Gettin' Whiggy Wit It
Jul. 28th, 2011 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThe year was 1850. The President was Buffalo's own Millard Fillmore, a compromise candidate for vice president who became the nation's second accidental chief executive after Zachary Taylor (who barely knew the man and who shut him out of his Administration) suddenly died in the summer of that year.
Under Fillmore's watch, the United States Congress passed one of the most reprehensible bills in its long history of reprehensibility: The Fugitive Slave Act. Northerners, and abolitionists everywhere, were suddenly subject to criminal prosecution for assisting southern slaves in their flights to freedom. Northerners rioted rather than go along with The Man, and within a decade, the nation was at war and Fillmore's party, the Whigs, was no longer relevant.
Roll the clock ahead 161 years. Congress is on the verge of a similar reprehensible act: refusing to raise a debt ceiling, as its Savior Reagan and its HolyProfit Prophet Dubya each did more than a dozen times, out of a similar calling to pander to its bullheaded Southern base.
The consequences of this inaction may well be as deadly to the Republican Party as those of the 1850 action were to the Whigs.
Even facing that, though, I cannot welcome it. I love this country too much. But if they cause the disaster and fade into irrelevancy as a consequence? I won't exactly be wearing sackcloth and ashes mourning their demise.
Under Fillmore's watch, the United States Congress passed one of the most reprehensible bills in its long history of reprehensibility: The Fugitive Slave Act. Northerners, and abolitionists everywhere, were suddenly subject to criminal prosecution for assisting southern slaves in their flights to freedom. Northerners rioted rather than go along with The Man, and within a decade, the nation was at war and Fillmore's party, the Whigs, was no longer relevant.
Roll the clock ahead 161 years. Congress is on the verge of a similar reprehensible act: refusing to raise a debt ceiling, as its Savior Reagan and its Holy
The consequences of this inaction may well be as deadly to the Republican Party as those of the 1850 action were to the Whigs.
Even facing that, though, I cannot welcome it. I love this country too much. But if they cause the disaster and fade into irrelevancy as a consequence? I won't exactly be wearing sackcloth and ashes mourning their demise.
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Date: 2011-07-29 08:30 pm (UTC)