Historian Heather Cox Richardson hit one out of the park tonight:
On April 8, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant was having a hard night. His army had been harrying Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s for days, and Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. The people in the Virginia countryside were starving and Lee’s army was melting away. Just that morning, a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant’s mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee still insisted his men could fight on.
So, on the night of April 8, Grant retired to bed in a Virginia farmhouse, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine. He spent the night “bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.” It didn’t work. When morning came, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.
As he rode, an escort arrived with a note from Lee requesting an interview for the purpose of surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”
The two men met in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee had dressed grandly for the occasion in a brand new general’s uniform carrying a dress sword; Grant wore simply the “rough garb” of a private with the shoulder straps of a Lieutenant General.
But the images of the noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving, and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” he responded, before asking how many men needed food. He took Lee’s answer– “about twenty-five thousand”– in stride, telling the general that “he could have… all the provisions wanted.”
By spring 1865, Confederates, who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that they would beat the North’s money-grubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while, backed by a booming industrial economy, the Union army could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment’s notice.
The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by men like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier’s uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work.
The filibuster is a critical tool to protecting that input [from small, less populous states] and our democratic form of government. That is why I have said it before and will say it again to remove any shred of doubt: There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation.
Thus writes the highly principled Joe Manchin of West Virginia in an op-ed called I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster. He believes the two parties must work together. Many Americans believe this, of course, probably most of us, although the solid 40% who support Trump no matter what are apparently down for any Big Lie that might help their party maintain power. There are principled members of both parties, Manchin insists. Therefore, it stands to reason that:
There is also bipartisan support for voting reform and many of the initiatives outlined in the For the People Act. Our ultimate goal should be to restore bipartisan faith in our voting process by assuring all Americans that their votes will be counted, secured and protected. Efforts to expand voting hours and access, improve our election security and increase transparency in campaign finance and advertisement rules should and do have broad, bipartisan support and would quickly address the needs facing Americans today. Taking bipartisan action on voting reform would go a long way in restoring the American people’s faith in Congress and our ability to deliver results for them.
Manchin writes this after the GOP majority legislature of the great state of Georgia passed a voter suppression law that would have enabled Trump to overturn the 2020 election, had it been in place last November, a law so transparent in its intent to favor one party that even corporations have denounced it as the Jim Crow artifact it is.
Manchin writes this editorial after 0 Republicans (in either House of Congress) voted for the COVID relief bill that Democrats narrowly passed by reconciliation.
Manchin believes in bipartisan cooperation with a party that speechified, paid to advertise doubt about “election integrity” based on a lie and cast 147 votes in Congress against certifying an election that officials of both parties declared free of widespread fraud.
Manchin can work with a party that is blocking a commission to get the facts on the January 6 riot at the Capitol. That’s what politics is all about.
I hate to revert to type, but the truth matters, even in politics, Joe Manchin, you stupid, posturing motherfucker. Same goes for your colleague Ms. Sinema.
Manchin reminds me of the Dubya Bush that Stephen Colbert skewered at the Correspondents’ Dinner a few years back. “You’re steadfast, sir. You believe the same thing on Wednesday that you did on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday!”
There is bipartisan support for keeping assault weapons out of the hands of violent maniacs, has been for decades. The GOP won’t vote for it. There was bipartisan support for Obama’s moderate nominee Merrick Garland for Supreme Court. The GOP Senate leader told the president to go fuck himself, no hearing, no debate. After Trump fomented, organized and incited the riot on January 6, #Stop the Steal, based on the Big Lie, the GOP fell into line to make sure he couldn’t be convicted in his impeachment, using a dubious rationale about having delayed the proceeding until it had no constitutional force.
Manchin ends his op-ed with these high-minded phrases:
We will not solve our nation’s problems in one Congress if we seek only partisan solutions. Instead of fixating on eliminating the filibuster or shortcutting the legislative process through budget reconciliation, it is time we do our jobs.
So, of course, that means not changing the filibuster rules back to requiring the party blocking debate to stand in the well of the Senate talking and talking. It means not changing the rule to put the burden on the minority to maintain a 41 vote quorum, but leaving the burden on the majority party to find 60 votes, ten among Trump dead-ender partisans. It means changing nothing, but the hearts of Manchin’s fellow legislators.
The odds are 50-50 that Manchin simply turns Republican if pressed hard enough by Senate colleagues. If the GOP suddenly got a majority in the Senate with “moderate” “centrist” Joe Manchin joining their caucus officially, they’d immediately end the filibuster, you can take that to the bank. Manchin would probably be OK with that.
The conservative Red State Democrat already shares many of their core beliefs. You don’t need to make a living wage if you’re poor, you can make do with a much smaller raise — it’s all you deserve anyway. If it’s not for endless war we can’t spend trillions fixing roads, bridges, transitioning to a more sustainable economy, training Americans for new jobs, etc. HOW WE GONNA PAY FOR IT? YOU SURE AS HELL CAN’T FORCE THE SUPER-WEALTHY AND CORPORATIONS TO PAY MORE TAXES! The man is a Republican asset, enjoying his moment as principled king maker/kingpin of obstruction. Fuck him and the flea-bitten bipartisan donkey he rode in on.
In an excellent op-ed in the NY Times the other day, entitled If It’s Not Jim Crow, What Is It?Jamelle Bouie offers an insightful treatment of the old Jim Crow voting laws, which were always crafted with a certain subtle shading (to avoid the federal punishments for depriving people of the right to vote based on race or previous condition of servitude). Not one of these Jim Crow voting laws were framed in terms of race, political party or any other discriminatory intent. Had they been, they would not have survived judicial scrutiny, even by outright racist judges.
Here’s the opening section of Bouie’s analysis:
The laws that disenfranchised Black Americans in the South and established Jim Crow did not actually say they were disenfranchising Black Americans and creating a one-party racist state.
I raise this because of a debate among politicians and partisans on whether Georgia’s new election law — rushed through last month by the state’s Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican — is a throwback to the Jim Crow restrictions of the 20th century.
Democrats say yes. “This is Jim Crow in the 21st century. It must end,” President Biden said in a statement. Republicans and conservative media personalities say no. “You know what voter suppression is?” Ben Shapiro said on his very popular podcast. “Voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.”
The problem with the “no” argument here is that it mistakes both the nature and the operation of Jim Crow voting laws. There was no statute that said, “Black people cannot vote.” Instead, Southern lawmakers spun a web of restrictions and regulations meant to catch most Blacks (as well as many whites) and keep them out of the electorate. It is true that the “yes” argument of President Biden and other Democrats overstates similarities and greatly understates key differences — chief among them the violence that undergirded the Jim Crow racial order. But the “no” argument of conservatives and Republicans asks us to ignore context and extend good faith to lawmakers who overhauled their state’s election laws because their party lost an election.
and, in describing the seeming subtle nature of many of these restrictions, Bouie points out that
Between the 15th Amendment, which prohibited overt discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and the 14th Amendment, which allowed Congress to slash the representation of states that disenfranchised adult males for any reason other than crime or rebellion, Southern lawmakers could not just write Black voters out of the electorate. “The disenfranchisers were forced to contrive devious means to accomplish their purposes,” Kousser writes.
And devious, while still “in-your-fucking face”, this Georgia voter suppression law is, whatever else one might want to say about a law that fixes a problem that never existed, based on an electoral loss that can only be prevented by immediately changing the laws of the state.
A modern day Hitler, say Saddam Hussein, defies the world in some terrible way. The response of the united democracies is to pressure him, by harsh economic sanctions (which hurt his victims, kill ailing children and leave him untouched) or war (which kills thousands of his victims, displaces millions, creates a refugee crisis that destabilizes the region for decades into the future). In the war Hussein is eventually captured and, after a short trial with a pre-ordained outcome, hastily strung up in some kind of garage or hangar, in the middle of the night. Democracy declares itself the winner.
What’s wrong with this scenario? It’s like using an atomic bomb to get rid of a single, nasty insect, for one thing.
I didn’t think of this in terms of Major League Baseball pulling $100,000,000 of business out a state where citizens are suffering mightily under the economic devastation caused by COVID-19 (also known as “Kung Flu” or the “Trump virus”) until I heard this very reasonable commentary from Tennessee comedian Trae Crowder:
If Major League Baseball had announced its firm intention to move the all-star game if certain provisions of the Georgia law were not revised, and used removal of a $100M game as a negotiating lever, might a strenuous public debate in Georgia have emerged? Of course, there is no mechanism available to do this kind of thing, though one imagines such a mechanism, with a May 15 deadline, could have been devised to address something of this anti-democratic magnitude.
Stacey Abrams, who the GOP blames for this bleeding of a fortune from the citizens of Georgia, was against the MLB boycott. She applauded the sentiment MLB’s decision expressed, and the giant corporation’s good intentions, but did not support the boycott itself. No matter, we live in a post-truth, alternative fact America.
Mitch McConnell will continue to threaten and lecture corporations about their political speech extending only to massive, unlimited campaign donations. He will block all COVID relief in the senate (as he did, month after month) unless it included blanket corporate immunity from law suits, no matter how egregious the corporate behavior was. He will go to the mat for the rights of corporations to be free of all restraint, to pursue profits as roughly as they see fit, but that doesn’t give the corporations a right to express outrage, no matter how outrageous the provocation they are responding to.
Zero sum. No solution was ever found in a zero sum world, except for one that benefits one side while screwing the other side completely. There’s no idea of any kind of win-win outcome with a party that only believes in victory at any cost.
Trump and the two GOP senators narrowly lost elections in Georgia. There was an immediate riot at the Capitol, the very day the two new Georgia senators won their run-offs. Trump wildly accelerated his efforts to loudly change the story from the GOP loss in Georgia to the widespread fraud he’d been fraudulently screaming about for months. The GOP state legislature in Georgia rushed to change the law to make sure this could never happen again, to remove any kind of political independence in the counting and certification of votes in the GOP-controlled 50-50 state of Georgia. The new law ensures the GOP wins any close election in the future.
The Georgia law, which ensures the GOP will have the final say in every county, district and precinct in Georgia (as Trump demanded, unsuccessfully, after the thrice recounted and certified election) is a new Jim Crow. The GOP defenders of this law to combat fraud by non-GOP voters appear on TV to snarl that it is not any kind of voter suppression effort, that the new law is needed to ensure “election integrity” and protect it from (imagined) voter fraud, that Blacks not whites are the actual racists, but the law is (absent the long Southern tradition of physical violence against targeted voters), without question, a new Jim Crow voting restriction. Jim Crow 2.0, yo.
A friend I hadn’t talked to in a while asked how I was doing. I went down the list of the reasons I’m basically doing fine, my health is OK, the people I know all seem to be healthy, I had the second dose of the vaccine last week, I have enough money to get by, Sekhnet is doing fine, my arthritic knees hurt, but I’m still walking every day, I’m grateful for all this.
Then there’s this feeling I can’t shake, that I am living in Europe in 1932. A student of history, my friend immediately agreed with the comparison.
Weak and badly shaken democracies worldwide are buffeted by constant well-funded lies that agitate millions of angry citizens to rage about their grievances, real and imagined. These weakened democracies try to solve pressing problems for their citizens while an implacable, unprincipled enemy undermines them at every turn, snarling that democracy itself is the problem and arming and organizing itself for violent insurrection, if needed. In the US, these enemies would be willing to sacrifice another 500,000 American lives to the pandemic and kill a bunch more cops, a small price to make the current government look feckless and despicable and ensure their party’s return to absolute political power very soon.
My friend said the Georgia voter suppression law, like the ones passed more quietly in a few other states of the former Confederacy, could not stand a constitutional challenge. I walked him through John Roberts’s blandly dishonest decision in Shelby County v. Holder [1], the infamous 2013 case that threw away the most crucial protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in spite of Congress reauthorizing it almost unanimously (98-0 in the Senate), President George W. Bush signing it immediately, with a statement about its centrality to democracy and justice, and the challenged law being upheld by the two federal courts below the Supreme Court.
Roberts also failed to consider (or mention) the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that allows a clean record of ten years with no voter suppression attempts to exempt a state from the preclearance requirement that Roberts threw out. In the Shelby County case itself, plaintiff Shelby County, Alabama (carefully chosen by a consortium of powerful right wing lawyers) had no such clean record. In fact, it had a blemished record. Never mind, John Roberts solved a problem that didn’t exist by taking a gut hook to a law that had been working pretty well to prevent the worst of the voter suppression it was designed to prevent.
The immediate result of throwing away the umbrella that was keeping us dry during a pelting shit-storm (to paraphrase RBG’s famous “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.“) was the instant mushrooming of restrictive voting laws in many states that would have previously needed pre-clearance before passing laws that discriminated against certain voters.
These newly liberated states had the laws all ready to go, signed them into law as soon as John Roberts fixed the Voting Rights Act for them.
In the first three months of 2021, 361 more such laws have been introduced in 47 states, emergency laws needed to deal with an “emergency” that only exists in right-wing media and the fevered hive-mind of Trumpism. These laws, it must always be pointed out, are based on a lie about widespread voter fraud. Their passage preemptively allows Republican state legislatures to intervene to certify the final vote tally, by throwing out thousands of legal votes, if necessary, as Trump illegally sought to have them do in 2020. In Georgia, no more worries about a law-abiding Secretary of State having the last word, the votes in every county will be counted by the GOP as well as all recounts.
This time,Roberts, on a 6-3 Federalist Society court, wouldn’t even have to get involved in upholding the Georgia law as reasonable and narrowly tailored to deal with a hypothetical problem, even one that has never been shown to exist in reality. No longer the “swing vote” on a 6-3 conservative court he can once again demonstrate that he is a principled institutionalist by voting with the three libtard losers that the Georgia law is arguably unconstitutional.
My friend said the court has to be increased to 11. I did the math for him. Georgia law upheld as constitutional 6-5, Roberts for the win, like in Hollywood Squares.
“Fuck,” he said.
The larger problem of institutional injustice is baked into the legalism of the law. A case often turns on an obscure bit of creatively-applied precedent, expressed in jargon the uninitiated have no hope of understanding. An obscure doctrine like the Non-deferential Exception Exemption Standard (a hypothetical doctrine pulled out of my ass) can be deployed by an unappealable Supreme Court to narrowly rule that, for example, a corporation has no obligation to do anything but make money for its shareholders and cannot lawfully be regulated in its pursuit of profit by any government agency or even sued by any consumer in a court of law.
“How can this be?” the average citizen asks. Well, that’s just your ignorance asking, you clearly don’t understand the fine points of the inviolable Non-deferential Exception Exemption Standard as set forth by our most brilliant jurists.
There was a great analysis of this right-wing judicial activism in the New York Times last week. The predominance of Federalist Society ideologues on the federal bench, appointed for life, is the result of a well-organized, well-funded forty year campaign to pack the court with friends of corporate and religious liberty. I clipped out the op-ed at the time, and Heather Cox Richardson mentioned it in her Letter from an American last night:
“By legislating from the bench, Republicans dodge accountability for unpopular policies,” writes Ian Millhiser in a terrific piece in the New York Times on March 30. “Meanwhile, the real power is held by Republican judges who serve for life — and therefore do not need to worry about whether their decisions enjoy public support.”
Ian Millhiser ends his piece:
Yet to understand decisions like Little Sisters and West Virginia, a reader needs to master arcane concepts like the “nondelegation doctrine” or “Chevron deference” that baffle even many lawyers. The result is that the Republican Party’s traditional constituency — business conservatives — walk away with big wins, while voters have less access to health care and breathe dirtier air.
By legislating from the bench, Republicans dodge accountability for unpopular policies. Meanwhile, the real power is held by Republican judges who serve for life — and therefore do not need to worry about whether their decisions enjoy public support.
It’s a terrible recipe for democracy. Voters shouldn’t need to hire a lawyer to understand what their government is doing.
Earlier in the op-ed he lays out a few of the prize decisions the Federalist Society Supreme Court has delivered for its ideologically-driven deep-pocketed patrons in recent years:
In the same period, the Supreme Court dismantled much of America’s campaign finance law; severely weakened the Voting Rights Act; permitted states to opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion; expanded new “religious liberty” rights permitting some businesses that object to a law on religious grounds to diminish the rights of third parties; weakened laws shielding workers from sexual and racial harassment; expanded the right of employers to shunt workers with legal grievances into a privatized arbitration system; undercut public sector unions’ ability to raise funds; and halted Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
Now, a 6-to-3 conservative-majority Supreme Court is likely to reshape the country in the coming decade, exempting favored groups from their legal obligations, stripping the Biden administration of much of its lawful authority, and even placing a thumb on the scales of democracy itself.
I told my friend there would need to be at least 15 justices on the Supreme Court to remove the power of a single “swing vote” like religious fundamentalist Amy Coney Barrett (her first decision was that traditional religious worship is more essential to freedom than state medical precautions during a pandemic), and a bipartisan committee to agree on and transparently vet candidates (no more hiding thousands of pages of prejudicial Brett Kavanaugh legal opinions or spending millions in dark money on a public relations campaign during confirmation, as was spent by Team Boof), and term limits on the justices to ensure that every administration had a pick or two.
“They’d never go for fifteen,” my friend said glumly, probably regretting he’d asked me how I was doing.
[1]
The essential dishonesty of the Roberts decision was its insistence that the debate over the Voting Rights Act relied on forty year old data, data that was largely erased by enforcement of the law he was now gutting. Since it had solved the problem he argued, as demonstrated by contemporary voter demographic data, and, as no pattern of racist voter suppression was currently in evidence, there was no further need to burden formerly racist states with an extra step, pre-clearance, before allowing them to institute restrictive voting laws that could, in any case, always be challenged in court.
His decision omitted many crucial facts that refuted his key assertions in the 5-4 decision (these are from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s crystal clear, prescient dissent):
The reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush approvingly signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as RBG describes:
recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.”
I’ve been gripped by unease recently, a hopeless feeling that comes from my helplessness in the face of what I can only call evil. It’s painful to sit with helplessness while watching inexorable horrors. It feels like a continual punch in the gut. I think it’s because helplessness serves to underscore the intractable cruelty of the world, and its irrationality — it doesn’t matter if your perceptions, feelings and beliefs are clearly right — you can do nothing about the upsetting unfairness you are witnessing. Particularly if the perpetrators are willing to employ every weapon imaginable to make you shut up, or, if it comes to it, simply die.
It is useless to argue with an enflamed lynch mob, try to convince them that they are mistaken, whipped up by lies that have driven them insane — you can only run like hell from that kind of lust to kill, and hope your trick knee doesn’t give out.It is a nightmare, truly, standing by and watching someone abuse, even murder, somebody else, and being unable to help, being forced to swallow the horror that you are helpless.
Hence the grating Serenity Prayer, about God granting you the wisdom to know when to stop being tormented about terrible things you can do nothing about. There is a time to walk away from a painful situation, but serenity is certainly not the cure for so many bad things we are told we must simply tolerate.
Listening to some of the testimony in the Derek Chauvin trial you hear over and over the pain of witnesses who felt helpless as they tried to intervene, tried to get Chauvin up off the dying man’s neck, tried to get medical attention for the unresponsive George Floyd after he’d gasped out his last pleas for mercy and lost consciousness. Several of the witnesses broke down crying while trying to describe how they’d been unable to get through to the four policeman who worked together to slowly kill the handcuffed, terrified man they had pinned, face down, on the pavement.
It is 2021, this is probably the first internationally televised trial of the perpetrator of a lynching. Hundreds of years of this practice went unaddressed, with shrugs, with filibusters against laws to make lynching a federal crime [1], with practical warnings about how to avoid being lynched — don’t make trouble, keep your eyes on the ground, head down and your mouth shut, except to say “yes, sir.”
When police commit such killings, in the course of doing their job, they are often protected by a legal concept called “qualified immunity” [2] which makes sure they are never even put on trial, and if they are, only long enough for this protection to be invoked and the case against them dismissed. While a concept that only applies in civil suits, a similar logic — holding the police accountable for every split second (or even nine minute plus decision, as in killing George Floyd) would make the job of the police officer impossible to do — works in decisions about whether to prosecute police officers for deaths of unarmed people they may sometimes cause.
It may seem partisan to call the killing of George Floyd a lynching, instead of a tragic mistake, or the result of a split second judgement call, but check out the behavior of the officers, their unchanging demeanor, even after it became clear to every witness that they were killing an unresisting prisoner, over a fake $20 bill.
Picture the impassive face of the former officer Derek Chauvin, one hand in his pocket, as he steadily pressed his weight on the neck of a handcuffed man, avoiding eye contact with the agitated crowd, choking the life out of a man who had long ago ceased struggling. He ignored the crowd that was yelling that he was killing the man who pleaded for his life, kept his knee on Floyd’s neck long after his victim went limp and lost consciousness (which he never regained).
I don’t see any difference between what Chauvin and his colleagues did to George Floyd and what violent strangers did to my family, most dramatically in 1942-3, what violent men did to families of Tutsis, Rohingya, Armenians, lynching victims of every ethnicity throughout the ages. One commonality of all these atrocities is the enforced reality of helplessness in the face of deadly violence. You have moral objections? OK, step right up, you can be next.
My mother, a lifelong practitioner of helplessness (as well as a great reader), used to love Frank Bruni, who has long written for the New York Times. She told me she used to read him when he was the Times restaurant critic, and that his opinion columns were equally good reading. I check him out from time to time, and my hat’s off to him. He wrote a recent op-ed addressing the pain of helplessness and our duty to help destroy certain kinds of helplessness — like the helplessness of a crowd witnessing a police killing of a handcuffed man and unable to stop it. I’ll let Frank Bruni sum it up, this is from the end of his op-edListening to Those Who Saw George Floyd Die.
Seeking context for Floyd’s cries to his dead mother just before his own death, one of the prosecutors asked Ross about Floyd’s relation with his mother and how the loss of her affected him.
“He seemed kind of like a shell of himself,” Ross said. “He was broken.”
Her testimony was meant to shed light not on how Chauvin behaved but on how Floyd lived, and that made it essential. She reminded anyone paying attention — and a great many of us are paying close attention — that Floyd, now a symbol, was also a man: loving, loved, strong, weak, with virtues, with vices.
And so very, very vulnerable.
The witnesses who were there at the end of his life came face to face with that. I think they came face to face, too, with their own vulnerability — with the confirmation of how many people are unsafe, and sometimes even helpless, when we let hatred and bigotry fester.
Unable to alter that big picture, a few of the witnesses wondered what, if anything, they might have done differently on that one day.
“If I would’ve just not taken the bill, this could’ve been avoided,” said Christopher Martin, the clerk at Cup Foods, where Floyd used a fake $20, prompting a manager to summon the police.
Martin, 19, seemed to be struggling with a kind of survivor’s guilt. So did other witnesses. They shouldn’t, but I can’t say the same for many of the rest of us. We too seldom turn toward the ills that factored into George Floyd’s fate. We too often look the other way.
[1]
imagine what these titans of the former Confederacy would have argued, in opposing a federal law to criminalize lynching, if they hadn’t been allowed, by parliamentary rules, to simply read the phone book aloud
[2]
In the United States, qualified immunity is a legal principle that grants government officials performing discretionary functions immunity from civil suits unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known”. Wikipedia
Heather Cox Richardson, late last night, after covering numerous other issues of the day in her newsletter Letters from an American:
But the lasting story today is the one that will hang over everything until it is resolved: the attempt of Republican legislators in 43 states to suppress voting with what are now 361 voter suppression bills across the country.
Today Major League Baseball announced it was pulling the 2021 All-Star Game and the MLB draft from Georgia in response to the state’s new voter suppression law, passed last week. The announcement drew fury from Republican officials.
They attacked MLB’s move as a product of “cancel culture and woke political activists.” Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia House Speaker David Ralston released a statement blaming “this attack on our state” on President Biden and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams and insisting that the bill in fact expands, rather than contracts, the right to vote. Ralston said that “Stacey Abrams’ leftist lies have stolen the All-Star Game from Georgia…. But Georgia will not be bullied by socialists and their sympathizers.”
Republican politicians also piled on at the national level. Representative Buddy Carter (R-GA) tweeted that MLB was “[t]otally caving to the lies of the Left” and called for a baseball boycott. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) called it “a cowardly boycott based on a lie.” Then Representative Jeff Duncan (R-SC) called for Congress to retaliate against MLB with a law to remove MLB’s antitrust exception. The former president urged his supporters to “boycott baseball” and the companies that do not support Georgia’s new voter suppression bill.
But journalists Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein of the New York Times today reviewed the new 98-page Georgia voting law and had one primary takeaway: “The Republican legislature and governor have made a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections, making absentee voting harder and creating restrictions and complications in the wake of narrow losses to Democrats.” Sixteen key provisions hamper the right to vote, especially in the urban and suburban counties that vote Democratic, or take power away from state and local election officials—like the secretary of state, who refused to throw the election to Trump in 2020—and give it to partisan legislators.
If it’s true that the Georgia law is no big deal, Democracy Docket founder and election law defender Marc Elias asked, “why are three separate Republican Party Committees spending money intervening in court to defend it—claiming that if the law is struck down it will disadvantage the [Republicans] in elections?”
MLB’s decision was actually not prompted by Stacey Abrams, who rejected calls for a boycott and urged companies not to leave the state but to stay and fight for voting rights. She tweeted that she was “disappointed” that MLB would move the All-Star Game “but proud of their stance on voting rights.”
Former House Speaker John Boehner, who presided over the House during the Republican wave of 2010, published a preview of his forthcoming book that makes some sense of the Republican attempt to divert attention to Abrams. He says that the rise of the internet meant that by 2010, Republican lawmakers were taking their orders from internet media websites and the Fox News Channel, their only aim to keep viewers engaged and cash flowing.
The Republican focus on media, rather than policy, has mushroomed until lawmakers are now reduced to talking about Dr. Seuss and the Potato Head clan rather than answering the needs of voters, with no policy besides “owning the libs.”
And now they are trying to pin the decisions of MLB on the “socialist” Stacey Abrams, a voting-rights advocate, rather than on the Georgia Republican legislature’s open attempt to undermine democracy.
The GOP, the Party of the Lie, is determined to pass restrictive voting laws to prevent something that never happened from ever happening again.The traumatic specter of a Stolen Election, whether true or false, requires immediate action to prevent another one.
The Brennan Center recently counted the rapidly increasing number of anti-voting “Voter Integrity” laws proposed in virtually every state in the USA. It is no longer 253 proposed laws in 43 states. I will let Amy Goodman, who reported it today, tell it:
A stunning new report from the Brennan Center for Justice finds Republican state lawmakers have now introduced 361 bills to restrict voting rights across 47 states. Restrictive bills are now moving through legislatures in 24 states, and 29 bills have already been passed by at least one chamber of statehouses.
Early on Thursday morning, the Republican-controlled Texas Senate approved a bill to limit early voting hours, ban ballot drop boxes, end drive-thru voting and to allow poll watchers to videotape voters. This is one of just 49 bills to restrict voting being considered in Texas.
This comes just a week after Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed a sweeping elections bill that adds new voter ID requirements, severely limits mail ballot drop boxes and rejects ballots cast in the wrong precinct. One provision would even make it a crime to hand out food or water to voters waiting in line at polling places.
Recent announcements by Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Major League Baseball (the first two motivated by activist pressure) have called out the clear unfairness of the Georgia law and its naked purpose of suppressing non-GOP votes. Coke and Delta CEOs changed their tunes from their first statements that the law was basically a good compromise that had some problems with them to state that the laws is, yes, bad, unacceptable.
It may be left up to corporations, those profit-driven psychopaths, to pressure states like Georgia into back off some of the more draconian, restrictive provisions of what promises to be a raft of these new voter suppression schemes. It is another irony of our corporate democracy that corporations themselves may be the final guarantors of the right to vote, if they can be forced, by organized activism, to exert enough pressure on GOP state lawmakers. Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who angrily denied charges of racism after signing his racist law and called out partisan liberals and out-of-control Blacks, people he accused of racism, immediately shot back at the corporations, who want to remain on the State of Georgia’s corporate tit but who still want to unfairly criticize the State for merely obeying Jesus Christ Himself!
The gutted 1965 Voting Rights Acts, after a 5-4 vivisection by the Supreme Court in 2013, now requires the victims of state discrimination to hire top notch elections lawyers and prove their case in court, rather than as the law intended when putting the burden on states proposing such laws, before they could be signed into law, to demonstrate they had no discriminatory intent in making seemingly one-sided laws.
Lawsuits contesting these laws, if passed (and why wouldn’t they be by a majority Republican state legislature?) will eventually reach a 6-3 Supreme Court for final adjudication. John Roberts, the “balls and strikes umpire,” author of the 2013 decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act (we post-racial now, y’all) who has never met a voter suppression law he couldn’t find legal grounds to wink at, won’t even be a swing vote this time. Like the famously deadly Tinkers-to Evers-to Chance double play combination of baseball lore the decision will go Thomas to Alito to Gorsuch to Kavanaugh to Coney-Barrett for a Federalist Society consistent outcome.
The Party of the Lie believes in straight 51-49 suck it democracy — no rights for the “minority”. If we have the votes, fuck you. If you have the votes, you’re not being bipartisan if you don’t work with us, you’re tyrants, monsters, Nazis.
Look again at these two maps and see what you think about 51-49 democracy where if we have 51 votes you can go suck it, cuck. The 49 percent or so who voted against the GOP in Georgia (which Biden won 49.47% to 49.24%)?Fuck y’all, we got the gerrymandered state legislature and the governorship, eat it.
That said, it’s imperative to get rid of both the filibuster and the Electoral College, two anti-democratic institutions falsely claimed to be protectors of democracy. It would also be a very good idea to expand the Supreme Court to 15 or so, and to place term limits on the Justices to ensure a regular opportunity for each party to appoint successors. If those things aren’t done, the Party of the Lie will prevail, wildly successful extremist Charles Koch will continue to smile his “aw shucks” grin during his endless victory lap, and we will have a one party 51-49 suck it state here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And, unlike the grounds for voter suppression laws proposed in 47 states, that ain’t no lie.
Oppression is always based on a lie. Not all human lives are of equal value. Blacks, Hispanics and Muslims are inferior to Whites (and no true White can be a Muslim). An animal has no rights whatsoever, nor any real feelings, either. Jesus Christ, and His father, in their infinite mercy, intended wealthy white men to autocratically rule over everybody else, for the benefit of all. A “well-regulated militia” means every individual can own as many guns as he likes, with no regulation allowed. A fair and decisive election that even Bill Barr stated was without fraud on a scale that would change any results was “stolen”, we need to fix the laws to allow the GOP state legislatures to make the final calls in every state on which votes to throw out to ensure “election integrity”. The Civil War was not fought to defend slavery, it was purely an issue of states’ rights (to own slaves or not).
The list is endless.
Someone well-born has the God-given right to rule over the rabble, those who chose the conditions of their birth less wisely. A self-evident truth like “all men are created equal” obviously excludes natural inferiors like women, white men without land, slaves, the servant class, indigenous non-citizens, Chinese, other immigrant groups (unless they obtain sufficient wealth to make themselves equal), felons who’ve served their sentences and the rest of them.
These things are so self-evident, they really go without saying. When the law is forced to say them, they sometimes do so unequivocally, as in the unappealable words of the Supreme Court: the Negro “has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” [1]
After four fun-house years when repeated presidential lying was just doing what a solid 39% of Americans loved, what they themselves, if they had the power, would do, we have a party finally and irrevocably devoted to defending what is now routinely called The Big Lie — that the 2020 election was stolen. Because of widespread belief in this lie, you see, we need to fix laws that are not broken, to ensure that something that didn’t happen never happens again.
The Big Lie was a technique perfected and named by Hitler’s brilliant Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. It’s a simple technique. Make an audacious lie (they get more attention and enflame more outrage than small lies) and repeat it over and over and over via the mass media. It works like magic, so seamlessly that after years of doing it, a depraved government can indulge its wildest fantasies. Why not, as millions of credulous Americans would celebrate, put Tom Hanks, Oprah, Hillary and the rest of those sick child blood drinking pedophile fucks in torture camps?
We now have one major political party, representing a solid 40% of our citizens (conservative estimate), marching in lockstep to the Big Lie. Because voting rights advocates have made great strides bringing more people to the polls, and we had a historically large turn out in 2020, during a pandemic, no less, we need new laws that would allow GOP state legislatures the final call on which votes to count in each state.
Such laws, which would ensure “election integrity” would also relieve any future Trump of the need to call individual state election officials, or fly them to Washington, to persuade them not to certify votes or to change certified vote totals. We need these laws, the GOP argues, to stop voting fraud, whether it actually happened or not, because of mass perception of widespread fraud that, tens of millions believe, led to an infernally clever, successful conspiracy to steal the election. This was an argument ambitious Lyin’ Ted Cruz made continually in the days leading up to the January 6 riot at the Capitol, so many Americans believe this baseless lie, we have to have a commission to investigate it before we allow a possibly stolen election to stand.
The 2020 election, with its historically large turn out, was miraculously clean and fair, in spite of widespread fear, and certified as such by members of both parties. This included the president’s own gunsel, one of the most powerful men in government, Bill Barr, who stated unequivocally, after railing nonstop about the danger of unverified massive voter fraud (by mail) leading up to the election, and authorizing federal investigations into suspected fraud right up to election day, that there had been no fraud anywhere on a scale that would have changed the results of the election [2].
Because of this lie, that the 2020 election was stolen, we had a riot in the Capitol to stop the certification of the Electoral College votes that Biden won by the identical “landslide” Trump won by in 2016. A riot there is now great dispute about, Republicans not supporting a full investigation into whether the president and his underlings planned and incited it, spending some $54,500,000 dollars (according to evidence produced in Trump’s second impeachment) to publicize, organize and foment it.
Republicans don’t want an investigation, because, after all, it would be so partisan and unfair, with Democrat [sic] control of the government. Can you really even call it a riot if only five people were killed, and only 140 police officers were seriously injured? The GOP resents all this kerfuffle about the so-called insurrection, this “riot”. Isn’t a riot, by definition, what Black people do? There were no Blacks in this one, among the violent antifa terrorist provocateurs posing as Trumpists, so how can it be a riot?
That is one of the terrible things about a Big Lie, or any lie you insist on, really, it leads to endless lies to support it. You have no choice, once you commit to an audacious and baseless lie, but to continually shore it up with further lies, block any inquiry that could show your lie is a lie.
It’s not even like an investigation into the cause of the January 6 “event” at the Capitol will necessarily lead us to the truth. Recall that when the 9-11 Commission finally met, after many months of stonewalling by Cheney and Bush, it had strict limits put on certain parts of its investigation. For example, when they interviewed Bush and Cheney there could be no notes taken, the two would take no oath to tell the truth, nobody could discuss anything either of them said, and nothing from that “testimony” could be included in the report. In other words, we have nothing to hide, and the power to enforce our right not to have to do so.
Trump, although its most grotesque and tireless exponent, was not the first powerful Republican (or Democratic, for that matter) compulsive liar. Trickle Down Economics, for example, the idea that giving more money to the wealthiest would immediately produce a tiny trickle of money to everybody else, was a big lie. If you give money to poor people, they spend it to buy things they need and want. If you give money to rich people, they hoard it, having no real need for the additional cash. Seems simple enough, but you repeat the idea that those who inherited $100,000,000 or more are “job creators”, that a “Death Tax” on their inherited fortunes unfairly penalizes those same people, and, in time, you can convince enough people to have your way.
As always, Heather Cox Richardson has a great analysis, this time of the current tug of war between voting rights activists, Big Business and the GOP on the final outcome of Trump’s last, greatest, most lucrative [3] Big Lie. Here you go, Heather for the bigger picture.
Barr, of course, his heroic efforts on behalf of Trump during his historically unjust and partisan stewardship of the Department of Justice aside, is now widely regarded by Trumpists as a disgrace who lacked the courage, like cowardly traitor Mike Pence, to do what was needed to keep their president in office. Finally, something we can all agree on in this brutally divided nation, Bill Barr is a disgrace.
[3]
Trump has raked in something like a half a billion in donations based on this Big Lie, the number was about $207,500,000, as of November 23, as the Rupert Murdoch-owned right-wing Wall Street Journal reported on his Big Lie-based fundraising on December 3, 2020, using the election lie to fleece both his sucker followers (they’d love him even more if he shot somebody in the face on Fifth Avenue and skull-fucked the corpse with his unimaginably gigantic member) and the usual mega-wealthy Betsy DeVos-style true believer cynics who fund right-wing crusades ofall kinds.
I came across this article searching, unsuccessfully so far, for how many tens of millions of dollars Trump/RNC spent on their more than 250 lawsuits attempting to limit voter access prior to the 2020 election and the 60 or so claiming fraud and illegality that it lost after the election.
This is from Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ December 3 account:
President Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have raised more than $207.5 million in the weeks since Election Day, his campaign said Thursday, as their claims of voting fraud have generated a financial windfall that could be deployed in future political ventures.
Despite an aggressive legal effort by the president’s attorneys in many states, there has been no evidence of widespread fraud and numerous federal and state officials have disputed the campaign’s fraud claims.
The size of the postelection fundraising haul between Nov. 4 and Nov. 23 is unprecedented for a losing candidate, much less an outgoing president. The fundraising total ensures Mr. Trump will have a considerable war chest at his disposal as a major figure in the Republican Party, especially as he contemplates a second White House bid.
Senior critic-at-large March 30, 2021 at 7:14 p.m.
The witness Donald Williams was trained in mixed martial arts. He had experience working in security — and alongside police officers — and handling potentially unruly crowds. He also described himself as an entrepreneur and a father. But during his hours of testimony over two days in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who is charged in the death of George Floyd, there is one thing that Williams made clear he was not: an angry Black man.
That he could not afford to be. He was not allowed to be. He could cry for Floyd. He could despair for him. But he was not supposed to be angry, even if that was what Floyd’s death demanded.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson has made anger central to his argument for Chauvin’s acquittal. In his version of events, the anger of the growing crowd on the street that May afternoon distracted Chauvin from the man he had pinned under his knee. Floyd, who had been accused of circulating a counterfeit $20 bill, was in Chauvin’s custody, which meant that he was also in his care. But the crowd — that dangerous, unruly mob, according to Nelson — had distracted Chauvin so that he could not attend to Floyd’s well-being. He could only concern himself with his detainment.
To that end, according to several witnesses, including Williams, the White police officer adjusted his knee to apply more pressure, to ensure that Floyd’s Black body remained immobile — until his immobility turned into unconsciousness.
The defense’s narrative makes use of one of the culture’s most damaging and enduring stereotypes about Black men — and women, too. These people ooze anger, and Black anger is inherently menacing. It isn’t justified or understandable or controlled, even when it is all of those things. It most certainly is not righteous. And when it rises, it must be tamped down, defused and crushed.
Nelson, bespectacled and bearded, and with an affinity for florid neckwear, worked hard to have the jury see Williams as enraged — as a man who was yelling at Chauvin and threatening fellow officers. Nelson detailed the many expletives and insults that Williams directed at Chauvin. He portrayed Williams as a man who was advancing toward the police with his chest thrust forward and spoiling for a fight
“It’s fair to say you grew angrier and angrier?” Nelson asked.
“I grew professional and professional. I stayed in my body,” Williams replied. “You can’t paint me out to be angry.”
Williams said he was speaking loudly so that he could be heard, so that he wouldn’t be ignored. He was imploring Chauvin to relent. He was calling Chauvin a bum and lacing his speech with expletives because the situation was too dire for polite conversation. Derek Chauvin’s defense team said on March 30 that Donald Williams, a witness, grew so angry at police that he wanted to fight them.
What Williams saw was, on its face, enraging. He had happened upon the sight of Floyd facedown on the ground with Chauvin on top of him for more than nine minutes. He heard Floyd cry for help and cry out for air. A young bystander saw him turn “purple” and described him as looking “really limp.” Kids saw this horror. Children. The gathered crowd all watched as their pleas to render aid to Floyd went ignored.
Anger is surely the natural human reaction, along with alarm and concern, but Nelson has characterized that as a wholly unnatural response to Floyd’s dire circumstances, as if he was not worthy of any of those emotions. Should the crowd simply have stood silent?
History would probably have excused their anger. So many other people of color — unarmed and stopped for minor offenses or for nothing at all — have died during encounters with police officers. They have been deprived of air, riddled with bullets; they’ve been killed without consequences because their death was deemed reasonable. When does fury become moral and decent if not in the face of all that?
Williams seemed to understand the perilousness of leading with anger. He refused to let it be his abiding message on Tuesday afternoon in a Minneapolis courtroom as Nelson tested him. No, his words weren’t getting angrier that awful day in May, he said, “they grew more and more pleading — for life.”
Williams was so alarmed by what was unfolding before him that he even called 911. He called the police on the police because he had not given up on law enforcement. He still had faith that they had the capacity to protect and to serve. He trusted in their outrage even if society demands that he deny his own.
The phrase resonated. “I stayed in my body.” Williams remained in control. He maintained focus. He was attuned to his movements and gestures. He didn’t let emotions take hold. He didn’t relinquish his soul.
As he spoke from the witness stand, Williams’s deep voice rumbled from a body that was both solid and still. On his second day of testimony, he wore an open-collared dress shirt in a sea-foam green. His hair was cut close. He didn’t fidget or appear nervous. He didn’t look imposing, but he often looked perplexed.
When Nelson questioned his emotions, pressed him about the expletives he’d used and took a sharp tone, Williams cocked his head sideways and furrowed his brow. Then a slight smile flashed across his face.
Williams did not display a hint of fury. Outrage can be a burden, but it can also be a source of power. If Williams had any anger, he was keeping it in reserve.
Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press.Follow
