I am reading These Truths, Jill Lepore’s insightful history of the United States from 1492 to 2016. Her description (on page 244) of Congress during the war with Mexico in the 1840s rang a warning bell:
Nearly as soon as the war with Mexico began, members of Congress began debating what to do when it ended. They spat venom. They pulled guns. They unsheathed knives. Divisions of party were abandoned; the splinter in Congress was sectional. Before heading to the Capitol every morning, southern congressmen strapped bowie knives to their belts and tucked pistols into their pockets. Northerners, on principle, came unarmed.”
Charles Dickens was in the U.S. at the time and wrote, “It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they and such as they be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked.” Meetings of the House of Representatives, he observed, were “the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.”
The struggle, of course, was over whether new territories acquired from Mexico would be slave states or free states. In two decades, the Civil War would give an answer.
As 2021 began, we saw a deadly insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, spurred on by a President who lost the election and wanted to reverse the will of the electorate. We saw many Republican Congress members support the President as other members called for impeachment. We saw metal detectors installed in the entries to the House chamber and at least one Representative vowing to bring her gun to her desk.
Let us hope that, as the impeachment trial looms, Congress can maintain discipline and respect for the oaths that its members have taken—and respect for the citizens they serve.
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