The modern-day Republican Party rejects its legacy and seeks a return to the 1850s

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The legacy of the "Party of Lincoln" is the Radical Republicans' (the liberals of their day) transformation of American society in the post-Civil War era with passage of the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery, the 14th amendment that enshrined "life, libery and the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution as birthrights of natural born citizens of the United States subject to equal protection and due process of law, and the 15th Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote (well, kinda sorta).

Joan McCarter had this great catch at Daily Kos: Irony alert: GOP touts proud 14th amendment history:

Jamison Foser has the catch of the day. Here's the RNC's "Political Achievements page, preserved via screen shot just in case they catch up to today's popular rhetoric.

Ok, now scroll down to 1866:

In case that's too small for you to read:

Republicans Passed the 14th Amendment

The 14th Amendment guarantees due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens. It enshrines in the Constitution provisions of the GOP’s 1866 Civil Rights Act. The original purpose of the 14th Amendment was to defend African-Americans from their Democrat oppressors in the post-Civil War South.

The principal author of the 14th Amendment was U.S. Rep. John Bingham (R-OH).  In Congress, all votes in favor of the 14th Amendment were from Republicans, and all votes against it were from Democrats.

In 1868, the Republican Governor of New Jersey vetoed an attempt by the Democrat-controlled legislature to rescind the state's ratification of the 14th Amendment.

The modern-day Republican Party rejects the legacy of the "Party of Lincoln." The modern-day Radical Republicans are not liberals but rather far-right fringe extremists who, despite their claims of fealty to the Constitution (for many they actually mean the Constitution of the Confederate States), they openly reject many provisions of the U.S. Constitution and want to amend it to reflect the dark vision of their far-right ideological leanings.

The most recent manifestation of the far-right fringe extremists' constitutional ire is long-settled law regarding the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. The nativist anti-immigrant descendents of the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s want to amend the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to certain persons born in the United States, something the Radical Republican Congress of the 1860s rejected after extensive debate.

The ultimate goal of the modern-day Radical Republicans is to repeal the legacy of the Party of Lincoln, and to return to discredited political theories of "states rights" and "nullification" of federal law once and forever put to rest by our bloody Civil War.

Old Abe must be turning over in his grave.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. of the Washington Post writes Is the GOP shedding a birthright?:

Rather than shout, I'll just ask the question in a civil way: Dear Republicans, do you really want to endanger your party's greatest political legacy by turning the 14th Amendment to our Constitution into an excuse for election-year ugliness?

Honestly, I thought that our politics could not get worse, and suddenly there appears this attack on birthright citizenship and the introduction into popular use of the hideous term "anchor babies": children whom illegal immigrants have for the alleged purpose of "anchoring" themselves to American rights and the welfare state.

Particularly depressing is that the idea of repealing the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" was given momentum by one of the nation's most reasonable conservatives.

"People come here to have babies," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). "They come here to drop a child. It's called, 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons."

Drop a child? How can a strong believer in the right to life use such a phrase?

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Just as dispiriting: Sen. John McCain, another once-brave champion of immigration reform, has tried to duck the issue. McCain, facing an Arizona Republican primary challenge on Aug. 24, has said he supports "the concept of holding hearings" on the meaning of the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship clause.

This is better than endorsing outright repeal, but what a difference from the McCain whose conscience once compelled him to say of illegal immigrants: "These are God's children as well, and they need some protections under the law, and they need some of our love and compassion."

Nothing should make Republicans prouder than their party's role in passing what are known as the Civil War or Reconstruction amendments: the 13th, ending slavery; the 14th, guaranteeing equal protection under the law and establishing national standards for citizenship; and the 15th, protecting the right to vote. In those days, Democrats were the racial demagogues.

Opponents of the 14th Amendment used racist arguments against immigrants to try to kill it, even though there were virtually no immigration restrictions back then. President Andrew Johnson played the card aggressively, as University of Baltimore law professor Garrett Epps reported in his 2006 book on the 14th Amendment, "Democracy Reborn."

"This provision comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood," Johnson declared. "Is it sound policy to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States?"

Republicans were taken aback that Gypsies were suddenly transformed into a great national peril as part of the campaign against the amendment. In his definitive book "Reconstruction," historian Eric Foner cites a bemused Republican senator who observed in 1866: "I have lived in the United States now for many a year and really I have heard more about Gypsies within the past two or three months than I have heard before in my life."

The methods of politics don't change much, even if the targets of demagoguery do.

Epps cites an 1859 oration by Carl Schurz, the German immigrant and Republican leader who helped deliver his community's vote to Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Schurz later became a leading backer of the 14th Amendment.

"All the social and national elements of the civilized world are represented in the new land," Schurz declared. In our nation, "their peculiar characteristics are to be blended together by the all-assimilating power of freedom. This is the origin of the American nationality, which did not spring from one family, one tribe, one country, but incorporates the vigorous elements of all civilized nations on earth."

That is the American tradition and the Republican tradition. Senator Graham, please don't throw it away.

The Radical Republicans of the modern-day Republican Party are not just attacking long-settled law under the 14th Amendment, oh no, they are also asserting a host of long-discredited political theories dating back to the pre-Civil War era.

Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times writes U.S. politics now in state of hysteria:

If you re-engage the American media after a month out of the country, as I've done this week, it's hard not to conclude that hysteria is now the dominant characteristic of our politics and civic conversation.

How else to explain the fact that questions like secession and nullification – issues that were resolved in blood by the Civil War more than a century ago – have come alive again and are routinely tossed around, not just by fringe figures but by Republican officeholders and candidates?

For example, Zach Wamp, a Tennessee congressman who opposes the recently enacted health-care reforms and is running for governor, told an interviewer that he hopes "the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government."

Meanwhile, GOP candidates for statewide office in various Midwestern and Southern states are promoting the notion that states ought not to enforce any federal law not approved by at least two-thirds of their state legislators. It's as if John C. Calhoun suddenly had risen from the grave and had a talk show.

In Nevada, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate has discussed abolishing Social Security and darkly mused over whether Washington's alleged overreaching may require a "Second Amendment solution." That means guns, a prospect that could be facilitated in one state after another by an outfit called Appleseed, which holds weekend seminars whose participants are given a mix of Minuteman pseudo-history and instruction on marksmanship.

Meanwhile, attempts to repeal sections of the Constitution continue apace. The so-called 10thers, who want to roll back 100 years of federal law and regulation to assert rights under the 10th Amendment, are almost unremarkably ubiquitous in the GOP. Candidates across the country pining for "tea party" support have endorsed repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would end popular election of U.S. senators and return their selection to state legislatures, a step that theoretically would "restore states' rights."

The most popular such movement involves abolishing or gutting the 14th Amendment as a way to deny American citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Even the ostensibly moderate Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has signed on to that one, while Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, speculates that such children actually are terrorist moles planted here to grow up as U.S. citizens as part of a long-range plot.

Nothing quite tops the anti-Muslim hysteria, which has led people to organize opposition to the construction of new mosques in places from Lower Manhattan to Temecula, Calif.

Back in the early 1970s – an era whose tumult we yet may come to regard as benign – social scientists here and in Britain coined the term "moral panic" to describe what can happen when groups of people are seized by an exaggerated fear that other people or communal forces threaten their values or way of life. The scholars described those who promoted the panic's spread as "moral entrepreneurs" – a term that takes on a deep resonance when you consider the commentators and politicians who have attached themselves, and their interests, to the tea party and its attendant movements.

In the midst of moral panic, inchoate indignation stands in for reason; accusation and denunciation supplant dialogue and argument; history and facts are rendered malleable, merely adjuncts of the moral entrepreneur's (or should we say provocateur's) rhetorical will. As we also see, a self-interested mass media with an economic stake in the theatricality of raised and angry voices can transmit moral panic like a pathogen.

Looking around the U.S. in summer 2010, hysterical moral panic seems an apt description of our fevered political condition.