Politico:
The tide against the Confederate flag and its historical markers continued to swell on Wednesday.
It swept through Alabama, where Gov. Robert Bentley became the latest public official to take a stand against the rebel banner’s display on government property, and Mississippi, where Sens. Roger Wicker and Thad Cochran changed course and said their state should replace its flag, which features the battle emblem of the Confederacy.
USA Today:
Shortly after the attorney general began a series of meetings here, Alabama Republican Gov. Robert Bentley ordered the removal of the Confederate battle flag from a memorial on the grounds of the state Capitol in Montgomery. It's the latest Southern state to confront its display of a volatile symbol of racial oppression that Roof allegedly embraced in photographs and in a hate-inspired manifesto posted on a social media account prior to the murders.
South Carolina officials are engaged in a debate to take similar action on the grounds of that state's Capitol where a Confederate battle flag also flies.
"If people want to commemorate that part of their histories,'' Lynch said in a meeting with reporters, "then museums are wonderful places to do that.''
Since the Charleston attack, U.S. officials have fielded repeated questions about whether the mass shooting should be regarded as an act of terrorism, rather than a hate crime.
Justice officials have said they would explore domestic terror-related charges during the course of the federal inquiry. But Lynch suggested Wednesday that there were few differences in the definitions involving the crimes committed in Charleston.
"Make no mistake,'' Lynch said. "Hate crimes are the original domestic terrorism.''
More politics and policy below the fold.
Post and Courier:
A Post and Courier poll shows more than two-thirds of the South Carolina Senate supports removing the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds. Support for the move continues to grow in the House as well.
A team of reporters has been polling lawmakers since Monday morning. As of 6 p.m. Wednesday, about 72 percent of the Senate’s 45 members had indicated their support for taking the flag down, either through direct comments to reporters or through sponsorship of a bill seeking the flag’s removal.
Across the aisle, 69 House members, or 56 percent of the chamber, have so far indicated support for removing the flag. That compares to nine who have signalled their opposition to the move. The remainder either haven’t decided, won’t say where they stand or have not responded to multiple requests from The Post and Courier to state their position.
Gibbs Knotts, a political science professor at the College of Charleston, said he was amazed by how many lawmakers went on the record with their stance ahead of the formal debate.
“It’s another sign that the momentum has really shifted on this issue,” he said. “It’s obviously stemming from the tragic events at the church here in Charleston, but typically you don’t see shifts happen that quickly.”
Update 10:22 Wednesday: It now appears that the Senate has achieved the two-thirds majority necessary to remove the flag.
Vox:
South Carolina doesn't have a separate law that gives harsher sentences to hate crimes. But the federal government does: It's made willfully killing someone because of his or her race a crime that's punishable with life in federal prison. (The verbatim text of the law in question is here.) The federal government could also charge Roof with first-degree murder, which could carry the death penalty, if it wanted to go further than life imprisonment.
In cases like this, where someone's alleged crime runs afoul of both state and federal law, federal and state prosecutors usually figure out which one of them is in the best position to bring a case to trial, for efficiency's sake. But in the meantime, according to Alex Little, a lawyer and former assistant US attorney, it's almost always easier for states to file charges quickly than it is for the federal government to "cobble together a complaint." That's why South Carolina prosecutors filed their charges Friday, even though the federal government was still deciding how to proceed. If the federal government files charges of its own, the state usually decides not to pursue its case.
Thad Cochran:
U.S. Senator Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) today issued the following statement regarding the state flag of Mississippi:
“As a proud citizen of Mississippi, it is my personal hope that the state government will consider changing the state flag. The recent debate on the symbolism of our flag, which belongs to all of us, presents the people of our state an opportunity to consider a new banner that represents Mississippi. I appreciate the views of my friend and colleague Roger Wicker, and agree that we should look for unity and not divisiveness in the symbols of our state.”
WaPo:
Former Virginia senator and potential presidential candidate Jim Webb (D) is not calling for Confederate battle flags to removed from public property, saying the issue is “complicated.”
Webb, who is exploring a 2016 presidential campaign, wrote on Facebook that the flag “has wrongly been used for racist and other purposes in recent decades. It should not be used in any way as a political symbol that divides us.”
At the same time, he avoided any explicit call to remove the flag from public places, as many of the Democratic and major Republican presidential contenders have in the wake of last week’s shootings at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C.
Instead, Webb ruminated on the “complicated history” of the Civil War and suggested that slavery was not inextricably tied to the Confederate side.
Beyond the flag, from
the Nation:
Congressional Democrats Introduce an Ambitious New Bill to Restore the Voting Rights Act
Two years ago, the Supreme Court gutted the VRA. Senator Patrick Leahy and Congressman John Lewis have a plan to fix that.
Jessica Winter:
Almost literally overnight, the chimera of consensus around the Confederate flag as a divisive but misunderstood symbol of “heritage” or “Southern pride” fell away, revealing the banner for what it is. The obscenity of the flag and the murderous racism it represents have dominated a national conversation about the American way of hate and violence for all the right reasons.
The flag has also dominated the conversation for a single wrong reason, which is that most Americans have given up on achieving meaningful gun control in their lifetimes or in their grandchildren’s lifetimes.
Things change. See Confederate flag.
McClatchy:
The confederate flag seems to be falling surprisingly easily now. And the spirit of the moment is spreading to other icons of the Civil War, seen now through a different lens cast in the events of Charleston.
But where does the nation go next, and how far will it go, in erasing the public markers of slavery 150 years after the end of the Civil War?
Charles Blow:
I prefer the Aspen Institute’s definition: “Institutional racism refers to the policies and practices within and across institutions that, intentionally or not, produce outcomes that chronically favor, or put a racial group at a disadvantage.”
Yet institutional racism’s defenders — or more precisely, its concealers — demand an articulated proof for something that moves in silence. They demand to see chapter and verse for something that is unwritten. They demand to know the names of the individual architects of a structure built subconsciously over time by each member of the vast multitudes adding their own bit, like beavers adding branches to a dam.
Institutional racism isn’t so much a grand design as it is an accumulation of racial detritus.
Symbols are important. Those Confederate flags must come down. That will be a spiritual victory. But we must not stop there. Institutional racism is the real prize on this hunt. Bring that down and cheers can truly go up.