Why Is the GOP Fighting to Preserve Monuments to Traitors?

When goes to France, one does not see statutes of those who held positions in the Vichy government.  Across the former Soviet block one sees few monuments to communist leaders and even in Russia, there has been a resurgence of recognition of the tsarist era which in retrospect was no where near as repressive and murderous as the communist era ushered in by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Brutal regimes and the losers in the stage of history are not typically honored by statutes and monuments once the regimes have fallen.  Except in the American South where a battle now rages over the statutes to the Confederacy - most erected during the Jim Crow era, not the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.  On the side of honoring those who in effect were traitors to the United States is the Republican Party, the descendant party of the one that fought the Civil War to end slavery and defeat those honored by monuments and statutes such as those on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, a truly beautiful street and grand residential area. An editorial in the New York Times asks the question of why.  My own short hand answer is that today's GOP is the party of white supremacy lead by the racist-in-chief, Donald Trump.  Here editorial highlights:

Confederate statues are being pulled down across the South — from Birmingham, Ala., to Decatur, Ga., to Richmond, Va., the Confederacy’s former capital. The U.S. Navy and the Marines have banned public displays of the Confederate battle flag — as has NASCAR.

Now, Congress is taking its own halting steps forward. On Thursday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced that portraits of four former House speakers who also served the Confederacy would be removed from display in the Capitol in observance of the Juneteenth holiday.

The portraits are of Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, who was speaker from 1839 to 1841 before serving in various high positions in the Confederacy, including secretary of state; Howell Cobb of Georgia, who was speaker from 1849 to 1851 and later served as a Confederate Army officer; James L. Orr of South Carolina, speaker from 1857 to 1859, who went on to serve in the Confederate Army and in the Confederate Senate; and Charles F. Crisp of Georgia, the House speaker from 1891 to 1895, who served in the Confederate Army as a young man.

“As I have said before, the halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” Ms. Pelosi wrote to the clerk of the House, requesting the removal. “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.”

Over in the Senate, Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, tried to nudge his chamber forward as well. He and the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, moved Thursday to pass a bill by unanimous consent that would remove 11 monuments to Confederates from the National Statuary Hall Collection displayed in the Capitol.

Not all of Mr. Booker’s colleagues agreed. Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, blocked the move. . . . The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was more outspoken in his opposition. On Tuesday, he derided brewing efforts to “airbrush the Capitol and scrub out everybody from years ago who had any connection to slavery” as “nonsense” and “a bridge too far.” He even felt moved to list for reporters some of the early presidents who owned slaves.

None of those presidents, it should be noted, went to war against the United States to defend slavery. Nor are all the 11 statues of peripheral figures who had just “any connection” to the war for chattel slavery. The statues include one of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America; Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the vice president; and its most famous general, Robert E. Lee. There are other statues of men less central to the rebel cause. But given that states can select any person of note from their state, surely there are many other men or women who don’t have the Confederacy on their résumés.

Is this really the hill that the Party of Lincoln wants to fight on in 2020? What an ignoble, lost cause.

Once again, America is showing itself to be exceptional, but not in a good way.

George Washington: The Tea Party's Nightmare

No one seems to engage in revisionist history more than the Christofascists who when not concocting the myth that America was founded as a "Christian nation" - it wasn't and the Founding Father had a proper suspicion of sectarian politics - make the case for states' rights which sounds as if it came out of the South in the 1850's.  Again, these claims are not justified by accurate history and those who put them forth ignore the fact that America tried the framework that they laud under the Articles of Confederation which were a resounding failure and led directly to the form of government established under the United States Constitution which provided for a much stronger federal government.  But, of course, Christofascists and Tea Party Neanderthals never let the real facts get in the way of their agenda.  A piece in Think Progress looks at how George Washington's desire for a strong federal government undercuts Tea Party claims.  Here are some highlights:

Five years after General George Washington took command of a revolutionary army, he believed that the revolution was on the verge of collapse. 

The Articles of Confederation, which bound the thirteen former British colonies together prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, were fundamentally flawed. Congress, under the Articles, could not directly tax individuals or legislate their actions. Delegates to Congress had little authority to exercise independent judgment, as they both owed their salaries to their state government and could be recalled “at any time.” Of particular frustration to General Washington, the Articles also gave Congress no real power to raise troops or to provide for them once they were assembled under Washington’s command. Congress could request recruits or money, but it was powerless if the states denied these requests.

“Unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone,” Washington wrote in 1780, “unless they are vested with powers by the several States competent to the purposes of war . . . our Cause is lost.”

The Revolutionary War taught our first president the value of a strong central government. And this understanding was not limited simply to the need to provide a capable army. As Washington wrote a young former aide named Alexander Hamilton shortly after the war was won, “unless Congress have powers competent to all general purposes, [] the distresses we have encountered, the expences we have incurred, and the blood we have spilt in the course of an eight years’ war, will avail us nothing.”

As both Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin and the Constitutional Accountability Center have explained, this concern about a too-weak national government provided much of the impetus for the new Constitution. When the framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia, with Washington serving as president of this Constitutional Convention, they adopted a resolution declaring that the new federal government’s powers should be quite expansive indeed. Congress, in the framers’ vision must be able “to legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union, and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent, or in which the harmony of the United States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual legislation.”

The framers understood, in other words, that there will be problems that face the entire nation, and that these problems require a government powerful enough to address these national concerns — Congress may legislate “in all cases for the general interests of the Union.”

To implement the framers’ resolution, a committee of the Constitutional Convention drafted the list of powers Congress is permitted to exercise, such as the power to “raise and support armies” or to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization” that are now contained in Article I of the Constitution. Arguably the most significant of these powers are Congress’ authority to “regulate commerce . . .among the several states,” which gave Congress broad authority to regulate the nation’s economy and the power to raise taxes and spend money in ways that advance “the common defense and general welfare of the United States.”

Today is the day when we celebrate George Washington’s Birthday. If the Tea Party fully understood what Washington did for this country, they would treat today as a day of mourning.

The Rise of the New Confederacy

If one looks at where many of the Republican saboteurs in Congress hail from, it doesn't take long to realize the majority are from states that made up the former Confederate States of America.  Now, as was the case 153 years ago - these individuals and the states and districts they represent abhorred the federal government, sought to resist changes in the concept of human rights and equality, and opposed modernity in general.  Some things do not change.  Indeed, South Carolina just passed a bill seeking to nullify the Affordable Health Care Act, apparently having learned nothing from the Civil War.  Andrew Sullivan aptly described these people and their mindset yesterday citing a study I referenced about evangelical Christians:

The bewildering economic and social and demographic changes have created a cultural and existential panic among those most heavily concentrated in those districts whose members are threatening to tear down the global economy as revenge for losing two presidential elections in a row. They feel they have already lost and have nothing to gain from any constructive engagement with a president they regard as pretty close to the anti-Christ of parasitic minorities. They feel isolated in a more multi-cultural country. They feel spied upon and condescended to. They have shut out any news sources apart from Fox.

Bob Felton further zeros in on the root of the problem:

There is a huge reservoir of people out there who are simply not capable of thriving in the modern world. They cannot do the kinds of jobs that need doing, they cannot understand the people doing them, and they resent and dislike the young and educated for whom it is all second nature. The world they grew up in no longer exists; it is modernity itself that is under attack.

A column in the Washington Post follows up on this revolt and willingness to destroy America rather than accept change:

It took on new force with fears of the federal government in Washington interfering with their cherished way of life. It gathered steam with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And it all came into full flower when shore batteries fired on Fort Sumter. It was the spirit of the Old Confederacy, a state-sponsored rebellion hellbent on protecting its “peace and safety” from the party that took possession of the government on March 4, 1861.

This virulent hostility to the Union led the Old Confederacy to conclude — as expressed by South Carolina — that with Lincoln’s elevation to the presidency, “the slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”

Federal government as the enemy.

Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government. 

The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.” 

Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames.
But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves.

They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.

Decent people who believe in the U.S. Constitution must stand against these hate and fear motivated elements.  They must be defeated politically and culturally and need to become the pariahs that they deserve to be.   The future of America depends on their defeat.

Is Racism Behind States Electing to Not Particiapte Medicaid Eaxpansion?

Click image to enlarge

The map above is pretty telling - the majority of states that are likely to opt out of the Medicaid expansion component of the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, largely coincide with the states that comprised the former Confederate States of America.  Also telling is that those most injured and deprived of health care coverage will be disproportionately black.   After blacks, Hispanics will be the next most adversely affected.  Many of my former GOP colleagues don't like to admit it, but in addition to far right religious extremism, racism is a key component of today's GOP.   That and hypocrisy since the GOP base wraps itself in religion, yet then seeks to destroy the social safety net that in many ways implements the Gospel message of caring for the poor and less fortunate.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this troubling phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

The New York Times has a story up outlining the effects of the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act in general, and the Medicaid expansion in particular:

Starting next month, the administration and its allies will conduct a nationwide campaign encouraging Americans to take advantage of new high-quality affordable insurance options. But those options will be unavailable to some of the neediest people in states like Texas, Florida, Kansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia, which are refusing to expand Medicaid. 

More than half of all people without health insurance live in states that are not planning to expand Medicaid. People in those states who have incomes from the poverty level up to four times that amount ($11,490 to $45,960 a year for an individual) can get federal tax credits to subsidize the purchase of private health insurance. But many people below the poverty line will be unable to get tax credits, Medicaid or other help with health insurance.

[I]f you look at a map of which states are refusing the Medicaid expansion, and then look at this report from the Urban Institute, a troubling (if predictable) trend emerges. Approximately a fifth (about 18 percent) of all people who will remain untouched by the Medicaid expansion are black. When you start drilling down to the states where those black people tend to live, it gets worse. In Virginia and North Carolina, 30 percent of those who are going to miss out are black. In South Carolina and Georgia, the number is around 40 percent. In Louisiana and Mississippi, you are talking about 50 percent of those who would be eligible for the expansion but who will go uncovered.

You look at Latinos and get a similar (and to some extent worse) picture. Nationally, Latinos make up 18 percent of those who stand to get health coverage. But in Arizona -- where the legislature is fighting Jan Brewer's effort to expand Medicaid -- Latinos make up 34 percent of those who stand to gain coverage. In Florida, they make up 27 percent, and in Texas they make up 47 percent. Texas has the highest rate of uninsured in the country. The majority of people there who are going to miss out on care -- over 60 percent -- are black and Latino.

When you have a country grappling with the deep vestiges of bigoted policy, you do not need "colored only" signs to get "colored mostly" effects.

I continue to find it disgraceful that the USA alone of developed western nations continues to view many of its citizens as disposable garbage.  The fact that a disproportionate number of these people are racial minorities speaks volumes.

The New Civil War: Women's and LGBT Rights

With the notable exceptions of Florida and Virginia, the states carried by Mitt Romney included the entirety of the old Confederacy and the region of the Old South has become the bastion of the Republican Party.  It is also the bastion of gay haters and those who continue to seek to subjugate the rights of women.   The Old South was most happy to maintain a society that held some in second class status or worse and things haven't really changed that much other than women and gays have been more or less added to the groups targeted for second class citizenship.  Here in Virginia, bills that would protect LGBT citizens from being fired by state departments and agencies and a bill requiring that women receive equal pay for the same work will face uphill battles.  A piece in Salon conjectures that we are indeed in a new civil war where the toxicity again arises from the states of the former Confederacy.  Here are some excerpts:

[E]ven though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.

We’ve just emerged from a presidential campaign that exposed how hardened our political and cultural divide has become, and how poorly the two sides understand each other. Part of the Republican problem, in an election that party thought it would win easily, was that those who felt a visceral disgust toward both the idea and the reality of President Barack Obama simply could not believe that they didn’t represent a majority. As many Republicans are now aware, the party now faces an existential crisis. It’s all very well to go on TV and talk about attracting Latinos and downplaying cultural wedge issues. But the activist core of the Republican Party is neo-Confederate, whether it thinks of itself that way or not. It isn’t interested in common cause with Mexicans or turning down the moral thermostat. Just ask Rick Santorum: What it wants is war.

In the recent “fiscal cliff” negotiations, which ended (of course) in yet another short-term stopgap measure, most congressional Republicans, having sworn a blood oath never to raise taxes on their millionaire patrons, were content to let the nation slide into chaos and catastrophe rather than reach a compromise with the president they have consistently depicted as a socialist renegade or alien interloper.

The lingering effects of our racist history – from the resegregation of our public schools to the enduring and astonishing “wealth gap” between whites and blacks – are national problems, not just Southern problems. Our new Civil War is infused with the undead spirit of the old one and waged by a rebellious neo-Confederacy rooted in the states of the Old South, but its influence can be felt, as with the pro-slavery forces of the 1860s, in every part of the country.

While the issues of the new Civil War are contemporary, its rhetoric is ancient and all too familiar, from states’ rights and resistance to Washington to claims of a special relationship with the Almighty and vague appeals to distinctive “cultural traditions,” employed as a justification for bigotry and oppression.

Many people on the neo-Confederate side see abortion and Adam-and-Steve marriage as moral outrages or offenses against God, to borrow Lincoln’s phrasing, which must be stopped at almost any cost. Of course, pro-choice activists and marriage-equality advocates see those issues as matters of basic economic justice, guaranteeing to all people the kind of basic personal autonomy that men take for granted, or the common-law legal and medical rights that heterosexual married couples have long enjoyed.

We appear to be moving into an unstable Missouri Compromise period of American history, in which regional tiers of states adopt sharply different policies on reproductive rights and marriage rights in particular, but also seem locked into fixed political identities and differing views on fundamental questions of national identity and the national future.

If you correlate the states where both same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions have been banned and the states with the harshest restrictions on abortion, you begin to measure the breadth of the neo-Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah. Most (but not all) are onetime Southern slave states and hotbeds of evangelical Christianity, and most (but not all) coincide with the familiar red-blue split between Republicans and Democrats.

Do I even need to mention that none of the neo-Confederate states are in the Northeast or on the West Coast, regions where abortion remains widely available and same-sex marriage is rapidly becoming routine? Or that the neo-Confederate states of the South and the Plains States have sent nearly all of the intransigent, anti-taxation Tea Party members to Congress, while the neo-Union states of the East and West, with their polyglot, immigrant-rich populations, have elected few or none?

As with slavery, however, it’s tough to imagine any viable long-term middle ground. At the moment, two women who get married in Iowa will have no legal relationship if they move to Kansas, and a teenage girl in Seattle can easily get a safe and legal abortion while her cousin in Dallas faces mandatory counseling, a 24-hour waiting period and a parental consent law. (If they have another cousin in rural Mississippi, she probably won’t find legal abortion services under any terms.) Regardless of how you feel about those issues, that’s nuts. No nation-state can function indefinitely on that kind of patchwork-quilt basis. 

It’s tempting to call upon history and proclaim that the only possible outcome of this new Civil War, after many years of ugly politics and occasional outbreaks of craziness and violence, will resemble the outcome of the last one: the continued expansion of constitutional rights and freedoms and the final defeat of the Confederate strain in American political and cultural life. But other, darker outcomes are definitely possible, and I suspect that as long as we’ve got a country, the Confederacy will still be with us.

It is nuts that as a gay man in Virginia I have NONE of the legal rights now taken for granted in states like New York - or even in Maryland just across the Potomac River.  And it makes a mockery of America's claimed founding principles of equality and the rights of citizens to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on GOP-Confederacy Parallels

The bulwark of today's Republican Party is the states that comprised the Confederate States of America 150 years ago.   And sadly, the racism of the GOP is little different that the pro-slavery states of the Confederacy.  Here's a part of Andrew Sullivan's reflection on the parallels between the Confederacy and today's GOP:

[I]f Virginia and Florida and North Carolina flip back to the GOP from Obama this November, as now looks likely, Romney will have won every state in the Confederacy.

I think America is currently in a Cold Civil War. The parties, of course, have switched sides since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The party of the Union and Lincoln is now the Democratic party. The party of the Confederacy is now the GOP. And racial polarization is at record levels, with whites entirely responsible for reversing Obama's 2008 inroads into the old Confederacy in three Southern states. You only have to look at the electoral map in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won, to see how the consolidation of a Confederacy-based GOP and a Union-based Democratic party has intensified - and now even more under a black president from, ahem, Illinois.  I find it troubling - and interesting.

The current electoral map without toss-up states, and only the states that were in existence in 1861

The states in 1861, colored for their position on slavery

Quote of the Day: Charles Pierce on the GOP - Today's Confereacy Party

This blog has noted many times the sickening racism that lingers just below the surface of today's Republican Party.  Yes, the GOP is wracked by hate filled religious extremism.  But worse yet in my mind is the racism and abject in ability of most of today's GOP base to recognize the common humanity of all Americans that don't look just like themselves.  The inability to see that others less fortunate have hopes and dreams, value in their lives and the same rights to equality under the civil laws chills my blood.   It is horrible and disgusting.  It's truly not American.  Yet the Republican Party of today can't see it and instead sees racial minorities, gays, non-Christians, and non-native born individuals as somehow less than human.  In a column Charles Pierce hits home at this moral vacuum at the heart of the GOP and spoiled children of wealth and privilege like Mitt and Ann Romney and Paul Ryan.  Here are some column highlights:  

There is no question in my mind anymore that the Republican Party has reconfigured itself as a Confederate party. Not because it is so largely white, though it is. Not because it is largely Southern, though it is that, too. And not because it fights so hard for vestigial accoutrements like the Confederate battle flag. The Republican Party is a Confederate party, I think, because that is its view of what the government of the United States should be. It is written quite clearly in the party's platform that the Republicans adopted last week in Tampa.

We are not a union of states. That argument lost in Philadelphia in 1789. The Constitution is a covenant between We, the People, not We, the States. The national government is every bit the "instrument of our self-government" as any state is. Nevertheless, the Republican Party has gone full Tenther. Now a lot of it is couched in arguments against the tyranny of EPA regulations and the jackboots of the individual health-care mandate, but there is no question that the driving force of this theory of government is resistance to full African-American citizenship just the way it was in 1860, in 1879, in 1957, and in 1965. And the most obvious manifestation of that resistance today is the staggering welter of voter-suppression laws that have emerged in the years since the president was elected. Almost all of them are being defended on Tenther grounds; Texas is directly challenging the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[T]he Republican Party condemned "the current Administration's assaults on State governments in matters ranging from voter ID laws to immigration." The "assault" in question involves the Department of Justice's entirely legal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a law freely passed in constitutional fashion by a free Congress as the representatives of the people in 1965. This is pure Tenther gibberish, and the people who wrote the Republican platform would have flunked civics back when we still taught it.)

The Republicans get positively giddy quoting Ronald Reagan to the effect that, "Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction," as though this were in some way profound. People like Virginia Fields and Henry Marsh know that freedom is never more than a couple of seconds from extinction because, unlike Reagan and the people who so glibly quote him, their freedoms have real enemies, and those enemies have not changed.  .  .  .  .   The attempt to undo African-American citizenship is the one battle from that war that has gone on and on and on,  .  .  .

Frankly, give what the Republican Party has become, it sickens me that I ever was a GOP activist.