The Civil War ended seven score and four years ago. But if you took a look a the makeup of the Senate Judiciary Committee, you might have a hard time believing it didn’t end more recently. Why? Well, if Abraham Lincoln woke up yesterday morning and watched that committee deliberating the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, he might have felt the need to rub his eyes. “Why,” he might have asked, “are almost all the Republicans on this committee from Confederate states?” It’s true. Other than Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah, all the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee are from Dixie. And, perhaps more confounding for Lincoln, every single one of the Democrats on the committee are from Union states. But if the regional makeup of the parties has flipped since Lincoln’s day, the regional split between them has not. The only comfort Honest Abe could have taken in watching yesterday’s proceedings is that Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was not calling for secession, but was the sole Republican member of the committee to vote in favor of confirming Ms. Sotomayor.
Fifty-five years went by after Lincoln’s assassination before women were granted the right to vote, so Abe might have displayed some confusion about how the issue of abortion rights could have replaced the issue of the right to own slaves as the most divisive issue of the day. Yet, somehow I think Lincoln would have recognized a pattern. It is still southern, white, gentlemen who are demanding a right to dictate terms and deny some American citizens their full rights. These southern white gentlemen are still consumed with racial animus. It could hardly escape Lincoln’s notice that the primary objection to Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation was that she had occasionally noted that white men were less inclined than Latina women to show empathy for the victims of race or gender prejudice.
There is a good reason that Democrats stock the Judiciary Committee with Union members and that the Republicans stock it with members of the Old Confederacy. Both parties want to be sure of their votes on the committee. But, I think it is a shame that the committee is so split by region. I think the Democrats should allow a member or two from the South to join the committee. I think Abe Lincoln would want it that way.
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Booman,
Which southern Democrats would you like to see on the committee? I’m having a hard time coming up with one that I would want in that position.
I understand your high-minded notion here, but I’m interested in outcomes….
Here’s who you have to choose from:
Mark Warner
Jim Webb
Kay Hagan
Mary Landrieu
Blanche Lincoln
Mark Pryor
Bill Nelson
To my mind, Hagan, Warner, and Webb in that order. Remember that we are talking about Judiciary here.
And none on the list would have engaged in the sort of garbage questions and arrogance that the Republican Southerners did. Southern gentlemen, my ass. Even Southerners would not call their actions gentlemanly. They were bitter little old men seeing their dreams of segregation going down the tubes.
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As is well known, story-telling was often with President Lincoln a weapon which he employ’d with great skill. Very often he could not give a point-blank reply or comment — and these indirections, (sometimes funny, but not always so,) were probably the best responses possible. In the gloomiest period of the war, he had a call from a large delegation of bank presidents. In the talk after business was settled, one of the big Dons asked Mr. Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the Union was not beginning to be shaken — whereupon the homely President told a little story,
“When I was a young man in Illinois, I boarded
for a time with a Deacon of the Presbyterianchurch.
One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the
door, & I heard the Deacon’s voice exclaiming
‘Arise, Abraham, the day of judgment has come!’
I sprang from my bed & rushed to
the window, and saw the stars falling in
great showers! But looking back of them in
the heavens I saw all the grand old constellations
with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and
true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not
come to an end then, nor will the Union now.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The irony of using a culturally bigoted argument to denounce racial bigotry is, I suspect, lost on our Yankee host.
There are lots of non-racist Southern liberals. Unfortunately, the proportion of the population we represent in our own region is not as high as that of our fellow liberals in the North and the West. Our numbers are, however, several orders of magnitude larger than they were in the 19th century and continue to grow over time. I’d like to know what percentage we have to hit to quell the periodic “fuck the South” threads. It’s been many years since the North and West surpassed us in open (and occasionally violent) racist incidents.
Just something to think about next time anyone in, say, enlightened Philadelphia is enjoying a relaxing swim in their all-white pool, or maybe sipping lattes in a deep-blue NYC cafe far enough away from where the cops are emptying multiple clips into an unarmed dark-skinned immigrant — or is the recession making ammunition expensive enough that they’re going back to breaking off broom handles in prisoners’ rectums?
But maybe I’m not being fair to Philadelphia. Kicking little black kids out of the pool is definitely a step up from dropping bombs on them from police helicopters. Progress is being made, isn’t it?
corvus, i live in philly and I tip my hat to you in your smackdown.
I was going to print some history i learned about the Great Emancipator, how he would prefer to ship all the free black people to panama and liberia and how he despise slavery because it deprived poor white people of the economic advantages of owning people, or his doubts about the innate intelligence of blacks.
i get booman’s point, that the republican party that freed the slaves is now the home of southern racists, but using lincoln as an analog is probably not the most effective strategy.
Yep.
In case you might not have heard, Smithfield Hams in North Carolina voted in a union.
If you don’t like what’s going on in the South, come down here and help out. Lord knows, lots of wet-behind-the-ears Yankee college students joined Southern college students (black and white) to undo discrimination in voting rights.
So far, too many of the non-Southern transplants have been born-and-bred Republicans who haven’t a clue of how their party has been Southernized (or better said, segregationalized).
If you are looking for some unworked fields in NC, there is Gastonia, Hickory, Wilmington, Fayetteville (although a lot of the military are more progressive than you might think), Smithfield, Asheboro, Greensboro, Elizabeth City, Boone (you’d get to take down Virginia Foxx if you moved there), Morganton.
Then when we’ve gotten the change rolling here, we can move on to central PA, Long Island, and the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago.
Or would you rather do Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho?
TarHeelDem, I admire you. But you are part of a very small minority. When Howard Dean was running, my daughter, who lives in Alabama, could not find five other Democrats to hold a meet-up. Five! I’m sure they existed, but were afraid of being identified as Democrats. Also, regarding Howard Dean’s comment about Confederate flag decals on pick-up trucks, she assured me that it was true, pick-up trucks down there do not have Confederate flag decals. “Usually, the dealer paints them on the truck.”
This isn’t 2003 anymore. Six judges in Alabama just changed from Republicans to Democrats. If she is still there, she should try again using those five as a starting point. Just as an experiment. I don’t know whether she would have more or fewer people show up. But the first thing Democrats have to start doing is having courage.
So what if they changed? If they still judge like minimally sane Republicans it’s a net loss that makes the poisons the party even more.
Not sure I want to encourage her for her own safety. Obama isn’t “the President” down there, he’s “the N____”, a still common, indeed ubiquitous term. Although she remains fore-square against bigotry (she’s regarded as “that nice, but crazy Yankee girl”), she is starting to believe in Creationism. She swallowed those “to complex to just occur by chance” arguments. Even though I assured her that I understand the mathematics of complexity and it is not to complicated to be natural. Just shows what happens after years of unrelenting exposure to Fox News journalism.
Geez, both to’s should be too’s. My grade school English teacher would have me after school for a week.
How is it cultural bigotry to observe that most senators and representatives from southern states are DINOs? I honestly don’t see how anyone can argue that, if the South somehow lost its representation in Congress we wouldn’t have a much better country. Nobody was talking about swimming pools or the other many crimes and offenses that are found nationwide.