'Mind your manners' isn't just something your mother told you. Manners – and civility – are an essential component of how things get done in government, and the Founding Fathers knew it.
The attack on the Capitol continues to cast a shadow over Congress as both a building and an institution, as it remains either the subject or subtext of most every political discussion in Washington.
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There’s a certain awful symmetry in politics. For the Republican Party, that symmetry appears to be violence in the Capitol on one end of history, marking the party’s national ascendancy and on the other, signifying its present unraveling.
On May 22, 1856, pro-slavery, Democratic Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Republican Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate chamber. Pummeling Sumner with his cane, Brooks was livid that Sumner had decried the efforts of Brooks’s relative, South Carolina Sen. Andrew Butler, to admit the Kansas territory into the union as a slave state.
In the wake of the caning, public opinion divided along sectional lines. While the House of Representatives eventually would censure him, Brooks was unrepentant and his fellow southerners believed he had done “exactly right,” as Stephen Puleo recounted in “The Caning: The Assault The Drove America to Civil War.” Horrified and dismayed, northerners thought Brooks a “