In 2018, Nashville pols countered months of subterfuge, half-truths and undercooked excuses about the real purpose of the extra attention paid to a historic burial ground, with righteous indignation about preserving our civic dignity.No, no. Not that time. The other time.For 125 years, President James K. Polk and his beloved wife Sarah have lain peacefully on Capitol Hill, and even without early-morning mayoral reconnaissance, they’ve done so without disturbance.But the folks at the Polk Ancestral Home down in Columbia, Tenn., hatched “Operation: Let’s Ignore a President’s Final Wishes So Mule Day Attendees Can Gawk at Him,” drumming up support in the legislature to relocate the bodies to Maury County, first mendaciously claiming that the president’s will specified it as his preferred final resting place (the will quite specifically states that he wanted to be buried at the now-demolished Polk Place in Nashville), and then, caught in a lie, claimed a move to “the only place still standing where the president lived besides the White House” better fulfilled his and his wife’s wishes. (President Polk never lived at the Ancestral Home for any length of time, as it was built while he was in law school, after which he almost immediately went into politics. Sarah, who never lived in Columbia, survived her husband for 42 years and never expressed any interest in such a relocation.)Despite the pleas of, among others, state Rep. Jeff Yarbro (whose final conversation with his predecessor, the late Doug Henry, was about the 1981 law Henry sponsored that required approval of the General Assembly to move the tombs) and pretty much every historian in Tennessee, the state Senate passed the necessary measure in 2017. That was followed by the House in 2018: In a rare bipartisan effort, numerous Republicans joined with Democrats to prevent a majority the first time it came up, but the votes were there the second time, boosted, in part, by Speaker Beth Harwell, who thumbed her nose at her hometown of Nashville in what one presumes was a vain effort not to finish last in the Republican gubernatorial primary.But don’t fret: There are plenty of hoops left for the body snatchers to navigate, including a likely challenge by some of the Polk descendants in Chancery Court. J.R. LIND