Hal Rogers, meet Henry Burnett, another congressman who tried to destroy the Union

Congressman Hal Rogers of Somerset, meet Congressman Henry Cornelius Burnett of Cadiz.

Burnett, a “Southern Rights” Democrat, joined the Confederates in the Civil War. So Congress expelled him for treason.

Rogers is Kentucky’s longest-tenured lawmaker. He and a slew of other Republican legislators voted to embrace Donald Trump’s banana-republic dictator-style attempt to keep himself in power by sabotaging the free and fair electoral vote that ultimately made Joe Biden president.

For aiding and abetting Trump’s scheme to convert the Constitution into a bird cage bottom liner, they all deserve the same fate as the disgraced Burnett.

Oh, the western Kentuckian ached to see the rebels capture Washington and hoist a Confederate flag over the Capitol. Some of the Trumpian terrorists packed Confederate banners when they stormed and sacked the Capitol. (Neo-Nazis among them sported anti-Semitic apparel.)

Before the white guys in the red MAGA caps raced for the Capitol steps, Trump egged on the Brownshirt wannabes with a rant reminiscent of a certain mustachioed megalomaniac’s Munich beer hall raving in the 1920s and 30s.

Anyway, somebody ought to write a sequel to President John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” name it “Profiles in Cowardice,” and fill it with true stories of grasping, grifting political hacks like Rogers. I suspect it would be at least twice as thick as JFK’s book, which was about some U.S. senators who had the guts to risk political careers and the wrath of their constituents by elevating principle over party.

Rogers’ craven genuflecting didn’t go unnoticed back home. Linda Blackford of the Lexington Herald-Leader, tore him a brand new one. The Louisville Courier Journal’s Joseph Gerth also lit into Rogers, the only Kentucky lawmaker to vote to derail the electoral vote count.

Blackford didn’t figure Rogers for the Kentucky pol who’d “throw his legacy to the winds and his face onto the ‘Wall of Sedition.’ That’s the helpful graphic from the New York Times showing all 147 Republicans who voted to overturn election results despite an attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol…incited by the mad king President Trump.”

Jabbed Gerth: “After the traitors tried to take over the Capitol, [Rogers] sided with them and voted to disenfranchise millions of Americans based on Trump’s fantastic stories of vote fraud he and disgraced former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to peddle to election deniers.

“He should be ashamed. They all should.”

Blackford and Gerth were easier on Rogers than the pro-Union Lexington Observer & Reporter and Louisville Journal were on Burnett. He was a frequent object of their disaffection.

The Journal suggested that because Burnett “blusters and raves like a bedlamite against the Lincoln Government” he should decamp to the Confederacy “which the unanimous voice of the world brands as the most tyrannical in the history of despotism.” Burnett was, after all, “admirably qualified for the office of Blackguard Extraordinary and Scullion Plenipotentiary to the court of Jeff Davis, for his brain is as feeble as his lungs are forcible and his mouth is as dirty as a den of skunks.”

Added Blackford: “The mob violence was enough to change several legislators’ minds, but not, it seems, Rogers. Then again, Rogers and his family do have a lot to lose if he were to leave Congress. Rogers is the poster child for ‘the swamp,’ the kind of political corruption that Trump swore to end but instead propagated.”

She concluded that Trump and his toadies have all got to go if we’re “to break the fever dream of alternative facts [and] show people there are consequences for promoting them...Hal Rogers is one tiny piece of this terrible movement that ended with a mob in the U.S. Capitol...But if we don’t stop it now, it will happen again all too soon.”

If more Republicans had displayed profiles in courage, it never would have happened in the first place.

Berry Craig III is an author, historian, freelance journalist and longtime union activist in Mayfield.