Whatever they can get away with

That's what the Republican Party is up to

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Segregating public schools by race has been, at least effectively speaking, illegal since the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education 67 years ago.  Oh, there were knock-down-drag-out fights to make it happen, especially in the Deep South, and an argument can be made that what you might call perfect integration of public schools has never completely been achieved.  But the law made by that Supreme Court decision has never changed.

What we have seen recently from the Republican Party leads me to believe that segregation is not behind us, either legally or practically.  I think the Republican Party, as it is currently constituted, would be perfectly happy with making segregation legal again.  Up is down with these fools.  Why wouldn’t they attempt to return segregation as the law of the land? 

Look at what they’re doing today with the bipartisan commission to investigate the assault on the Capitol that will soon come to a vote.  They don’t just want to sweep the whole thing under the rug. They are denying not only that Donald Trump instigated the assault on the Capitol, but that the insurrection happened at all. 

Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the Senate this morning to announce that he will oppose formation of a commission to investigate what he called “the events of January 6.”  Kevin McCarthy came out yesterday with his opposition to the commission. Republican senators who only yesterday had announced that they supported a bipartisan commission are today saying they will vote against it.  Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is one.  Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas is another.  Both men supported the commission to investigate the assault on the Capitol less than 24 hours ago.  Today they are both opposed.

The Republican Party is prepared to do literally anything they think they can get away with.  They are going to attempt to go into the mid-term elections next year denying that their party, or the man who they recognize as their party leader, had anything to do with the attack on the Capitol, or with attempting to stop the certification of the ballots of the electoral college.  They are engaged in a massive campaign of voter suppression in a naked attempt to make it more difficult for Black and other minority citizens to vote.  They’re not even trying to hide it.  Their intentions are right out in the open.

So is their racism.  For some reason, I was thinking about Jesse Helms the other day.  A senator from North Carolina for 20 years, from 1973 to 2003, he was a figure of derision practically everywhere in this country except his own state, and even within the state of North Carolina, he faced stiff opposition.  He won his last two campaigns for reelection, in 1990 and 1996, with only 52.5 and 52.6 percent of the vote against a Black Democratic candidate in both races, Harvey Gantt. 

The tendency back then was to write off Helms as something of an aberration in the Republican Party, a throw-back to a kind of coarse nativism and racism that most Republicans did not countenance, at least not then.  His famous “hands” commercial, that many said was responsible for his victory in 1990, showed a white man’s hands crumpling up a job application after losing the job to a “less qualified” minority applicant.  It was criticized at the time for its “racial subtext.” The ad was a nakedly racist appeal for white votes, and Helms was known in his state and in the Senate as racist.  He led a 16 day filibuster against creating a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.  He voted against the Voting Rights Act whenever it came up for renewal. 

But Helms wasn’t a lone wolf within the Republican Party. Looking back, we can see that he was its heart and soul.  It was Republican appointed Supreme Court justices who voted to disembowel the Voting Rights Act in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.  A recent proposal by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin and Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act has been met with silence from congressional Republicans.  They don’t want to empower the federal government to oversee how states run their elections for federal office.  They don’t even want officials like a secretary of state to have the authority over elections.  They want Republican-controlled legislatures to control the counting of ballots, and in presidential elections, the awarding of electoral college votes.  They don’t want more people to vote.  They want fewer.  They don’t want fair elections.  They want to win. Period.

When Brown v. Board of Education was decided, southern states did everything in their power to prevent the integration of their public schools.  In 1964, a decade after Brown, 98.9 percent of Black students in 11 southern states were still going to school in segregated all-Black schools.  Whole school systems in at least one southern state were closed rather than integrate.  Eventually, court decisions led to integration in one school system after another around the Deep South.  In response, many white parents pulled their children out of integrated schools and established private all-white “academies” to educate their children, leaving only a smattering of low income white children to go to school in integrated systems with Black children.  And then they fought for years to try to use public tax dollars to fund their private all-white schools.  Donald Trump and his secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, were still fighting to use so-called “vouchers” for private segregated schools when he left office.

I remember what it was like in 1964.  That year, I went to a high school in Virginia that was partially integrated only because the federal government was able to force the school system in Fairfax County to accept the sons and daughters of Black members of the military.  But every morning, several school buses filled with Black children whose parents were not in the military drove past my school on their way to a high school ten miles south.  Schools in Fairfax County were not fully integrated from kindergarten to 12th grade until 1974.

The Supreme Court this week accepted a Mississippi abortion case that many legal experts say could lead to a weakening, if not totally overturning, of Roe v. Wade.  With six justices appointed by Republican presidents, three by our last disgraced and twice-impeached president, the court is poised to overturn anything they want.  They could overturn Roe v. Wade.  They could overturn the clause in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that barred federal funds from going to segregated schools on the same basis they did away with the clause in the Voting Rights Act that mandated the overseeing of southern states voting laws by the Department of Justice.  In that decision, they found the law interfered with the “sovereignty” of the states covered by the Voting Rights Act.  The Roberts court could use the “sovereignty” basis to overturn federal court decisions that have outlawed so-called “voucher” programs that were passed to allow the use of local tax dollars to find private schools that discriminate on the basis of race.

The Supreme Court can do whatever they feel they can get away with.  So can Republicans in congress, especially in the Senate, so long as they have the power of the filibuster. 

The Republican Party is trying to bury the assault on the Capitol on January 6.  They are trying to prevent the investigation of that assault so that another assault just like it can happen.  They are not going to risk losing at the ballot box again.  They are doing whatever they can get away with to fix it so they can’t lose, even if that means we lose our democracy.