Syndicated columnist Jamie Stiehm: Biden's speech: Lincoln's Civil War echoes
I'm giving a Lincoln's Birthday party Sunday. The tallest guest will read a short speech. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden faces Congress for the speech of his presidency - the State of the Union.
Abraham Lincoln has wise advice across the ages.
For his first time in office, Biden addressed a "House Divided" in the Capitol: a red House, a blue Senate. Lincoln's words aptly describe our moment.
The new House Republican majority is an ornery lot. The 51 Senate Democrats and 212 House Democrats had to cheer "Joe" on to drown the nasty reception from hard-right Republicans.
More than 100 in that House chamber disputed the results of Biden's 2020 election the day the armed Jan. 6 mob seized the Capitol. Those members aided the seditious conspiracy to undo the peaceful transfer of power for the first time ever.
Speaking to the American people, Biden had a lot to write home about, A's and B's on his report card. Foremost on the domestic front: the robust economy (on job creation) and taming the pandemic. Abroad, Biden's actions leading and lending arms to help Ukraine defend against the brazen Russian invasion prove his foreign policy chops. He brought NATO allies into the fold as only a steady, seasoned American president could. Former President Donald Trump tried to extort Ukraine.
Biden and Lincoln agree on the good American nature at heart. Lincoln pleaded on March 4, 1861, "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies."
For the Southern slave states, secession was already a done deal: thus deaf to Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory."
Lincoln's first inaugural visual was powerful and could be taken two ways. The Capitol was half-finished behind Lincoln as he spoke on the steps, missing the dome.
The Civil War broke out soon after, in April 1861 and lasted until April 1865. Lincoln was its final casualty when he was shot on Good Friday at Ford's Theatre, laughing at a comedy, celebrating the war's end.
Biden too reached out to a table of his enemies, as an old-school optimist. He believes in the power of his personal bonhomie to win over opponents.
The stakes are as high as they can be for the global economy if congressional Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling after passing a ruinous Trump tax cut for corporations and the rich. The "full faith and credit" of the United States is on the line. It has never failed before.
We're living in an age of firsts, with wild climate change. Fortunately, Biden could say to the divided House that he signed the largest climate bill ever ($369 billion) to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
Surely House Republicans will carry out their sordid agenda anyway, including an investigation of Biden's son Hunter and perhaps Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top medical scientist.
I'm thinking of badger Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, the newly anointed Judiciary Committee chairman. And he has company among troublemakers.
Their weak leader, narrowly elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, can't or won't rein them in. Same difference.
Biden confronted the Supreme Court and many states and urged Congress to enshrine reproductive freedom - a constitutional right for 50 years - into law. The Supreme Court has never stripped a human right before.
Lincoln was similarly outraged at the Dred Scott opinion in 1857, ruling Black people, free or enslaved, could never have rights as citizens.
Well, thank goodness we're not "engaged in a great civil war," as Lincoln declared in the Gettysburg Address.
Or are we? Anti-democracy extremist forces are at large; only 1,000 of the 30,000 in the mob were arrested. Their leader remains a free man. The 2024 election may be a battlefield tearing us further apart.
In the end, Biden won't have to say: "I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return."
Lincoln spoke those saddest words at the Springfield, Illinois, train station on a February morning. The townspeople wept. He never came home again, alive.
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