I like to avoid the “nailed it” characterization, but by golly, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post really, really does nail it here. Brutally, and to the point.
On the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, Republicans in the United States Senate showed America everything they’ve learned, and everything they took away from that sordid event.
Milbank writes:
Republicans chose a special way of observing the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. They tried to vote down a highly qualified Black woman who had been nominated to run the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
There was never any real dispute about Kristen Clarke’s qualifications for this job. The Republicans’ nearly-unanimous objection to her boiled down, ultimately, to the fact that she was Black, and the very idea of a Black woman enforcing this country’s civil rights laws was apparently too terrible to contemplate. So their strategy was to talk about something, anything other than that fact.
As Milbank points out, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had set the tone earlier in the day, paying her respects by doubling down on her new status as de facto leader of the Republican House caucus, comparing laws that require people to wear masks to the Holocaust.
But Greene was just a sideshow. The real action was on the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon. As Milbank notes, nobody seemed to want to talk about Clarke, her qualifications, her exemplary career at the Justice Department, at the New York attorney general’s office, or at the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law.
They wanted to talk about … this:
… John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber, gave a speech denouncing House-passed legislation for, among other things, “banning voter ID and other safeguards against voter fraud.” Such “safeguards” have been found repeatedly to disenfranchise Black voters disproportionately.
And they wanted to show their constituents just how strongly they opposed any Black nominee who might cross their path. As Milbank observes, after Thune’s racist screed, but before the Clarke vote, Republican senators voted in “near lockstep to oppose the confirmation of Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the first Black woman tapped to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.”
Milbank rhetorically asks:
Speaking out for voter-ID requirements? Stalling racial-justice legislation? Opposing two overwhelmingly qualified Black nominees? And all this while publicly ignoring the anniversary of the Floyd murder?
Racism isn’t just a factor in Republican politics. It is the factor. But rarely has it been on display in all its ugly facets as it was on Tuesday.
The party of white supremacy did exactly what you would expect. And if you squinted just a little bit, you could all but see their white hoods.