Hatfield

Andrus, Boise, Civil War, Egan, Hatfield, Idaho Politics

Effective and Not

Posted on by christian

man with flagNullification or Common Sense

They celebrated Jefferson Davis’s inauguration yesterday in Montgomery, Alabama. Actually, it was a day late. One hundred fifty years ago Friday, Davis became the President of the Confederacy.

As the Los Angeles Times noted, it was a much bigger celebration in 1961 on the centennial of the event that presaged the Civil War. Several southern governors showed up then, none did this weekend. The crowds were smaller and more people were in the ceremony than in the audience.

As LA Times blogger Andy Malcolm points out, Davis – this is history, not state’s rights mythology – is a curious hero for modern day southerners. He actually opposed succession, but not the “right” of a state to do so, and his wife openly opposed the war. The prickly former Mississippi Senator had a stormy tenure. He tried to micromanage the operations of southern armies in the field, advanced his favorite generals over more accomplished men and developed an uncanny ability to feud with southern governors. Still, he was the only president the south had. You go to celebration with the president you have.

Apropos of the political moment in several states – Montana now seeks to nullify health care and the Endangerd Species Act – even Davis opposed nullification, arguing that just leaving the Union was a more practical and effective approach. That didn’t work all that well, either.

As the Idaho State Senate prepares to ignore the sound and fury of “nullification” of federal health care legislation that came over recently from the state’s righters in the Idaho House, it may be worth a moment to consider how a state that depends so heavily on federal largess – INL, Mountain Home AFB, the Forest Service, irrigation projects – can wage an effective battle against the big, bad federal government.

Former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus has a piece in the Twin Falls Times-News that makes the case for the quiet, but effective approach of applying common sense to our not infrequent battles with Washington, D.C. In short, fix problems by using the courts and the legislative arena, not by passing time wasting bills that garner big headlines, but don’t fix problems.

That approach is more difficult, to be sure, but it can work and have lasting results. All that lasts from the nullifiers of 150 years ago is the memory of a lost cause, the consequences of which we still struggle to put in context and understand. The real question may be, have we learned anything from that disasterous piece of American history?

Civil War, Hatfield

Still Fighting the War

Posted on by christian

ForrestThat Devil Forrest

This just in: Civil War still rages.

From nullification battles in Idaho and several other states to a Mississippi proposal to remember Confederate cavalry Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest with a new license plate, the Civil War – it began 150 years ago in April – is still with us.

For those who don’t understand why the Arabs and Israelis can’t get beyond their ancient disputes or scratch their heads over the “troubles” in Ireland, you need only look just below the surface of American politics and culture to appreciate that our old war is new again. We’re still fighting over the cause, meaning and memory.

In case you’re wondering about Forrest – that’s him in the uniform of a Lt. General – he rose from private to general officer during the course of the war, is generally regarded as a military genius, albeit a blood thirsty one, and was a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest notoriously presided over a massacre of black Union troops at Ft. Pillow in 1864. When a Forrest statute was erected in Nashville a while back, the debate began again over whether the man historian Shelby Foote called the one true military genius of that awful war deserved to be commemorated in his home state.

Now Forrest is back in the news. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a possible GOP presidential candidate, says he won’t “denounce” supporters of the license plate for the general. The Associated Press quoted the guv as saying, “I don’t go around denouncing people. That’s not going to happen.”

Strangely enough Idaho and Mississippi often show up in the same paragraph. The two states, worlds apart in so many ways, often compete for worst of show in educational spending or per capita income. Now, we’re competing for throwbacks to 1860. Or, as one wit said recently, Idaho has gone from being West of the Mississippi to being the Mississippi of the West. After all we do have our Secesh Creek and there is a town called Dixie. Perhaps we come by this nullificaiton impulse naturally.

As a truly famous Mississippian, William Faulkner, once famously said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

 

Civil War, Egan, Hatfield, Idaho Politics

Nullification

Posted on by christian

davisWe Fought a War Over This…

As Idaho and a half dozen other states prepare legislation to attempt to “nullify” the federal health care law, including apparently sanctions against anyone trying to implement the law, it may be worth remembering that 150 years ago this week the future President of the Confederacy stood on the floor of the United States Senate and spoke his farewells.

A good part of Sen. Jefferson Davis’ speech on Jan. 21, 1861 was devoted to the doctrine of nullification.

His home state of Mississippi was leaving the Union, Davis said, and, in his mind at least, it naturally followed that he had to leave the Senate of the United States.

Davis explained his theory of his duties as a citizen and made it clear that his allegiance to Ole Miss came before his country. “If I had thought that Mississippi was acting without sufficient provocation,” he said, “or without an existing necessity, I should still, under my theory of the Government, because of my allegiance to the State of which I am a citizen, have been bound by her action.” My state right or wrong, apparently.

Davis went on at some length to draw a distinction between what he and Mississippi were doing – leaving the Union – and the theory, widely advanced in the 1830’s by John C. Calhoun, of nullification.

“Nullification and secession, so often confounded, are, indeed, antagonistic principles,” Davis said. “Nullification is a remedy which it is sought to apply within the Union, against the agent of the States. It is only to be justified when the agent has violated his constitutional obligations, and a State, assuming to judge for itself, denies the right of the agent thus to act, and appeals to the other states of the Union for a decision; but, when the States themselves and when the people of the States have so acted as to convince us that they will not regard our constitutional rights, then, and then for the first time, arises the doctrine of secession in its practical application.”

In his somewhat tortured assessment of nationhood, Davis explained what Calhoun was trying to do by advocating nullification, or as he described it a state “assuming to judge for itself.”

“It was because of [Calhoun’s] deep-seated attachment to the Union – his determination to find some remedy for existing ills short of a severance of the ties which bound South Carolina to the other States – that Mr. Calhoun advocated the doctrine of nullification, which he proclaimed to be peaceful, to be within the limits of State power, not to disturb the Union, but only to be a means of bringing the agent before the tribunal of the States for their judgement.

“Secession belongs to a different class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the states are sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again when a better comprehension of the theory of our Government, and the inalienable rights of the people of the States, will prevent any one from denying that each State is a sovereign, and thus may reclaim the grants which it has made to any agent whomsoever.”

In other words, disunion in the mind of Jefferson Davis was a logical follow on to nullification for a sovereign state.

The trouble with Idaho’s approach to this fundamental Constitutional guestion is that it neglects a good slice of the last 150 years of American history; those years since Davis made his passionate defense of state’s rights. Our ancestors fought a bloody and protracted Civil War to resolve these very questions. As a result, the United States became a singular nation, as the great historian Shelby Foote loved to point out. Prior to Lee’s surrender to Grant in 1865, it was common to refer to the “United States are.” But our history and our courts have consistently held since that the “United States is.”

Still, every few years nullification comes roaring back. During the civil rights era, ten different southern states sought to nullify the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court ultimately ruled in 1958 in Cooper v. Aaron that the Brown ruling, ending segregation, could “neither be nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes for segregation.”

Idaho’s foremost Constitutional scholar, Dr. David Adler, recently told the Associated Press that nullification proponents are conveniently overlooking a lot of our history. “The premise of their position and the reasoning behind it are severely flawed and have no support in our Constitutional architecture,” Adler said.

In their zeal to overturn an act of Congress, the proponents of nullification cite, as Jefferson Davis did on the brink of the Civil War, the “high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited,” not to mention the wisdom of Jefferson and Madison. Funny, they rarely mention that old fire breather, Calhoun.

Through a terrible Civil War and on through the long and continuing struggle for civil rights, the United States gradually and imperfectly became one country of many states. Through elections and court cases, debate and discourse, we have arrived at a federal government that makes laws and attempts, not always ably, to apply them fairly to all the people. If folks don’t like those laws, they do have recourse – legal recourse. They can sue in the courts, as Idaho has done over the health care legislation, or they can have an election to change the Congress.

Neither available legal approach, historically or Constitutionally, sanctions nullification. Maybe that is so because wise leaders, at least since Jefferson Davis, have been able to see where such a doctrine logically can lead.

The great Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote a concurring opinion in Aaron more than 50 years ago and captured the essence of what is at sake in preserving our federal system.

“Lincoln’s appeal to ‘the better angels of our nature’ failed to avert a fratricidal war,” Frankfurter wrote in 1958. “But the compassionate wisdom of Lincoln’s First and Second Inaugurals bequeathed to the Union, cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable.”

Civil War, Hatfield

Yup, It Really Was About Slavery

Posted on by christian

Confederate MonumentConfederate History Month

On the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin stands a massive monument commemorating the side that lost the Civil War. The monument is all the proof one would ever need that Americans – south, north, black, white – have never completely come to closure about the gruesome episode that re-defined our nation.

Rather than the war that cemented forever the idea of one union, the American Civil War is still regularly referred to by some as the War Between the States or even the War of Northern Aggression. The war is regularly celebrated by some, usually in the south, as a four-year act of chivalry or as a principled act of state’s rights. As a matter of horrible fact, the Civil War was a 600,000 casualty blood bath launched and sustained by unconstitutional acts of treason. You can look it up. And, yes, the Civil War was certainly about slavery.

Based on the dust up recently in Virginia, where Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed Confederate History Month without making any reference to slavery, not all of us can admit – even in 2010 – that the war was at its very core caused by and prosecuted as a result of the single worst stain on the American story – slavery.

McDonnell retreated from his historically shaky proclamation faster than – pardon the reference – Stonewall Jackson’s “foot” cavalry moved at Chancellorsville in 1863, which is to say very fast. The “controversy” spawned a good deal of commentary, including Gail Collins’ observation it might be a good idea to always begin a Civil War history lesson with an acknowledgement that the “whole leaving-the-union thing was a bad idea.”

Not surprisingly, given the political nature of everything these days, a good deal of the chatter was about what rising star McDonnell had done to his future political prospects by failing to identify the central fact about the war. McDonnell’s defense was that the original proclamation he signed, the one without a slavery mention, was all about encouraging tourism.

Frank Rich sees an even more sinister motive behind the Virginia governor’s slavery oversight – an appeal to the very white, very state’s rights demanding Tea Party crowd. It is an interesting notion, but I’m not sure I buy it. After all, one can rarely go wrong by accepting the most obvious explanation for a political gaffe – incompetence backed by ignorance.

Too many Americans – even some governors – suffer from a potentially terminal case of historical amnesia. We don’t know our history, or perhaps in McConnell’s case he just conveniently forgot our history. If the GOP governor, even one officed in Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy, has ever read the Second Inaugural speech of another Republican he would have had the cause of that awful war explicitly identified. The cause, even Confederate leaders knew at the time, was slavery.

What Abraham Lincoln proclaimed was not a celebration of some romantic lost cause as apparently most Civil War revisionists desire, but emancipation. Even as the war continued to rage in March of 1865, he acknowledged the debt that both sides were paying for allowing the “peculiar and powerful interest” of slavery to come near to destroying the nation.

Lincoln prayed for a speedy end to the “mighty scourge of war,” but acknowledged that God might will the war to continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as it was three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'” Amen.

Lincoln knew what the war was about and it wasn’t about state’s rights or protecting southern homes and communities from those nasty Yankees, as Gov. McDonnell suggested. The war was about ending slavery and preserving the Constitution.

There is a good proclamation worthy of real history in those ideas; worthy even of a history challenged governor in the cradle of the Confederacy.

2014 Election, Afghanistan, American Presidents, Borah, Bush, Church, Churchill, Crisis Communication, Cuba, Dallek, Hatfield, Mansfield, Morse, Obama

Obama’s War

Posted on by christian

afghanistanWar is the unfolding of miscalculations – Barbara Tuchman

I have a clear memory of an old basketball coach from high school who preached a simple strategy. Coach would say when someone was trying to make a particularly difficult play, for example, a flashy, behind the back pass when simple and straightforward would do, “Don’t try to do too much.”

I have been thinking about that old coach this week as I’ve watched President Obama ensure that America’s longest war – our eight years and counting in the graveyard of empires, Afghanistan – will last a good deal longer. Afghanistan is Obama’s war now and I cannot escape the feeling that the president has made the decision – for good or bad – that will define all the rest of his historic presidency. We all hope he got it right. There is a good chance he has made the mistake of trying to do too much.

A nagging sense of deja vu hangs over his decision. We have seen this movie before and, as one of the president’s critics from the right – George Will – suggests, we won’t like the way it ends. As an Idaho and Northwest history buff, I am also struck by a realization of something missing from the political debate aimed at defining the correct policy approach in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The missing element, it seems to me, is hard headed consideration of the limits of American power and influence. Deja vu all over again. We have seen this movie before, as well, and the end is not very satisfying.

An Idaho Perspective on Limits

Idaho has had two remarkable United States Senators who played major national and international roles in formulating our country’s foreign policy in the 20th Century. William Borah, a progressive Republican, served 33 years in the Senate and chaired the once-powerful Foreign Relations Committee in the 1920’s. Frank Church, a liberal Democrat, served 24 years in the Senate and chaired the same committee in the 1970’s.

The Idahoans wielded political power in vastly different times and a half century apart. In the broad sweep of history, we have to say both lost their fundamental battles to shape American attitudes about the limits of our power and influence. There is a direct link from that failure to the president standing in front of the cadet corps at West Point earlier this week.

Borah’s influence was at its zenith in the interval between the two great wars of the 20th Century when he served as chief spokesman of the non-interventionist approach to foreign affairs. Church’s time on the world stage coincided with the post-war period when international Communism dominated our concerns and Vietnam provided all the proof we should ever need about the limits of American power.

It can only be conjecture, but I would bet that neither of the men from Idaho, who once exercised real influence in the Senate, would be comfortable with the president’s course in Afghanistan. The reason is pretty simple. Both Borah and Church, passionately committed to American ideals and to representative democracy, believed that even given the awesome power of the country’s military, there are real limits to what America power can accomplish in the world. Historically, both felt America had repeatedly embraced the errands of a fool by believing that we could impose our will on people and places far removed and far different from us. Their approach to foreign policy and identifying American interests was defined by limits and certainly not by the belief that we can do it all.

In his day, Borah opposed sending the Marines to Nicaragua to police a revolution. It simply wasn’t our fight or responsibility, he argued, and the effort would prove to be beyond the limits of American influence. Church never believed that American air power and 500,000 combat troops could help the Vietnamese sort out a civil war. Both were guided by the notion that Americans often make tragic mistakes when we try to do too much.

Other Northwesterners of the past – the Senate’s greatest Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, Oregon’s pugnacious maverick Wayne Morse and the elegant, thoughtful Mark Hatfield – counseled presidents of both parties to understand our limits. Those reminders hover over our history and this moment in time.

None of this is to say that there are not real and compelling American interests in shutting down the 21st Century phenomenon of Jihadist terrorism. We do have legitimate interests and we must keep after this strategic imperative. But, the foundation of any successful strategy is correctly defining the problem and understanding the limitations.

Is projecting an additional 30,000 American troops into one of the world’s most historically difficult places, in the midst of tribal, religious and cultural complexity, the right approach? And, does it address the right problem? We’ll find out. The British and Russians found out before us.

As Barbara Tuchman made clear in her classic book The Guns of August – the book centers on the miscalculations and unintended consequences that helped precipitate the First World War – wars never unfold as planned. Miscalculations and faulty assumptions always get in the way of grand strategy.

Assuming progress on a tight timeline, assuming better behavior from a stunningly corrupt Afghan government, assuming our brave and talented troops can “nation build,” where others have failed time and again, are calculations and assumptions that may just not go as planned.

Grant the president this: he inherited a mess and no good option. Also, like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam and Harry Truman in Korea, he faces great political pressure not to display weakness or signal American retreat. It has never been in the presidential playbook to candidly discuss the limits of our power and influence. The American way is to believe we can do it all.

One of the great “what ifs” of 20th Century American history, particularly the history of presidential decision-making, is the question of what John Kennedy, had he lived and been elected to a second term in 1964, would have done with American involvement in Vietnam.

Many historians now believe, with a second term secure and political pressure reduced, JFK would have gotten out. We’ll never know. We do know what Johnson did, and his inability to confront the limits of national power and define precise American interests destroyed his presidency. History may well record that George W. Bush and Barack Obama failed to confront the same limits and correctly define precise interests.

Kennedy once said this: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: deliberate, continued, and dishonest; but the myth: persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

As we head into the cold and gray of another long winter in the rugged, deadly mountains of Afghanistan, we may again – I hope I’m wrong – confront the persistent, persuasive and unrealistic myth that America’s military – motivated, trained and determined as it is – can do everything.

As I said, I hope I’m wrong.