“Insidious Motives”: What? Racism In Louisiana? No! Apologize!
The ongoing effort by conservatives to define racism out of existence (if not to attribute it solely to people who worry about racism) reached a new low this week, per this AP story:
Republicans are calling on Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu to apologize after she suggested Thursday that President Barack Obama’s deep unpopularity in the South is partly tied to race.
In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Landrieu was quoted as saying that the South “has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.”
The comments came after an NBC reporter asked the senator why Obama has such low approval ratings in Louisiana. Landrieu’s first response was that the president’s energy policies are deeply disliked by residents of the oil and gas-rich state.
She then added, “I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans. It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”
Note that Landrieu didn’t describe racism as Obama’s biggest problem, much less suggest that anyone in particular who didn’t like him had racial motives. She simply said there’s a history of racism in the South that naturally was reflected in attitudes towards the first African-American president. I cannot imagine a less disputable contention, and the honorable thing for representatives of the Party of Lincoln to do would be to respond with a “yes, but” argument.
But no:
State Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere issued a statement late Thursday calling Landrieu’s remarks “insulting to me and to every other Louisianian.”
“Louisiana deserves better than a senator who denigrates her own people by questioning and projecting insidious motives on the very people she claims to represent,” he said. “Senator Landrieu and President Obama are unpopular for no other reason than the fact the policies they advance are wrong for Louisiana and wrong for America.”
So it seems Landrieu’s job is to whitewash Louisiana history and deny any white people there have “insidious motives.” Do you suppose Villere never ascribes “insidious motives” to Louisiana’s African-Americans? Ha!
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, October 31, 2014
“Life Is Hardly Imitating Art”: Fear May Win Elections, But It Makes Governing Hard
According to Hollywood, most disasters feature government or institutional figures who try to downplay the scale of catastrophe, at least publicly, in order to prevent mass panic. Rightly or wrongly, these fictional leaders want to shield the public from the facts because they believe disseminating the truth would only provoke hysteria.
Right now, though, life is hardly imitating art. As the midterm elections approach, some leading political figures — most of them Republicans — are actively spreading half-truths, distortions and just plain lies in order to increase voter anxiety. They believe exploiting public fears will boost their chances.
It is a sinister and shameful use of the political soapbox, a detrimental exercise that misleads people about the risks they face from threats as different as Islamic jihadists and an exotic virus. It also damages the reputations of institutions that are indispensable in a crisis.
Shouldn’t our political leaders be the responsible ones who distribute facts, dampen panic and model rational decision making? Isn’t it part of their job to coach the rest of us to keep cool? Apparently not, if exaggerating threats is the better campaign strategy.
The use of fear as a political weapon isn’t new, of course. It is as old as the earliest political gatherings and has been used by feudal lords, despots and democratically elected premiers and presidents. There’s a reason for that: Fear is among the most powerful of human emotions, more likely to motivate people to react than sorrow, joy or even anger.
For some Republican candidates, Ebola arrived in the United States just in time. While the murderous jihadists of the Islamic State group had helped to push President Obama’s approval ratings to new lows, they were still a faraway threat. But the tragic death of Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian national who died in a Dallas hospital, lent itself to hyperbole and fearmongering.
Several Republicans have found a way to work the Ebola virus into criticisms of their Democratic opponents, usually linking an alleged weakness on border security to an enhanced threat from infected persons. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has suggested that the Obama administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are hiding the truth about the transmission of Ebola.
But the prize may go to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who suggested in an interview with the right-wing media organization Newsmax that Islamic State fighters might use Ebola as a biological weapon.
While the GOP has taken the lead on the fear bandwagon, a few Democrats have also jumped aboard, scared to be left behind. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) are among the Dems who have joined the call for travel bans from some West African countries, although health officials have repeatedly said such restrictions would be counterproductive.
Perhaps our elected leaders would be more responsible if the nation were facing an existential threat, as it did in World War II. Perhaps they’d put aside partisanship if Ebola were really poised to create a worldwide pandemic, spiraling through affluent countries as well as poor ones.
History shows us examples of bipartisan cooperation to fight not only Nazi Germany but also the communist threat that lingered for a half-century after that. Unfortunately, that same history shows us many examples of politicians only too willing to inflame passions, incite fear and create panic for personal gain. Sen. Joe McCarthy’s crazed commie-hunt went on for years, destroying not just livelihoods but also lives.
In my lifetime, politicians have used the fear of racial integration to incite white voters and scare them to the polls. For decades, the worst stereotypes about black students were used to agitate white parents; the most pernicious lies about black homeowners used to panic white neighborhoods. While those segregationist pols didn’t invent racism, they primed it and pandered to it. And we are still trying to recover from the havoc they wrought.
Yes, you can win elections by inspiring fear and panic, unfortunately. But you will have created another breach in the social fabric — another ruinous tear that will make it more difficult to govern from the post you’ve won.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 25, 2014
“Part Of A Very Big Problem”: Jim Crow Persists; How Ferguson Case Leaks Revive A Shameful Tradition
On those rare occasions when it makes a real effort to grapple with the raw brutality of Jim Crow, the American mainstream media usually returns to a particular set of images that, by their very nature, are jarring and extraordinary: the burning cross, the hangman’s knot, the Klansman on horseback. This isn’t a bad thing; you can’t understand Jim Crow without understanding the significance of the Klan, for example. But it’s not an entirely good one, either.
The problem with focusing so much on these potent symbols is that it can lead us to a mistaken conclusion: namely, that the only evil of Jim Crow (and U.S. white supremacy in general) was manifested in these menacing, otherworldly forms, rather than in the system’s more humdrum and everyday modes of dehumanization. The problem with the former is easily solved. Today, the burning cross, the noose and the Klansman are all enemies of polite society. But those subtler manifestations of apartheid — the interlocking social networks and political institutions that together worked to disempower black citizens and deny them their rightful place as full members of the community — have proven more difficult to shake.
The proof is all around us, but if you want a more tangible example, the news out of Ferguson, Missouri, is happy to oblige.
After briefly turning the small, hard-luck suburb into the center of the world, the media has as of late been paying much less attention to the story of Michael Brown’s killing, mostly because people on both sides of the controversy have been stuck in an anxious holding pattern, waiting to see if a county grand jury will bring charges against Officer Darren Wilson. Many observers, and seemingly most pro-Brown Ferguson protestors, expect it will not; and many are already positioning themselves to win the war for public opinion that will ensue the moment the charges (or lack thereof) come down.
That’s the tense atmosphere into which the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently dropped two bombs, both of which cited unnamed government sources saying evidence suggests Wilson’s claim to have shot Brown only after the youth tried to nab his gun — and to have killed Brown only after the wounded and unarmed teenager decided to charge him head-on — is indeed the case, in spite of what multiple eyewitnesses have said. As more than a few people noticed, the leaks all seemed to go in a certain direction (Wilson’s). Rather unnecessarily, the Brown family’s lawyer assured the media that the leaks weren’t coming from them. More necessarily, a forensic pathologist quoted extensively in the Post-Dispatch story said her remarks were taken out of context.
At this point in the story, anyone familiar with the dynamics of American race politics would suspect that like countless racially stratified and unharmonious small-town authorities before it, the establishment in Ferguson was doing its damnedest to quash an embarrassing investigation and protect one of its own. Perhaps aware of the likely widespread nature of that view, former St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch was swiftly thereafter quoted speculating that the leaks weren’t coming from Ferguson authorities, but rather were the result of the Department of Justice’s machinations. Because the feds recognize that it’s “probably very unlikely” that Wilson will be charged, Fitch said, the DOJ was selectively leaking evidence in order to “let people down slowly” before the announcement of no charges being filed came.
If that sounds a bit odd to you — Fitch’s contention that Attorney General Eric Holder had previously decided to “take over the Ferguson Police Department” is a warning sign — you’ve got some prestigious company. Barely more than a day after Fitch made news, the DOJ was quoted in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere expressing serious unhappiness over the leaks, saying they were “irresponsible and highly troubling” and describing them as “an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case.” Needless to say, Ed Magee, the spokesperson for the county prosecutor’s office, has denied responsibility entirely. “There’s really nothing to investigate,” Magee told the Times. “All we can control is people in our office and the grand jury, and it’s not coming from us or the grand jury.”
As you can probably tell, I’m highly skeptical of the idea that Eric Holder’s DOJ has all along been playing a secret shell game, pretending to enter into the Ferguson maelstrom in order to sideline local authorities it deemed biased and/or incompetent while, behind the scenes, doing everything it could to protect Wilson and discredit Brown. But even if we end up discovering that the Department of Justice was playing both sides, it would make no difference to the bigger, lingering problem Ferguson revealed — the way the legal and political institutions in much of America still treat black American citizens as if they were separate from the rest of the community, a force to be contained, coerced, managed. (In fact, if Fitch is correct, and the DOJ is trying to “let people down slowly,” it would actually strengthen the point.)
More important than these specific leaks, however, is the way that the behavior of officials throughout the power structure of Ferguson have responded to the protestors as if they were a dangerous, alien presence rather than American citizens who have full and equal rights just like the rest. Instead of trying to reach an accord with Michael Brown’s supporters, the Ferguson establishment is trying to preemptively position itself as a victim, hoping it can win the war for public opinion if and when the chaos of this summer reignites. This isn’t because the overwhelmingly white men and women in positions of authority in Ferguson are especially villainous, but rather because Ferguson, like so much of contemporary America, remains very much the town that racist social engineering built, one in which the unspoken assumption is that black people can never be equal members of their own community.
So, to return to my earlier argument about the visuals of Jim Crow, let’s indeed celebrate that the most extravagant symbols of that terrible era — the burning cross, the noose, the Klansman’s hood — are now widely considered to be ugly and taboo. For a country in which, not so long ago, the lynching of black men was considered a source of public entertainment, that’s no small thing. But let’s also keep in mind that in so far as it was a social and political system that fundamentally denied black people membership in the larger community, Jim Crow still persists.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, October 25, 2014
“Shame On Texas And The U.S. Supreme Court”: A Capitulation To Voter Suppressors Everywhere
In allowing Texas’ voter identification law to go into effect, at least for the November election, the U.S. Supreme Court last week showed the nation precisely what it meant in 2013 when its conservatives struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County vs. Holder.
It is hard to chronicle in a short space the ways in which the Texas law, one of the most discriminatory voting laws in modern history, runs afoul of constitutional norms and reasonable standards of justice. State lawmakers rammed through the measure, jettisoning procedural protections that had been used for generations in the state Legislature. By requiring registered voters to present a certain kind of photo identification card, and by making it difficult for those without such cards to obtain one, the law’s Republican architects would ensure that poor voters, or ill ones, or the elderly or blacks or Latinos — all likely Democratic voters — would be disenfranchised, all in the name of preventing a type of voter fraud that does not materially exist.
These lawmakers — and for that matter the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court judges who now have sanctioned the law’s implementation for next month’s election — were shown mountains of evidence on what the law’s discriminatory impact would be on minority communities. Witness after witness testified that the new law amounted to a poll tax on people who had, even in the deepest recesses of Texas, been able for decades to adequately identify themselves before lawfully casting their ballot.
What was Texas’ strongest argument against all this evidence? That a state may establish financial and practical hurdles that preclude the poor from voting so long as it — purportedly — does not discriminate against voters by race. For now, this nonsense is the law of the land in Texas.
And as Congress dithers over an amendment to the Voting Rights Act and state lawmakers continue to churn out legislation on voting that widens the nation’s divides, the high court’s ruling essentially endorses the following judicial construction — a capitulation, really, to vote suppressors everywhere — to be the law of the land in America: That even when a state with a long history of discrimination in voting practices is found to have intentionally discriminated against minority citizens by restricting their voting rights, even when a trial judge says so and even in the absence of a contradictory appellate finding on the scope and effect of that discrimination, the state still is entitled to implement those discriminatory practices in a national election.
The six Supreme Court justices who allowed the Texas law to go into effect did not write a single word about the trial judge’s extensive findings of intentional discrimination in the law’s creation or implementation. The 5th Circuit judges, who overturned that trial judge’s ruling, evaded the vital issue by noting, in passing, that those complicated issues could be resolved later, when the federal judiciary evaluated the case on the merits.
The rationale behind these hollow displays of justice is perverse, saying it would be more unfair now to force Texas to go back to the old voter identification laws, the ones that had worked well for decades, than it would be to require voters to get the new identification the law demands.
The swift passage of this Texas law — it was blocked by the Voting Rights Act until the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County, then began to be hustled through the state Legislature on the very day that case was decided — is unassailable proof that intentional racial discrimination still exists in these jurisdictions. The trial judge so found, in page after page of documentation, that Texas state officials, emboldened by the Shelby County decision, devised a way to make it harder for blacks and Latinos to have their votes counted. Read her opinion for yourself.
Only three justices on the Supreme Court — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — had the courage to call the high court’s ruling the sham that it is. Ginsburg wrote in the dissent that there was ample proof the Texas law discriminates, and no proof that it doesn’t. There was ample proof, she wrote, that state officials relentlessly fought against amendments to the measures that would have ameliorated the discrimination, and no proof that the new restrictions will solve whatever perceived voter fraud problems lawmakers fear. About 600,000 registered voters could be disenfranchised, Ginsburg warned.
Some stoic commentators have noted that the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the Texas law — that the justices may well strike it down next year, or the year after that, when it inevitably comes back to them following a ruling on the merits at the 5th Circuit. I don’t buy it. And even if this court ultimately does strike down this odious law, where precisely do the disenfranchised citizens of Texas in the November election go to get their votes back? Nowhere, which is the point of the Texas law and the ultimate effect of the judiciary’s shameful tolerance of it.
By: Andrew Cohen, The Los Angeles Times; The National Memo, October 24, 2014
“Silent Treatment”: The Supreme Court And Voting Rights
The Supreme Court’s weirdly busy October brings to mind an old Cadillac commercial showing a sedan gliding silently down the highway, driver calm and confident in a hermetic, leather-appointed cabin, while the announcer intones, “quietly doing things very well.” Whether the justices are doing their jobs well depends on your point of view. But there is no disputing that they have been doing their most consequential work in uncharacteristic silence in recent weeks. The justices’ moves on gay marriage, abortion and voting rights have been delivered all but wordlessly, as Dahlia Lithwick of Slate recounts. The notable exception to the rule is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the justice who refused to hold her tongue over the weekend, when six of her colleagues permitted Texas to enforce its new photo identification law in the November elections.
The Court’s announcement came down at the ungodly hour of 5am on Saturday. It followed a federal district court decision on October 9th that the Texas law was discriminatory in both intent and effect and “constitutes a poll tax”—a ruling that was stayed by the Fifth Circuit Court on October 11th. The stay prompted an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court via Antonin Scalia, the justice assigned to the Fifth Circuit. The six justices who denied the request to lift the stay before dawn on October 18th were mum as to why; they released no reasoning for the decision, which effectively gives Texas’s questionable voter law a pass. But Justice Ginsburg and her clerks apparently ordered pizza and downed some Red Bull on Friday evening, pulling an all-nighter to compose a six-page dissent, which Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined. (Rick Hasen asks why Justice Stephen Breyer, the fourth liberal justice, did not sign on to the dissent; one strong possibility is that he was asleep.)
Octogenarian Supreme Court justices are not known for burning the midnight oil, but Justice Ginsburg had an unusually good reason to do so in Veasey v Perry. The Texas law she opposed is a transparent attempt to help Republican candidates by keeping racial minorities, who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, home on Election Day. In the words of the trial judge, the law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose.” Justice Ginsburg’s wee-hours dissent drew on the district court’s ruling to issue a scathing rebuke to the Fifth Circuit and, by implication, to the six justices who refused to lift the Fifth Circuit’s stay. “In light of the ‘seismic demographic shift’ in Texas between 2000 and 2010, making Texas a ‘majority-minority state,’ ” Justice Ginsburg wrote, “the District Court observed that the Texas Legislature and Governor had an evident incentive to ‘gain partisan advantage by suppressing’ the ‘votes of African-Americans and Latinos.’ ”
Justice Ginsburg also criticised the law’s defenders who claim it is necessary to fight voter fraud: “Texas did not begin to demonstrate that the Bill’s discriminatory features were necessary to prevent fraud or to increase public confidence in the electoral process.” The upshot is disturbing: by refusing to act, the Supreme Court majority is allowing a law to take effect that “may prevent more than 600,000 registered Texas voters (about 4.5% of all registered voters) from voting in person for lack of compliant identification…A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African-American or Hispanic.”
What was the majority’s reasoning for deferring to the Fifth Circuit, and by extension to Rick Perry, the governor of Texas? We don’t know; they didn’t tell us. The rationale probably has to do with Purcell v Gonzalez, a 2006 case in which the Court decided that courts should be wary of changing voting rules too close to an election. But Purcell does not lay down an ironclad rule against last-minute changes. And as Rick Hasen writes, “[i]t appears to be unprecedented to let a law that was deemed racially discriminatory go into effect simply to avoid the risk of voter confusion and election administration inefficiency.” If the six justices voting to let Texas law take effect thought that voter confusion was more worrisome than racial discrimination, they should have put that reasoning down on paper.
John Rawls, an influential political philosopher who died in 2002, described the Supreme Court as an “exemplar of public reason”, a tribunal that accounts for its decisions with reasoned reference to the laws and traditions of the country. “It is the only branch of government,” Mr Rawls wrote, “that is visibly on its face the creature of that reason and of that reason alone”:
To say that the court is the exemplar of public reason also means that it is the task of the justices to try to develop and express in their reasoned opinions the best interpretation of the constitution they can, using their knowledge of what the constitution and constitutional precedents require.
Echoing Kant, for whom the “publicity” of public decisions is a key component of a constitutional republic and is, indeed, the “transcendental principle of public right”, Rawls insisted that “the court’s role…is part of the publicity of reason” to which citizens should enjoy full and unfettered access. Normally the justices acquit themselves quite well in this regard: they spend months drafting and polishing lengthy opinions in argued cases, and they release their decisions to be consumed, interpreted and scrutinised by everybody. But this month, by keeping their reasoning close their robes on several big decisions, the justices are falling down on their duty to share what they are thinking.
Six justices allowing Texas to enforce a voter-identification law that a federal judge had characterised, in a 147-page decision, as a racist poll tax—and to do so with pursed lips—is not merely rude. It is a breach of the Court’s legitimacy in a constitutional democracy. When the stakes are this high, all the justices should follow Justice Ginsburg’s lead and stay up all night to explain to America just what they are up to and why.
By: Steven Mazie, Democracy in America, The Economist, October 22, 2014
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