 commanding a degree of intimidation not seen in my memory, at least. The combination of an acquittal and no observance of subpoena powers might easily provide 45 with the wherewithal to manipulate his re-election, and even attempt to perpetuate his term of office for life.

We seem to be sleepwalking toward such a disaster. By Friday, though, we should know if a few Republicans wish to exude Edmund G. Ross' courage in at least demanding more evidence, which this event truly needs to be called a trial, due to what we now know about John Bolton. Will they do it on genuinely ethical grounds, or those associated with saving their political hides?

The latter would seem to be quite propitious, but we'll take it. What's different about the country at this particular moment is that significant cores of intense followers can be found on both sides in just about every state. So would these crossover Senators suffer the kind of abuse that Ross did? It's certainly possible. With the emergence of right-wing militia groups, it isn't out of the question.

We need four. I'm quite sure discussions are ensuing; maybe deals are being cut as you read this. Andrew Johnson survived with an absolute minimum of support in 1868; I'm not sure that merely four crossovers will work this time to save Congress from irrelevance. It would sure help if there were more. Political cover is now worth its weight in diamonds. Rumors fly; magical thinking has been rejuvenated. Or not. As I write this, we are less than eighty hours away from a showdown with what the Constitution means: how much, or how little.

"Millions of men cursing me today will bless me tomorrow for having saved the country from the greatest peril through which it has ever passed," Ross said shortly after suffering his crucible. He was eventually right. The press later honored him for saving the Constitution--"The country was saved from calamity greater than war," said one--and he was appointed territorial governor of New Mexico. All that took about twenty years, though. Deep passions die hard.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark