In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do. In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy made Edmund Ross one of the Senate’s “Profiles in Courage” for his decisive and heroic vote not to convict and remove Johnson. Repealed in 1887, the Tenure of Office Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But while the act was the lethal instrument to be used in the political assassination of a president whom the Radical Republicans meant to terminate, Stanton’s ouster was not the primary cause of their fury. What truly enraged the Radical Republicans was Johnson’s resolve to be more magnanimous toward the defeated South than they meant to be. Johnson had in mind an earlier end to the military occupation of the South and a more rapid return of the seceded states to the Union. The story is told in the 1942 Hollywood film “Tennessee Johnson,” starring Van Heflin, which has since gone down the memory hole along with Woodrow Wilson’s White House favorite, “Birth of a Nation. As historians concede, the impeachment of Johnson was about Reconstruction and who would remake the South. Would it be the Southern majority that fought and lost the war, or the victorious Yankees and the “scalawags” and “carpetbaggers” laboring alongside them? The triumphant Radical Republicans were not about conciliation. So severe were aspects of the occupation that Gen. Robert E. Lee reportedly said if he had known what was coming, he might not have quit fighting. So, too, the impeachment of Donald Trump is not really about his 10-week delay in shipping arms to Ukraine or his postponing of a visit by Ukraine’s president until he announced an investigation of Burisma Holdings and Joe and Hunter Biden. Even before the 2016 election, Democrats, collaborating with a like-minded media, were using the instruments of power they possess, to first prevent and then to overturn the election results of 2016. Russiagate, the James Comey FBI investigation, the Mueller probe — aborting a Trump presidency has always been the goal. Saturday, White House counsel Pat Cipollone succinctly described to the Senate the bottom line: “They’re asking you to remove President Trump from the ballot in an election that’s occurring in approximately nine months. … They’re asking you to tear up all of the ballots across this country on your own initiative, take that decision away from the American people.” To save “our democracy,” to which they pay tireless tribute, the impeachers want to ensure that the people, in a supposedly free election in 2020, are not allowed to make the same mistake they made in 2016. To save our democracy, the House and half the Senate want to deny the America electorate one of the most important roles the people play in this republic — the exercise of their right to choose the head of state and commander in chief of the United States. Disqualifying presidential candidates whom populists favor but elites abhor is a quite common practice — in Third World countries. Over the weekend, we learned that John Bolton, who has offered to testify in the Senate trial, claims in his coming book that Trump made a direct link between sending military aid to Ukraine and Ukraine’s opening an investigation of the Bidens. This has caused some Republican senators to reconsider calling witnesses, particularly Bolton, in the impeachment trial. If four Republicans vote for witnesses, they will be doing the work Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi’s House failed to do in their haste to get Trump impeached by Christmas. They will be prolonging a trial set up to burn and bury their president. The Senate should let Trump’s defenders complete their case, as the House managers and impeachers have already done. Then allow 16 hours of questioning. Then call for the verdict. There is no treason, no bribery and no high crime in what the House managers allege. There is nothing in the articles of impeachment voted that rises to a level to justify removing a president. Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on defenseless cities and sent 2 million POWs back to the tender mercies of Stalin in Operation Keelhaul after World War II. JFK greenlighted the overthrow of an ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, in a coup that ended in the murder of Diem. LBJ ordered the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, and his White House shared the fruits of that FBI surveillance with a friendly press. No one was impeached. Why? Because Truman, JFK and LBJ were establishment favorites. For Trump, a phone call with a Ukrainian president saying, “Send us your Biden file and we will have a meeting,” is a political capital crime justifying democracy’s version of a death penalty. Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

ALABAMA: Foundation Weighs In on Proposed Bridge Name Change SELMA, Ala. — The F.D. Reese Foundation over the weekend weighed in on an online petition, reported to have as many as 8,500 signatures, to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge in honor of civil rights icon U.S. Sen. John Lewis, D-GA, who recently announced his diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. “While we agree Senator John Lewis has played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement, we can’t forget the impact of those from Selma who also dedicated their lives to the Civil Rights Movement,” read the foundation’s statement, which was penned by F.D. Reese Foundation CEO Rev. Alan Reese. The statement goes on to recall the history of Selma’s “Courageous Eight,” the monicker bestowed upon the members of the Dallas County Voters League, who were responsible for bringing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into, and thus national attention to, the struggle for voting rights in Selma. The statement notes that it was the group’s “tenacity and resilience” that pushed them to recruit King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) “to aid in the struggle of voter’s rights,” which directly led to the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, “the highlight of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” With that in mind, the foundation urges in the statement that consideration be given to renaming the bridge for one, or all, of the men and women who were part of the Voting Rights Movement in Selma – specifically, the statement notes, the members of the “Courageous Eight,” which include Ulysses Blackmon, Amelia Boynton, Ernest Doyle, Marie Foster, James Gildersleeve, J.D. Hunter, Henry Shannon and the foundation’s namesake, Frederick D. Reese. “In recent years, there have been several debates, petitions and protests to have Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag removed,” the statement said. “Some argue that keeping the monuments and flag allow us to remember the history this country was built on.; others argue removing the monuments and flag removes the constant reminder of the hate the ancestors of African-Americans endured. It is not our goal to have the name of the bridge changed, but, if the bridge must be renamed, let’s remember those from Selma who were instrumental in the march from Selma to Montgomery. Name the bridge for the ‘Courageous Eight’ and the foot soldiers who took a stand not only for Selma, but for the nation.” At a recent Selma City Council work session, attorney Faya Rose Toure called on the council and city to support the effort to rename the bridge, calling the bridge’s namesake, Edmund Pettus, a “domestic terrorist” for his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). It is unclear if the petition Toure was rallying support for is the same as the one the Reese Foundation referenced in its statement – the petition referenced in the foundation’s statement was said to have “roughly” 8,500 signatures, while the petition Toure referenced at the council work session was said to have collected more than 300,000 signatures from people across the country, according to a Jan. 13 article in the Times-Journal. According to a 2015 article in Smithsonian Magazine during the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” Pettus moved to Selma after the end of the Civil War, in which he was a brigadier general for the Confederate Army, and went on to serve as Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan during the final year of Reconstruction. The article quotes Alabama historian Wayne Flynt and University of Alabama history professor John Giggle, who weigh in on both Pettus’ history and the likely reasoning behind naming the bridge for him in May 1940, more than three decades after his death. “His fanaticism is borne of a kind of pro-slavery belief that his civilization cannot be maintained without slavery,” Flynt is quoted as saying in the article, noting that Pettus was a rarity in his native Limestone County, which largely opposed secession, and supported the Confederacy due to his belief in white supremacy. “He lives in an area full of people who oppose secession. He is going against the grain. He’s not a reluctant pragmatist, brought to secession to go along with the people. He’s a true believer.” “The bridge was named for him, in part, to memorialize his history, of restraining and imprisoning African-Americans in their quest for freedom after the Civil War,” the articles quotes Giggle as saying. At age 75, Pettus was elected to serve in the U,S, Senate after a campaign that “relied on his successes in organizing and popularizing the Alabama Klan and his virulent opposition to the constitutional amendments following the Civil War that elevated former slaves to the status of free citizens,” the article states. “That he was elected statewide demonstrates the power of a Confederate pedigree and the Ku Klux Klan political machine,” Flynt said in the article. “You didn’t get the nomination unless you had the support of white elites in the Black Belt.” The article notes that, at the time, a petition was circulating to rename the bridge – the petition, which was addressed to the National Parks Service, the mayor of Selma and the governor of Alabama, was 40,000 signatures short of its 200,000 signature goal,