It’s official. Judge Amy Coney Barrett is now Judge Amy Coney Barrett. She was qualified. Her confirmation hearings went without a hitch. She has the full package and now she is at Court. We have a truly conservative majority now that Chief Justice John Roberts has decided to stab us in the back and join the liberal wing. However, there was one anecdote that Democrats tossed around during the ACB confirmation fight that wasn’t actually true. This was said by Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) during the Vice Presidential Debate. See, she claimed that when Abraham Lincoln had a Supreme Court vacancy in 1864, just 27 days before the election, he held off because “Honest Abe said, ‘That’s not the right thing to do. The American people deserve to decide who will be the next president of the United States, and then that person will be able to choose who will serve on the highest court in the land.”
This is a lesson from Kamala Harris’s history – and it’s wrong. This is not surprising for a political party that is stupid when it comes to history and whose foundations are historically illiterate. Even the Washington Post. he had to weigh himself and politely give Harris a history lesson on why her interpretation is grossly off the mark. They added that the only thing Harris got right was that there was a vacancy 27 days before the election [emphasis mine]: :
Harris is correct that the seat became vacant 27 days before the election. And that Lincoln didn’t nominate anyone until he won. But there is no evidence that he believed the seat should be filled by the winner of the election. In fact, he had other motives for the delay.
On October 12, 1864, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney died at the age of 87. He served as chief justice for almost 30 years, but will always be best known – or rather notorious – for writing the majority opinion in Dred. The case of Scott v. Sandford, in which he stated that black people are inferior and “have no rights that the White man should respect.” (The House voted to remove Taney’s bust from the Capitol over the summer in the wake of the George Floyd protests.)
According to Michael Kahn, former chairman of the board of President Lincoln’s Cottage, Taney had been ill for years, so it was no surprise to Lincoln that he would have the opportunity to appoint his own chief justice. But Lincoln was busy with both his campaign and the Civil War—Sherman’s troops had just captured Atlanta and would soon be marching to the sea. He told his advisers that he would not nominate anyone immediately because he was “waiting for public opinion from across the country,” according to historian Michael Burlingame in “Lincoln: A Life.”
[…]
And then there was Salmon P. Chase. Chase was a former senator, Ohio governor and Treasury secretary who, according to Burlingame, believed he was destined to be president. In 1860, he unsuccessfully competed with Lincoln for the Republican nomination. Although Lincoln disliked him, Chase had many supporters. Chase’s opponents told Lincoln all the nasty things Chase said about him behind his back.
The overarching effect of the delay is that it united Lincoln’s broad but shaky coalition of conservative and radical Republicans. And that kept rivals like Chase in check. Chase, who had frequently criticized Lincoln in the past, immediately began courting the president throughout the Midwest, sparking rumors of a secret agreement, according to Kahn.
Congress was on recess until early December, so it wouldn’t make sense to mention the man’s name before the election anyway.
The publication added that during this period – and I can’t believe we have to say this – much of the delay was due to letters of recommendation arriving in the mail about who should fill the position. It takes time, and besides, Lincoln was just dealing with the worst crisis this nation had ever seen during the Civil War and struggling to keep his party’s coalition together, which he would need if he were to bring about the death of slavery in America by passing the 13th Amendment. You see, therefore, liberals really cannot be counted on in their historical interpretations, especially when they try to apply current situations to past events. They end up looking like idiots. This story is wrong, Kamala, but it doesn’t matter. The GOP had votes to certify from the start – and they did. It’s over. I would recommend removing this anecdote about Lincoln from your conversations that the DNC gave you.
