GOP extremists’ real goal is absolute control
Right-wingers pretend to pledge fealty to the Constitution. Their real goal is to cut out the part about democracy
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
... The nation faced a similar crisis after the Civil War. Then, Americans saw the threat for what it was. That the revolutionaries were attempting a political coup was obvious. Only twenty years before the very same men had tried to dismember the United States government using cannons and rifles. The crisis of 1879 looks much the same as today’s, although the Republicans and Democrats have traded positions.
In 1879, Democrats took control of Congress for the first time since the 1850s. Voters had backed Democratic candidates primarily because of a deep recession that they blamed on the Republicans in power. A small cabal of former Confederates within the party, though, insisted they had a mandate to reverse the course the country had taken since they had seceded in 1861. They set out to return the South to white control once and for all. “The great blunder of our section was in abandoning our seats in Congress in 1861,” one Democratic representative told the New York Times. The better plan was to seize control of Congress and run the entire United States.
To that end, the 1879 revolutionaries had a simple plan. They would refuse to fund the government unless the Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes took the few remaining the U.S. Army troops out of the South (that the troops were removed in 1877 as part of a corrupt bargain is a myth). These men forced a weak Speaker of the House, the long-forgotten Pennsylvania Democrat Samuel J. Randall, to attach riders to a series of routine appropriations bills, one after the other. These riders ended military protection in the South for African American voting. They made holding federal troops at the polls punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and imprisonment at hard labor for three months to five years; that is, an express ride into the Southern convict labor system that by then was brutalizing freedmen. Essentially, the riders reestablished the Democratic white supremacist policies Republicans had spent almost twenty years uprooting. Democrats planned to force Republican President Hayes to choose between caving to their demands or to leaving government obligations unpaid. They gambled that he would sign the bills to keep the government afloat ...
Republicans and moderate Democrats — even those who weren’t big proponents of black voting — recoiled from this attempted coup. They recognized that what was at stake was bigger than black rights alone. The issues of troop placement and voting rights were cover for the larger question of the structure of the American government. An extremist faction in Congress was trying to destroy the nation’s constitutional system. Its members were holding government finances hostage in order to force their will on the president. They wanted to destroy the independent power of that office, making it subservient to their will by virtue of the fact they could always cut off government funds ...
Hayes vetoed five appropriations bills with the riders. He insisted that the “dangerous doctrine that a bare majority in the two houses can absorb all the powers of all the Departments of the Government, cannot be under any conceivable circumstances approved when embodied in legislation.” At the end of April, in the first of his five veto messages, he attacked the rider policy as “radical, dangerous, and unconstitutional,” for it would enable the House to dictate its terms to the Senate and the president, thus destroying the balance of power in the American government ...
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/18/ted_cruz_wants_to_be_king_make_no_mistake_the_gop_extremists_real_goal_is_absolute_control/
