The Similarities Between Presidents Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump

Last week, I was scanning the local radio stations when I happened upon an NPR interview featuring Jon Meacham. If I’m not mistaken, this man was an editor for Newsweek magazine and now fashions himself a presidential historian. As far as I’m concerned, liberals are incapable of truth, and their historiographies should be looked upon with a suspect eye.


The following excerpt is an illustration of Mr. Meacham's history:


STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

The election of President Trump got Jon Meacham thinking. Meacham is a journalist and historian. He's written biographies of presidents. He wrote a book about faith. The 2016 election prompted him to combine those two subjects and more in a book called "The Soul Of America." It's an exploration of the history of a country whose soul, he says, includes Martin Luther King and the Ku Klux Klan and much in between.



JON MEACHAM: The question I get asked all the time is, has it ever been this bad? And the answer is yes. In fact, it's been worse. We are in a very, I believe, perilous moment because of the president of the United States. I will state that. But I also think it's worth pointing out that Andrew Johnson announced that African-Americans were genetically incapable of self-government.



INSKEEP: This is the president after the Civil War.



MEACHAM: He was a bully. He was self-absorbed. He gave self-pitying speeches. Any of this sound familiar? You know, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said - history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. The story of American history is that we have, in fact, moved forward. And what we've done - and the reason I wanted to look back at these moments - is what have been the moments where presidents have either been really right and led us forcefully and proactively? And what about the moments where they've been really wrong? And how did we overcome that?


Now that’s libtard history for you. First of all, Andrew Johnson was a man of his times, meaning the vast majority of Americans believed ex-slaves were incapable of self-government. Hell, there were blacks who acknowledged that they, in their present state of ignorance, had no understanding of Western civilization and the principles of our federalist system. Negro rule in South Carolina and Louisiana was a perfect example of what President Andrew Johnson, and others like him, feared.


However, I will say Presidents Johnson and Trump have a lot in common but not for the reasons Mr. Meacham spewed. What our glorified historian omitted is that both men had to deal with radicals in both Congress and their administrations. We all know what President Trump is going through; President Johnson dealt with something very similar.

The administrative state didn’t exist during the time of Reconstruction; instead, President Johnson had to deal with an overzealous Congress and their embeds in his cabinet. When the Radical Republicans forced the Reconstruction Acts along with the Tenure of Office Act over Johnson’s veto, he knew he had a battle on his hands especially after the 14th Amendment was forced upon the states. Here is an excerpt from Southern Reconstruction:


After the Fourteenth Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification in June, Johnson realized he was in a fight to the finish with Congress for control of Reconstruction. The next month, three of his cabinet members resigned because they declined to support his plan over the one emerging from Congress. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton felt the same way but remained in the cabinet to spy for the Republican Radicals and as their tool to implement congressional Reconstruction policies through the force of arms.


Consequently, Johnson decided to make his case to the public. Although not a common practice at the time , the president set out on a trip to visit every outside of New England. He pleaded his case in public speeches during August and September, before the autumn elections. Secretary of State William Seward, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, and General Ulysses S. Grant Accompanied him.


I guess this is what Mr. Meacham means by self-absorbed and self-pitying speeches. God forbid a president takes his case to the American people.


The goal of the Radicals was to impose their will upon the Southern states by turning them into military districts. Secretary of War Stanton was to be the enforcer of these policies completely bypassing the commander-in-chief. Stanton’s duplicity can be traced to a race riot in New Orleans. Radicals back then, as they do today, had a high tolerance level for violence. Here is another excerpt from Southern Reconstruction:


The mayor of New Orleans asked the local military commander to intervene and block the convention to prevent violence. The commander wired Secretary Stanton for instructions, but Stanton did not reply. He failed to even mention the tense New Orleans situation to President Johnson. His silence on the matter, and similar duplicitous actions, eventually led Johnson to request the secretary’s resignation. Meanwhile, a New Orleans mob broke up the convention before military units arrived to end the violence. Thirty-four blacks and one white were killed.


The Tenure of Office Act was designed to trap President Johnson. One of the articles of impeachment was Johnson’s unauthorized firing of Stanton. This charge was completely unconstitutional and was recognized as such years later. Here is another excerpt from Southern Reconstruction:


Years later, when President Grover Cleveland questioned the Tenure Act’s legitimacy, it was repealed. If the Tenure Act had prevailed, the presidency could not have remained an independent branch of government. Those voting for acquittal realized that Congress was running amok, intimidating the executive, and increasingly, the judicial government branches. Some senators voting for conviction, including John Sherman and even Charles Sumner, later admitted they were wrong.


In 1926, almost sixty years after the Tenure Act was passed over Johnson’s veto, the Supreme Court ruled in a test case involving Woodrow Wilson’s removal of his postmaster general that a president had the right to remove cabinet members. Nine years later, it also ruled that Congress could limit a president’s power to remove other officers. The court never addressed the Tenure Act specifically.


I would say Presidents Trump and Johnson have a lot in common; just not in Jon Meacham’s historiography.


Source:


https://www.npr.org/2018/05/01/607303543/has-the-partisan-divide-ever-been-this-bad-author-jon-meacham-says-yes


https://www.amazon.com/Southern-Reconstruction-Philip-Leigh/dp/159416276X

Oh Congress, Where Art Thou?

These past few months I’ve noticed a common theme from Republicans that is disturbing.  They’ve bought into the progressive ideology which renders Congress as overseers of the executive branch.  Speaker Paul Ryan stated as much in a press conference and so has Kenneth Starr in an op-ed published in the Washington Post.

How convenient for the legislative branch to concede its constitutional prerogatives to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats while they sit and conduct inconsequential hearings on all the president’s men.  These congressmen can’t even pass a budget without resorting to continuing resolutions or omnibus bills.  It must be nice sitting from on high and pass judgement on others who are doing the jobs they were elected to do.

But this is the administrative state that Woodrow Wilson and his ilk envisioned for America.  They wanted an efficient federal government unencumbered by the constraints of the Constitution or the citizenry.  Here is an excerpt from a blog post I wrote back in 2012:

Where did this paternalistic attitude of an administrative state come from? Ronald J. Pestritto summed it up best in his book, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism:

If bureaucracy, as it administers progress, is to act on behalf of the general interest, what is the role for public opinion? Wilson, after all, seems a consistent advocate of connecting politics much more directly with popular opinion. Yet, his writings on the separation of politics and administration show that public opinion is not to be brought more directly into the realm of administrative decision making. “The problem,” Wilson explained, “is to make public opinion efficient without suffering it to be meddlesome.” Public opinion is a “clumsy nuisance” when it comes to the “oversight of the daily details and in the choice of the daily means of government.” So while public opinion ought to be introduced more directly into politics, politics must confine itself to general superintendence – to the role of setting only the broad goals of the nation. “Let administrative study find the best means for giving public criticism this control and for shutting it out from all other interference,” Wilson wrote.

So the American people are a nuisance and the administrative state is the vehicle to stop us from interfering with the grand schemes of the masterminds.

Congress does have an oversight role and that is over the federal judiciary which they, once again, have conveniently neglected.  Article Three specifically states Congress shall regulate federal courts.

In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

Congress can limit the scope of the federal courts.  However, they refuse to do it.  

Marbury v. Madison is considered one of the biggest power grabs in American history.  I contend the judiciary’s abuse of the 14th Amendment ranks alongside it.  Section 5 states:

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.  

Oh Congress, where art thou?

Origins of the U.S. Kudzu-esque Administrative State

What in the hell has happened to our unalienable rights of life, liberty and property?  What happened to the federalist principles of self-government established in our Constitution?  In today’s America, those unassailable rights are permissible on conditions set forth by federal government bureaucrats and judges.  This isn’t the America of our Founders.  Hell this isn’t America, period.

The Obama administration exposed the hard reality that we aren’t the country we thought we were.  We’ve been slowly transforming into a European socialist welfare state and it’s been going on for a long time.

An article published in Powerline revealed just how this kudzu-like administrative state has grown by spreading its vines into the very fabric of American culture, and as you can expect, this ideology was nurtured in greenhouses of higher learning.  Here is an excerpt:

Studying administrative law in law school, I don’t think we read anything that raised questions about the legitimacy of the agencies giving rise to to it. We took it as a given and picked up the story with the passage of the Administrative Procedure Act in 1946. We should have taken a look at the question of legitimacy in constitutional law, and probably did, though the standard New Deal account I would have received is extremely misleading.

 Exercising executive, legislative and judicial powers, the agencies are a constitutional anomaly. When it comes to a government of limited powers based on the powers allocated and divided among the three branches, the administrative agencies don’t really fit. I am honor bound to add that the Supreme Court doesn’t quite see things my way, although Douglas Ginsburg spells out elementary principles (and cites some relevant case law) in “Legislative powers: Not yours to give away.”

The origins of the American administrative state began in 1857 when Columbia University hired Francis Lieber, a German immigrant, to teach a new discipline called “political science.”  His successor was another imported German, John William Burgess, who indoctrinated a whole generation of Americans into the “virtues” of administrative sciences including Woodrow Wilson.  This new philosophy is alien to American self-governance.   Here is an excerpt from Living Constitution, Dying Faith:

The birth of American political science created a bastion within the academy for the view that perpetual societal improvement is possible and inevitable, partly because of evolutionary unfolding, but partly with the aid of the right kind of superintendence.   The institutional and theoretical departures implied by this view would have made the new political science unrecognizable to the American Founders, whose “new science of politics” had almost nothing in common with it.  It was certainly the case that the new political science, in its dismissive contempt for traditional political philosophy, and unchanging principles of political right, and ideas and institutions from prior centuries, turned its back on the Founders.  For the most part, it still does.  American political science therefore remains almost genetically incapable of understanding the Constitution of the fathers.

So there it is.  Americans have been indoctrinated into accepting an administrative state that is outright hostile to our very essence.  And now that we’re confronted with a kudzu-esque bureaucracy, citizens are beginning to wonder if we have any recourse before we are completely subsumed by this foreign entity.

  Source:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/02/understanding-the-administrative-state.php

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Constitution-Dying-Faith-Progressivism/dp/1933859709

Obama Doesn't Need a Stinking Congress

There can be no doubt we are living in a post-constitutional American.  The long march of progressivism has arrived.  I wonder if Woodrow Wilson, if he were alive today, would be proud, or aghast, at his vision of an administrative state unencumbered by “meddlesome” and “clumsy nuisance” that is public opinion.

President Barack Hussein Obama and his apparatchiks have run circles around Congress and the American people.  What his highness hasn’t accomplished by the use of a pen and a phone, his bureaucrats have passed by creating rules, regulations and mandates that have the force of law.  It truly is astonishing.  Here is an excerpt from the Washington Times:  

With one day to go, the administration added 81,611 pages to the Federal Register, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s count of the official record-keeping digest of federal agencies’ rule-making. It’s the highest total on record and the third time Mr. Obama has crossed the 80,000-page level during his presidency, the institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews calculated.

“This is the pen and phone era, and the president has made clear he’s going to go around Congress when he gets the chance,” Mr. Crews said. “We expected Congress to do something about it, but it didn’t.”

Not only did Congress not do anything, they funded his agenda to the tune of $1.1 trillion!  To add insult to injury, Speaker Paul Ryan and the republican establishment have promised to defund Planned Parenthood and Obamacare after they already funded it!  They must take us for fools!

The pen and phone president promised to violate our Second Amendment rights as soon as he gets back from vacation.  Can we expect Congress to block him?  I think we all know the answer to that question.

Congress has abrogated their constitutional responsibilities, for every law they passed in 2015, Obama’s bureaucrats enacted 16 regulations.  Does anyone believe this is how this country is supposed to be run?  If so, let’s cut out the pretense and disband Congress.  It’s quite obvious they’re not needed.

Source:

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/30/obama-sets-record-for-new-rules-in-2015/#.VoV1aFQFXBI.twitter

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/report-obama-admin-winning-the-new-regulations-race/article/2577931

Gallop Poll: Federal Government is an Immediate Threat to Rights and Liberty

Gallop published a poll stating that nearly half of the American people believe the federal government is an immediate threat to their rights and liberties.  This is understandable considering the current administration has expanded the administrative state at an alarming rate. 

Never before in American history has the federal government intruded upon our lives as of now.  We’ve witnessed various agencies harass political opponents with impunity.  Recently, an elected official in Kentucky was arrested for exercising her religious beliefs, a direct violation of her First Amendment rights.  That maybe a first since the founding of our republic.

Gallop, of course, mitigated their findings with the following explanation:

The fact that almost half of Americans see the federal government as an immediate threat to their lives and freedoms may appear alarming at first, perhaps conjuring an image of Americans worrying that the government will be breaking down their doors and engaging in random arrests of private citizens.

 But two findings mitigate against this type of more dramatic interpretation. First, the fact that Democrats and Republicans have flipped in their probability of holding these views when the administration changed in 2009 shows that these attitudes reflect more of a response to the president and disagreement with his policies than a fundamental feeling about the federal government in general

A change in president and policies will not reduce the size of government.  These bureaucracies will continue to expand their powers.  And let’s not forget the Supreme Court.  They are just as much of a threat as any federal bureaucrat.

 Source:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/185720/half-continue-say-gov-immediate-threat.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_content=morelink&utm_campaign=syndication

Government Bureaucrats Shield Unscrupulous Politicians

When historians reflect upon the Age of Obama, they’ll note this was the era of federal bureaucrats.  They’ll state this president flaunted the administrative state like no other before; that it became self-evident that all three branches established and reaffirmed a fourth arm of government, and gave it the power to create and adjudicate its own rules, in fact circumventing the legislative process outlined in our Constitution.

This was cleverly done by politicians, who didn’t want to vote on controversial subjects, and have to face the wrath of their constituents.  What better way to implement laws that advance statism than a nameless and faceless bureaucrat, while at the same time, giving a politician a platform to rail against policies he secretively advocates.  One would say this form of government is un-American.  As a matter of fact it is! 

President Woodrow Wilson was a great advocate for the administrative state.  He was a proud elitist who resented the “little people” who criticized his genius.  Wilson had a disdain for the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.  He believed in Darwinian principles of societal evolution.  Progress became a dog whistle for a powerful centralized government and its legion of specialized bureaucrats.  This model of scientific administration Wilson admired was crafted by Europeans:

But where has this science grown up? Surely not on this side of the sea….American writers have hitherto taken no very important part in the advancement of this science. It has found its doctors in Europe. It is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principles….It has been developed by French and German professors.

Nazi Germany demonstrated how efficient and innovative a motivated government bureaucrat can be.  I watched a documentary on how the German people were kept in the dark on Hitler’s “Final Solution.”  Politicians didn’t want to get their hands dirty when it came to murder.  Even the Nazis were subject to public opinion.  So, with trial and error, they surreptitiously expelled Germanic Jews to concentration camps, all the while assuring their neighbors they were being sent to a better place.

And the role of the judiciary

It was the administrative state that collected data, confiscated property, transported, housed, and eventually murdered millions of Jews.  You will be hard pressed to find Adolf Hitler’s signature affixed to any document authorizing or acknowledging the “Final Solution.”  Bureaucrats shielded the Fuehrer as much as possible for plausible deniability.

The administrative state is designed to give plausible deniability to ambitious and deceitful politicians.  So far, under the Obama presidency, over 21,000 regulations have been implemented with an additional 2,375 scheduled for the year 2015.  And, of course, all this is being done with the clap and thunder of congressional outrage and grandstanding by our elected representatives.

    

Source:

http://www.heritage.org/initiatives/first-principles/primary-sources/woodrow-wilson-asks-what-is-progress

http://costonscomplaint.blogspot.com/2012/02/obama-administration-flourishes-under.html

http://www.hdot.org/en/learning/myth-fact/hitlerorder.html

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/report-21000-regulations-so-far-under-obama-2375-set-for-2015/article/2558050

Democrats Utilize Nuclear Option; Dismiss Senate Rules

We have witnessed time and time again, Democrats disregarding the very rules and laws that they have implemented for short term political expediency.  This time they utilized the nuclear option.  According to Senate parliamentary procedures, a 2/3 vote is required to change senate rules.  That means 67 members must vote in the affirmative.  Senator Harry Reid and his confederates ignored this, even though he warned of the consequences in his book.

Everyone knows what this is about.  They want to pack the D.C. Circuit Court in order to buttress their runaway Administrative State and rule us without going through the legislative process.

You Democrats are fooling no one.

H/T:  NCRenegade

The Administrative State is Shaking Under the Great Awakening

If there is one good thing that has come out of this whole Obamacare fiasco, it is the awakening of the American people to the insidious nature of the administrative state.  Everyone is becoming aware of how powerful these bureaucracies are.

President Barack Obama continuously assured all of us that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.  And indeed the law, written in narrow terms, reaffirmed that.  But the unaccountable and unelected bureaucrats wrote regulations that made damn sure your policies wouldn’t be grandfathered.  They deceived us.

When you screw with something as personal as health care, people are going to notice.  And that is one thing these parasites in Washington D.C. never intended to happen.