Hillary: Racism Behind GOP Supreme Court Nominee Fight

From day one of Barack Obama's presidency, Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell have made it known that they goal was to make Obama a failed president.  To their chagrin, their efforts have not borne success.  However, the rage throughout a portion of white America over having a black man - or more accurately a half black man - in the White House has never abated.  In some ways, it seems to have intensified, especially with the growing signals from the GOP that it is happy to climb in bed with racists and would be segregationist.  Speaking in Harlem recently, Hillary Clinton connected the dots between this reality and the GOP's threats to block any Supreme Court nominee that Obama might put forward.  The Daily Beast looks at Hillary's remarks. Here are excerpts:

Clinton, speaking to an incredibly supportive audience in her home state, suggested that Republican opposition to President Obama’s plan to appoint a Supreme Court justice to take the late Antonin Scalia’s seat is predicated on the inherent racism that has made Obama the enemy for the past seven years of his administration.

“Justice Scalia’s passing means the court hangs in the balance,” Clinton said. “Now the Republicans say they’ll reject anyone President Obama nominates, no matter how qualified. Some are even saying he doesn’t have the right to nominate anyone! As if somehow he’s not the real president.

“That’s in keeping with what we’ve heard all along, isn’t it? Many Republicans talk in coded, racial language about takers and losers. They demonize President Obama and encourage the ugliest impulses of the paranoid fringe. This kind of hatred and bigotry has no place in our politics or our country.”

Republican resistance, of course, stems from the fear that Obama will appoint a liberal justice to replace the conservative stalwart that was Scalia. As for whether that fear is also predicated on racial bias remains to be seen.

Clinton had quite a bit to say Tuesday about her primary opponent and the Johnny-come-lately persona Clinton’s African-American surrogates have cultivated for him.

“You know, you can’t just show up at election time and say the right things and think that’s enough,” she said. “We can’t start building relationships a few weeks before a vote.”

That line directly echoed what South Carolina House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford had to say about Sanders last week, suggesting he had only come around to issues relevant to the African-American populace in the last “40 days,” while Clinton had been focused on them for the last “40 years.”

“We have to begin by facing up to the reality of systemic racism, because these are not only problems of economic inequality,” Clinton said, referring to Sanders’s most repeated line.  “These are problems of racial inequality.”