The war that isn’t over

Donald Trump implied yesterday that Abraham Lincoln failed to avoid the Civil War via successful negotiation because he wanted to be even more famous than Donald Trump (the most deplorable of all possible outcomes in the course of human events):

“The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” Trump said. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”

Trump went on to describe the Civil War as “vicious” and suggested that “Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.”

The WAPO then dutifully quotes a couple of historians, who point out that Trump doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

This latest illustration of how Trumpism is on one level simply part of the 150-year-old rearguard action by the Old Confederacy to keep fighting the Glorious Lost Cause led me down a rabbit hole, where I found among other things this:

October 17, 1978

In posthumously restoring the full rights of citizenship to Jefferson Davis, the Congress officially completes the long process of reconciliation that has reunited our people following the tragic conflict between the States. Earlier, he was specifically exempted from resolutions restoring the rights of other officials in the Confederacy. He had served the United States long and honorably as a soldier, Member of the U.S. House and Senate, and as Secretary of War. General Robert E. Lee’s citizenship was restored in 1976. It is fitting that Jefferson Davis should no longer be singled out for punishment.

Our Nation needs to clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past, to finally set at rest the divisions that threatened to destroy our Nation and to discredit the principles on which it was founded. Our people need to turn their attention to the important tasks that still lie before us in establishing those principles for all people.

Note: As enacted S.J. Res. 16 is Public Law 95-466, approved October 17.

Jimmy Carter, Restoration of Citizenship Rights to Jefferson F. Davis Statement on Signing S. J. Res. 16 into Law. 

Liberal Historians ™ point out that Davis remained a proud defender of the fact that he committed treason in the defense of slavery to his dying day. (I wonder if Carter signed this atrocity in part because he got so much blowback for offering a pardon to Vietnam war draft resisters?).

Relatedly, law prof Gerard Magliocca points out that in Law School Fantasyland, the legally correct way to deal with Trump’s potential disqualification under the same provision of the Constitution that was used to disqualify Jefferson Davis from holding future federal office would be to do what Congress and the president did in 1978 in re Davis, which is to remove that disqualification via legislation, which is the mechanism explicitly provided for in Section 3 of the 14th amendment to deal with this kind of thing.

This probably sets some sort of record for an academic argument in the worst sense, as I seriously doubt such a resolution could garner a single vote in either the House or the Senate. Obviously, Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge that Trump is an insurrectionist, and Democrats aren’t going to forgive him for a crime he and most of his tens of millions of supporters flatly refuse to admit he committed in the first place.

But I will stipulate that this is in fact the Legally Correct way to deal with this awkward little interlude in the ongoing prosecution of the American Civil War.