(American) History’s Greatest Monster

By contrast with Barack Obama, as Scott Lemieux says Andrew Johnson really was an example of a president who stood in the path of progressive policies. The Republican congressional majorities of the Johnson years had lots of perfectly good ideas, and Johnson consistently acted to undermine them.

That said, while thinking about the lost opportunity of the Johnson years it is worth sparing a mention for the greatest centrist wankers of all time—the moderate Senate Republicans who refused to vote to convict Johnson on impeachment charges. It’s true that the impeachment prosecution was a bit trumped-up and essentially amounted to a politically motivated “no confidence” vote. But the commonly heard view (this was in my high school history textbook, for example) that convicting Johnson would have led to some kind of pernicious parliamentary system seems really blinkered. For one thing, lots of countries have parliamentary systems and are doing fine. But more importantly, it would have led to no such thing. The particular political circumstances of the Johnson impeachment were bizarre. Lincoln had put a Democrat on the ticket for crass political purposes, then been assassinated, bringing a Democrat into the White House despite Republican electoral victories. At the same time, you had a Republican majority in the House and a Republican supermajority in the Senate that would have been adequate to convict. On top of that, there was no Vice President, so stalwart Republican Ben Wade would have taken over had Johnson been removed from office.

That configuration of circumstances will almost certainly never repeat again. And if it does, the precedent that “you can’t use assassination to flip partisan control of the presidency” would hardly be a pernicious one.