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Juan
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Today Derek Chauvin's trial for the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, began in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The death of Mr. Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, under the knee of police officer Chauvin, who is 45 and white, sparked dramatic civil unrest in the United States. The murder was captured on video by onlookers who tried to intervene as Floyd cried for help, said he couldn't breathe, called for his mother, and then died. Today, prosecutors showed a 9-minute 29-second video of the murder, and told jurors to "believe your eyes." They presented evidence from a 911 dispatcher who called a supervisor after seeing the event on a police surveillance camera. "Something was not right," Jena Scurry said. The defense, in contrast, urged jurors to look at the scene in a larger context: the death happened in a part of the city where residents were hostile to officers, so Chauvin was concerned, and Floyd died not from the pressure on his neck but from underlying causes, including drug use. In our adversarial justice system, each side tries to present the best case it can. The defense is doing what it is paid to do, that is, to defend the accused. The jury is supposed to remain impartial and be swayed by the evidence. Remember that Boston patriot John Adams famously defended the British soldiers accused of killing five civilians in the Boston Massacre. The Chauvin trial is expected to take about a month. The other big news today is the coronavirus. The increasing rate of vaccinations appears to be racing against increasing infections to see which will win. While the Biden administration is administering vaccines at a pace that seems likely to have us at 200 million vaccines in arms by April 20, Biden's hundredth day in office, the highly contagious variants of the disease along with loosened restrictions are driving numbers of infections back up again. On Sunday, the average from the previous week for vaccines administered hit 2.7 million a day—an impressive uptick— and today Biden announced that by April 19, more than 90% of Americans over the age of 16 will be eligible for a vaccine and will live within five miles of a vaccination site, including 40,000 pharmacies. But the average number of new cases of Covid-19 per day also increased. More than 30 million of us have been infected since the pandemic began. And 549,892 of us have died. Today, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, warned that she had a sense of "impending doom" and begged people "to just hold on a little longer," wear masks, and get vaccinated. President Biden recorded a message urging governors who have gotten rid of mask mandates to reinstate them and to slow down plans to reopen. "Please," he said. "This is not politics…. Reinstate the mandate if you let it down, and businesses should require masks as well. A failure to take this virus seriously — precisely what got us into this mess in the first place — risks more cases and more deaths." There is, of course, a backstory to the Biden officials' pleading. Just a year ago, on March 29, 2020, then-president Trump backed off from his insistence that the country could reopen for business on Easter Sunday, April 12, perhaps after he heard Dr. Anthony Fauci's estimate that the nation might suffer as many as 100,000 deaths over the next year from Covid-19—a number that then seemed incredible. On March 29, our coronavirus cases topped 139,000 and at least 2425 people in the United States had died, while health care workers had inadequate protection and few supplies. Trump tried to downplay the pandemic as he tried to reopen the nation's economy, but apparently found some relief in the daily briefings that put him before the television cameras. On this day a year ago, he tweeted: "President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of 'the Bachelor.' Numbers are continuing to rise…["] "Because the 'Ratings' of my News Conferences etc. are so high, 'Bachelor Finale, Monday Night Football type numbers' according to the [New York Times], the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. 'Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.' said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!" Last night, on a CNN documentary titled "COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out," Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of Trump's White House coronavirus response team, said that while the first surge of Covid-19 deaths—about 100,000 Americans—was unavoidable, "[a]ll the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially." Birx added: "The majority of the people in the White House did not take this seriously." Birx was not the only former official airing grievances. Brett Giroir, the nation's coronavirus testing chief under Trump, admitted, "When we said there were millions of tests available, there weren't…. There were components of the test available, but not the full… deal." Former director of the CDC Robert Redfield said that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar personally tried to change scientific reports that the White House didn't like. Today, the Biden administration announced it would investigate the interference of government officials with scientific evidence during the past administration in order to press political points. The Trump administration got rid of researchers who worked on climate change and other issues the administration disliked, ignored studies of chemical dangers, and refused to listen to doctors and public health officials regarding the coronavirus pandemic. The Biden administration hopes to restore faith in the government by emphasizing that it will take the advice of scientists seriously. Tonight, the former president released a rambling statement attacking Dr. Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, calling them "self-promoters" with "bad instincts and faulty recommendations" that he "almost always overturned" and which would have "led us directly into a COVID caused depression." But Biden has taken the opposite tack Trump did and it is working: 71% of Americans approve of Biden's handling of the pandemic. According to polls, Republican men—Trump's key demographic-- are reluctant to get the vaccine. A CNN poll says that 92% of Democrats have had the vaccine or plan to get a shot, while 50% of Republicans say they plan to get one. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) today urged Republican men to go ahead and get the shot. He said there is "no good argument not to get the vaccination." —- Notes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/29/derek-chauvin-trial/ https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/politics/mitch-mcconnell-covid-19-vaccine-republican-men/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/world/pfizer-moderna-covid-vaccines-infection.html I'm not going to link to Trump's statement. It is public. https://news.yahoo.com/dr-deborah-birx-says-every-011110504.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/climate/biden-trump-science.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/29/trump-officials-tell-all-coronavirus-response/ |
Since the Civil War, voter suppression in America has had a unique cast. The Civil War brought two great innovations to the United States that would mix together to shape our politics from 1865 onward: First, the Republicans under Abraham Lincoln created our first national system of taxation, including the income tax. For the first time in our history, having a say in society meant having a say in how other people's money was spent. Second, the Republicans gave Black Americans a say in society. They added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing human enslavement except as punishment for crime and, when white southerners refused to rebuild the southern states with their free Black neighbors, in March 1867 passed the Military Reconstruction Act. This landmark law permitted Black men in the South to vote for delegates to write new state constitutions. The new constitutions confirmed the right of Black men to vote. Most former Confederates wanted no part of this new system. They tried to stop voters from ratifying the new constitutions by dressing up in white sheets as the ghosts of dead southern soldiers, terrorizing Black voters and the white men who were willing to rebuild the South on these new terms to keep them from the polls. They organized as the Ku Klux Klan, saying they were "an institution of chivalry, humanity, mercy, and patriotism" intended "to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States… [and] to aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws." But by this they meant the Constitution before the war and the Thirteenth Amendment: candidates for admission to the Ku Klux Klan had to oppose "Negro equality both social and political" and favor "a white man's government." The bloody attempts of the Ku Klux Klan to suppress voting didn't work. The new constitutions went into effect, and in 1868 the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union with Black male suffrage. In that year's election, Georgia voters put 33 Black Georgians into the state's general assembly, only to have the white legislators expel them on the grounds that the Georgia state constitution did not explicitly permit Black men to hold office. The Republican Congress refused to seat Georgia's representatives that year—that's the "remanded to military occupation" you sometimes hear about-- and wrote the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution protecting the right of formerly enslaved people to vote and, by extension, to hold office. The amendment prohibits a state from denying the right of citizens to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." So white southerners determined to prevent Black participation in society turned to a new tactic. Rather than opposing Black voting on racial grounds—although they certainly did oppose Black rights on these grounds-- they complained that the new Black voters, fresh from their impoverished lives as slaves, were using their votes to redistribute wealth. To illustrate their point, they turned to South Carolina, where between 1867 and 1876, a majority of South Carolina's elected officials were African American. To rebuild the shattered state, the legislature levied new taxes on land, although before the war taxes had mostly fallen on the personal property owned by professionals, bankers, and merchants. The legislature then used state funds to build schools, hospitals, and other public services, and bought land for resale to settlers—usually freedpeople—at low prices. White South Carolinians complained that members of the legislature, most of whom were professionals with property who had usually been free before the war, were lazy, ignorant field hands using public services to redistribute wealth. Fears of workers destroying society grew potent in early 1871, when American newspaper headlines blasted the story of the Paris Commune. From March through May, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, French Communards took control of Paris. Americans read stories of a workers' government that seemed to attack civilization itself: burning buildings, killing politicians, corrupting women, and confiscating property. Americans worried that workers at home might have similar ideas: in italics, Scribner's Monthly warned readers that "the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society." Building on this fear, in May 1871, a so-called taxpayers' convention met in Columbia, South Carolina. A reporter claimed that South Carolina was "a typical Southern state" victimized by lazy "semi-barbarian" Black voters who were electing leaders to redistribute wealth. "Upon these people not only political rights have been conferred, but they have absolute political supremacy," he said. The New York Daily Tribune, which had previously championed Black rights, wrote "the most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power,… [are] taxed and swindled… by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen." The South Carolina Taxpayers' Convention uncovered no misuse of state funds and disbanded with only a call for frugality in government, but it had embedded into politics the idea that Black voters were using the government to redistribute wealth. The South was "prostrate" under "Black rule," reporters claimed. In the election of 1876, southern Democrats set out to "redeem" the South from this economic misrule by keeping Black Americans from the polls. Over the next decades, white southerners worked to silence the voices of Black Americans in politics, and in 1890, fourteen southern congressmen wrote a book to explain to their northern colleagues why Democrats had to control the South. Why the Solid South? or Reconstruction and its Results insisted that Black voters who had supported the Republicans after the Civil War had used their votes to pervert the government by using it to give themselves services paid for with white tax dollars. Later that year, a new constitution in Mississippi started the process of making sure Black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted, effectively getting rid of Black voting. Eight years later, there was still enough Black voting in North Carolina and enough class solidarity with poor whites that voters in Wilmington elected a coalition government of Black Republicans and white Populists. White Democrats agreed that the coalition had won fairly, but about 2000 of them nonetheless armed themselves to "reform" the city government. They issued a "White Declaration of Independence" and said they would "never again be ruled, by men of African origin." It was time, they said, "for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95% of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by Negroes." As they forced the elected officials out of office and took their places, the new Democratic mayor claimed "there was no intimidation used," but as many as 300 African Americans died in the Wilmington coup. The Civil War began the process of linking the political power of people of color to a redistribution of wealth, and this rhetoric has haunted us ever since. When Ronald Reagan talked about the "Welfare Queen (a Black woman who stole tax dollars through social services fraud), when tea partiers called our first Black president a "socialist," when Trump voters claimed to be reacting to "economic anxiety," they were calling on a long history. Today, Republicans talk about "election integrity," but their end game is the same as that of the former Confederates after the war: to keep Black and Brown Americans away from the polls to make sure the government does not spend tax dollars on public services. —- Notes: I don't link to my own books usually, but if anyone is interested, the argument and quotations here are from my second book, "The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North," (Harvard University Press, 2001). |
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signs the voting law. Photo: Gov. Brian Kemp's Twitter feed. |
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed his state's new voter suppression law last night in a carefully staged photo op. As journalist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, Kemp sat at a polished table, with six white men around him, under a painting of the Callaway Plantation on which more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. As the men bore witness to the signing, Representative Park Cannon, a Black female lawmaker, was arrested and dragged away from the governor's office. It was a scene that conjured up a lot of history. Voting was on the table in March 1858, too. Then, the U.S. Senate fought over how the new territory of Kansas would be admitted to the Union. The majority of voters in the territory wanted it to be free, but a minority of proslavery Democrats had taken control of the territory's government and written a constitution that would make human enslavement the fundamental law in the state. The fight over whether this minority, or the majority that wanted the territory free, would control Kansas burned back east, to Congress. In the Senate, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, who rejected "as ridiculously absurd" the idea that "all men are born equal," rose to speak on the subject. He defended the rule of the proslavery minority in Kansas, and told anti-slavery northerners how the world really worked. Hammond laid out a new vision for the United States of America. He explained to his Senate colleagues just how wealthy the South's system of human enslavement had made the region, then explained that the "harmonious… and prosperous" system worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a larger class with "a low order of intellect and but little skill." Hammond explained that in the South, those workers were Black slaves, but the North had such a class, too: they were "your whole hireling class of manual laborers." These distinctions had crucial political importance, he explained, "Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than 'an army with banners,' and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box." Hammond believed the South's system must spread to Kansas and the West regardless of what settlers there wanted because it was the only acceptable way to organize society. Two years later, Hammond would be one of those working to establish the Confederate States of America, "founded," in the words of their vice president, Alexander Stephens, upon the "great physical, philosophical, and moral truth… that the negro is not equal to the white man." Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln recognized that if Americans accepted the principle that some men were better than others, and permitted southern Democrats to spread that principle by dominating the government, they had lost democracy. "I should like to know, if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares ... are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?" he asked. Led by Abraham Lincoln, Republicans rejected the slaveholders' unequal view of the world as a radical reworking of the nation's founding principles. They stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. When southerners fought to destroy the government rather than accept the idea of human equality, Lincoln reminded Americans just how fragile our democracy is. At Gettysburg in November 1863, he rededicated the nation to the principles of the Declaration and called upon his audience "to be dedicated… to the great task remaining before us… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The United States defeated the Confederacy, outlawed human enslavement except as punishment for crime, declared Black Americans citizens, and in 1867, with the Military Reconstruction Act, began to establish impartial suffrage. The Military Reconstruction Act, wrote Maine politician James G. Blaine in 1893, "changed the political history of the United States." Today, as I looked at the photograph of Governor Kemp signing that bill, I wondered just how much. —- Notes: James Henry Hammond, Speech on the Admission of Kansas, March 4, 1858. Alexander Stephens, Cornerstone Speech, March 21, 1861 https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/georgia-governor-brian-kemp-painting-slave-plantation-20210326.html |
Jim Crow refers to a series of racist laws and measures that discriminated against African-Americans. Even though these laws were enacted between 1876 and 1965, the effects of Jim Crow are relevant today.
Originally, Jim Crow was the name of a character in a plantation song in the American south. From there, it became associated with discrimination against African-Americans after slavery. Jim Crow laws made it difficult for African-Americans to vote. Forcing African-Americans to use separate restaurants and bathrooms was another example of Jim Crow. This name is synonymous with bigotry and racism. Even today, when there is racism against African-Americans, people will refer to Jim Crow.
The Republican Party has now revealed the true purpose of its existence. Casting off any doubts about it, the RNC has unified Republican controlled state legislatures to engage in enacting laws that support voter suppression. The RNC has determined that it no longer has the ability for a democratic majority, and must stop people from voting. As such, the naming convention for this political party will no longer be Republican, but will hereafter be referred to as the Jim Crow Party. The Jim Crow Party, wherever it exists, will bear the brunt of Boycott
Ten more people in Boulder, Colorado, died yesterday, shot by a man with a gun, just days after we lost 8 others in Atlanta, Georgia, shot by a man with a gun. In 2017, after the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas, political personality Bill O'Reilly said that such mass casualties were "the price of freedom." But his is a very recent interpretation of guns and their meaning in America. The Second Amendment to the Constitution is one simple sentence: "A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." There's not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to "bear arms" meant to be part of an organized militia. As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, "A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane." The path to today's insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places. One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation. By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. "Riflemen" competed in the Olympics, in colleges and in local, state and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunitions and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him. NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns, but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons, prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children, to require all dealers to be licensed, and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America's hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade. But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing "gun control." It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on "gun rights." This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War Two. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the "socialism" of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors. Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. In 1972, the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of "cheap handguns," but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan-- for the first time. When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew. In 1981, a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, Representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it. After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Although until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun, in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that. In 1991, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional. Now a player in national politics, the NRA was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers. By 2000, it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election. In that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms. Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012, the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent more than $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump's effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million. The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party's ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. Even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members— recently supported background checks, Republicans have killed such legislation by filibustering it. Maybe this time things will be different. Today President Biden called for the Senate to pass measures already passed by House lawmakers for universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons. More important, perhaps, is that new voices are making themselves heard on this issue. The political participation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) jumped by 91% in Georgia in 2020 and was key to electing Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate. The Georgia murders, six of which took the lives of women of Asian descent, have inspired this community to demand policy changes that address hate crimes and violence. Judy Chu (D-CA), chair of the 21-person Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, told Politico's Maya King: "Certainly for AAPIs who may not have been involved before, this is a wake up call to say, 'You need to be involved.'" —- Notes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/guns-boulder-shooting-assault-weapons-ban/ https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/23/politics/biden-gun-control-colorado-atlanta/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/us/politics/senate-gun-control.html https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/23/georgia-asian-communities-political-outreach-477606 |