The Confederate States of America was a collection of states that seceded from the Nation following the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln in 1861. The rebellious states were: South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
The defining issue: Southern Democrats did not approve of the Republican platform, which opposed the extension of slavery to new states.
In fact, during the Presidential election of 1860, Republican candidate Lincoln did not appear on the ballot in ten southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Residents of those states could not vote for Lincoln even if they had wanted to. It was the ultimate example of voter suppression, a tactic that has been used in various forms in those States since Reconstruction to disenfranchise African American voters.
The Civil War was a humanitarian and economic disaster for the Southern states. The Union was saved, but in the ex-Confederacy the attitude was, “You may beat us but you won’t defeat us.” Political guerrilla warfare by the Southern states has continued almost continuously for the past 150 years.
Fast-forward to 2020.
In the Presidential election, Joe Biden earned 81 million popular votes and 306 electoral votes, while incumbent President Donald Trump received 74 million popular votes and 226 electoral votes.
The President was livid and launched a public relations and legal campaign to reverse the results, claiming that he’d been cheated, fraudulent votes had been cast, and all manner of nefarious goings-on at local polling places and election headquarters had taken place to deny him victory.
State elections officials (Republican and Democrat) checked, checked, and re-checked the results and found no conspiracy or evidence of significant errors…in every case.
The Trump campaign then instigated over 50 lawsuits in key states where the President had not prevailed, and the result of those legal initiatives was bupkis: the State and Federal courts, including Republican and Democratic judges, found no evidence of wrongdoing, primarily because Trump’s legal experts presented no smoking gun, no glove that didn’t fit, no facts that supported their claims, etc.
Try as they might, the President and his legal eagle Rudy Giuliani couldn’t find any judges who would buy their hocus pocus.
End of story, or so it seemed.
Then, out of the blue, a lawsuit was filed by the Attorney General of Texas, and joined by sixteen other states, alleging voter fraud and election tampering in a handful of “battleground” States where Trump had lost the election. The lawsuit, a last-ditch effort by the President, with the Texas Attorney General carrying his water, basically asked the Supreme Court to overturn the election and hand the victory to President Trump…because Joe Biden had won in those States. The President called the Texas lawsuit “the big one”.
One hundred and twenty-six G.O.P. Congressmen signed an amicus brief backing the Texas lawsuit to throw out the 2020 election results and give Trump a second four-year term.
The thinking behind this Hail Mary fling into the end zone was that the Republican-majority Supreme Court Justices, three of which had been appointed by President Trump, would rule for the incumbent despite having no factual grounds to do so.
To his great disappointment, the Justices decided to follow the U.S. Constitution instead. Thanks to them, blatant partisanship lost out to the Rule of Law.
I find it interesting that many of the States that got involved in this shameful anti-Constitutional sedition were also the same ex-traitor States that threw a fit when Abraham Lincoln was elected: Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
It seems that officials in those states just don’t believe in America and the U.S. Constitution, except when it suits them.
President Trump acted outraged that “his” Supreme Court would not support his coup attempt: he upbraided the Justices publicly for not having “courage”. The President also told his followers that his efforts to overturn the election were not over and encouraged them to raise Hell with their elected officials.
The President took out some of his anger on the Governor and Secretary of State of Georgia, who had failed to deliver victory in that State to Donald Trump. He publicly stated that the two (Republican!) officials should be thrown in jail.
President Trump also berated Attorney General Barr, his most loyal and obsequious appointee, for publicly stating the Department of Justice had found no evidence of election fraud. Barr subsequently turned in his letter of resignation.
This followed by several weeks the President’s firing of the government’s Cybersecurity Chief Christoper Krebs, another Trump appointee, who had announced that security of the 2020 election had been virtually flawless.
Several Texas Republican Party bigwigs then threw out the idea of secession from the Union, because, basically, Texas didn’t get it’s way. Predictably, right-wing radio talk show host/blowhard Rush Limbaugh joined in with pointed comments that “we’re trending toward secession”.
Some Conservative/QAnon bomb-throwers are conjecturing about an upcoming second Civil War. I’ve read comments from the right-wing militia types bragging that “we have more bullets than they do”. (Yeah, your group of camo’d gun nuts out in the woods shooting at targets of Democratic politicians are intimidating. But how many aircraft and cruise missiles can you deploy?)
“Civil War”…that’s some pretty scary stuff right there, even if it is sour-grapes rhetoric tossed into the political mix just to suck up to Republican kingmaker Donald Trump: G.O.P. politicians are terrified that the guy won’t support them in their next election.
However, there are a lot of Republican voters out there who are disappointed in the election but who will move on, just like Democratic voters did when Clinton lost in 2016. Most Republicans are not super-partisan, just like their Democratic counterparts: all they want is a Federal government that cares about their well-being.
On the other hand, there is a considerable number of aggressive, deranged wingnuts in America who might be willing to act on the conspiracy crap that President Trump has been pitching…like attack the perceived “enemy”.
An example of this was the vandalism of an A.M.E. Baptist church in Washington D.C. a couple of nights ago where the redneck hoodlums burned a Black Lives Matter banner hanging from the church.
Gee, didn’t we go through this back in the 1960’s? Haven’t we grown just a bit?
There currently exists a potent brew of discontent in our Nation, with wannabe President-for-Life Trump almost deposed and the Covid-19 pandemic simultaneously hitting its peak. Tens of millions of people are unemployed and hungry. People are frustrated and look to blame someone for their problems, real and perceived. The Covid-19 vaccines are coming online, but it will take many months for everyone who wants to be inoculated to do so.
In the meanwhile, public health measures like the wearing of masks, social distancing, and business closures are rubbing people thin. I was in a WalMart today when I saw a grandmother, her daughter, and two kids checking out…not wearing facemasks, which are required by Nevada state law. I mentioned this to an employee who informed me that “we can ask them to wear a mask but cannot enforce it”. No wonder than the pandemic is going full-throttle right now!
It’s been called “Covid Fatigue”, and everyone has come down with it. Let’s face it: we all want to get back to “normal”, whatever that will be.
A city Mayor in Kansas resigned yesterday due to to continuous threats her after she supported a mandatory mask-wearing measure in Dodge City. This kind of intimidation of public officials has been commonplace in some locales over the past six months and will probably worsen as the pandemic hits its stride this Winter, businesses are shuttered for public health and economic reasons, and unemployment lines lengthen.
Several months ago, when the Black Lives Matter movement was hitting full stride and the Trump Administration took sides against it, a teenaged nutjob took an assault rifle across state lines to “protect businesses” and shot two protesters to death. These murders, which were seen by all Americans on TV, were justified by right-wing radio and TV commentators and conspiracy bloggers as “patriotic”.
The young man’s legal cost and bail was put up by another Conservative “patriot”. His case, when it comes to trial, will be a media circus akin to the O.J. Simpson spectacle. It wouldn’t surprise me if ex-President Trump testifies on behalf of the deranged MAGA supporter.
We can expect more of this Trump-induced rage in the coming year. I won’t be surprised if someone takes a shot at President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, or both. It could happen at the Inauguration.
Brainstorm idea: Maybe we should just throw in the towel and let those malcontent States and their rednecks secede? They have a history of troublemaking and…who needs them anyway? And, besides, those States are expensive to maintain as members of the Union.
Of the seven ex-Confederate States who recently joined Texas in the seditious lawsuit to overthrow the 2020 election results and summarily declare Donald Trump the winner, six of them receive far more Federal aid than they contribute in taxes. South Carolina is worst at $7.75 per $1.00 Federal tax contributed, followed by Florida ($5.40), Louisiana ($3.30), Alabama ($3.20), Mississippi ($3.10), and Tennessee ($2.75).
Other supporters of the Texas lawsuit include North Dakota ($5.40), West Virginia ($2.20), Indiana ($2.00), Texas ($1.50) and South Dakota ($1.25). Among the States supporting Trump’s attempted coup, only Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and Oklahoma are tax “donors”, i.e. they receive less Federal aid than they contribute in taxes.
If these (for the most part) ungrateful malcontents seceded or were allowed to secede from the Union, they would have a rough go of it.
With the exception of Texas and Florida, they are among the poorest of all States, and a good amount of the business they do can be credited to U.S. military installations located there, Federal crop subsidies, and government contracts that they’ve secured via their Congressmen in Washington D.C. They would also have no military to protect them and their citizens would need permission to cross into the United States to visit friends or conduct business, just like Mexican and Canadian nationals must.
I wonder if they would build a “Wall” to keep Americans out?
Personally, I’m tired of these (mostly) disgruntled Southerners continually harping about their “way of life”, their phony religious piety, “States’ Rights”, Big Government out to infringe on their right to bear arms, and their animosity towards anyone who isn’t Caucasian and Christian. One hundred and fifty years of complaining is enough.
Let’s kick them the Hell out and make them fend for themselves.
And take that carpetbagging Floridian (ex-President Trump) with them.
They deserve each other: he could be President again.