MICHAEL WALSH: Sacramento Democrats Fire on Fort Sumter.

The situation is rich in irony. Southern Democrats insisted they were acting constitutionally under the 10th Amendment by defying anti-slavery sentiment; Southern Democrats, after Lincoln was assassinated by one of their number, continued to wage a rear-guard action at the state level in the defeated South throughout the Andrew Johnson and Grant administrations; Southern Democrats continued to use the same argument during the Civil Rights movement to justify Jim Crow laws and the poll tax. It took not only acts of Congress to certify the plain outcome of the Civil War, but also a series of federal court decisions, backed up at times by troops.

Had Lincoln, and the country, dodged Booth’s bullet, there is a strong case to be made that he would have declared the Democratic Party a seditious organization and outlawed it—especially as Democrats demonstrated, through their postwar actions, that they had every intention of returning Lincoln’s “charity for all” of the second inaugural address, with malice toward him, the GOP, and the country at large.

Now California Democrats—as radical a group of anti-Americans as you will find in this country, whether legal or “undocumented”—have again fired on Fort Sumter. And once again (don’t kid yourselves), the goal is de facto and, later, de jure, secession from the United States of America, as part of the Aztlan-inspired Reconquista of what Hispanic radicals consider lost territory.

Read the whole thing.

Related: “Who ever thought that John C. Calhoun would emerge as a key political thinker of the 21st Century? I certainly didn’t, but that is exactly what has happened.”