By Calvin Hill
At this point, it no longer matters why MORNING JOE host, Joe Scarborough, affixed the sobriquet Moscow Mitch on senior Kentucky Senator Addison McConnell III. As the leader of the Senate Republicans, he has gone from having his caucus vote, unanimously, to renew the Voting Rights Act, before the election of Barack Obama, to unanimously opposing it after the election of Barack Obama. Why Tim Scott, the lone black Republican Senator goes along with this overt display of racism is anybody’s guess – though his answer might enlighten us.
This is not to single out Scott, per se, because there should be a line of Republicans explaining their reversal of intent as to who gets to participate in America’s democracy, just that Scott belongs at the front of the line. However, with “off the record” being a time honored principle of the Fourth Estate, I’m afraid we will have to wait for Scott’s post political book to find out how he really felt watching Massa Mitch treat the Obama White House with the essence of the Roger Taney judicial adage that President Obama had no rights and no authority that Mitch McConnell was bound to respect.
McConnell reveled in his conspicuous assaults on the constitutional jurisdiction of the presidency. He bore no shame or embarrassment over his explanations of twisted hypocrisy. He suddenly came up with standards, which appears he only applied because the President of the United States was black. It was McConnell’s 8-year open engagement with political Jim Crowism against Barack Obama and Tea Party rallies replete with Confederate flags and images of Obama in apian effigy that led the Republican Party to ignore the recommended outreach determined by their 2012 autopsy in exchange for the need to flex white muscles against the audacity of a black man in the White House.
From the January day of the Obama inauguration, to this day, the GOP has waged an unconditional war against the Democratic Party, Independents, and any Republican or Libertarian who has the wholly declarative belief that we all are created equal and endowed with the presumption that America is still the haven where the tired and poor yearn to breathe free – not just Norwegians.
In the past, it was McConnell’s Republican Party, the party of Ronald Reagan, that championed immigration as the beacon America shone around the world. In the past, it was the immigrant success stories that permeated the lexicon of Republican presidents and campaigns. Then a loud and unsuccessful presidential run by Pat Buchanan awakened a zero-sum attitudinal white-lash against immigrants, as well as a fear inspired motive for Congressional representatives to eschew legislation for sensible immigration reform. Now, the Republican Party has determined that the long heralded status of “immigrant” is no longer advantageous, but a policy to be exploited.
The racial animus toward immigrants by the Republican Party and the conservative media has been so negative and so hostile, Cuban Canadian immigrant, Ted Cruz, has been ranting as though his family came over on the Mayflower. In reality, members of his family were just another group of refugees escaping to something better.
While Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party has used Donald Trump and the US credit card to turn America into a Kremlin style oligarchy, West Virginia Senator, Joe Manchin, is concerned that decent housing, lead-free water, seeing a doctor and access to the web creates an entitlement mentality. Manchin is listed as the 19th richest of 100 US Senators. Perhaps he thinks his refund check, courtesy of the Republican’s 2017 tax cut is an “entitlement” worthy of McConnell’s willingness to default on the full faith and credit of the United States that put the majority of $2 trillion in his pocket and the rest of the 1%.
As Manchin’s obfuscation of reason while scuttling the Build Back Better agenda of President Biden, he brings back the bad old days of his pre-enlightened West Virginia predecessor, former Klan recruiter, Robert Byrd. And while Manchin’s introduction of a voting rights bill appears admirable, his abject refusal to carve out a filibuster exception for his bill, in the face of national hostility, merely aids and abets McConnell’s aspiration to keep non-white people from the polls and allow Republican state legislatures the option of not counting their votes.
As President Biden has promised to have the backs of his black voters who gave him the White House and Democrats the majority, Mitch McConnell has galvanized and altered the party of Lincoln. Though shrewd, McConnell has not been very opaque about his racial governing preference since the election of Barack Obama. Allowing his caucus to tolerate Donald Trump’s blatant racism has been a welcome assist toward Mitch’s governing goals. By stacking the federal judiciary, he need not worry about attack dogs and fire hoses at voter registration drives. And thanks to a ‘good ole boy’ southern neighbor in West Virginia, Mitch has the filibuster to stick knives in the backs of those black voters that Joe Biden said he would protect.
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