The Associated Press:
Report finds democracy for Black Americans is under attack
Marc Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who leads the civil rights and urban advocacy organization, cited the most recent example: the vote this month by the Republican-controlled Tennessee House to oust two Black representatives for violating a legislative rule. The pair had participated in a gun control protest inside the chamber after the shooting that killed three students and three staff members at a Nashville school.
“We have censorship and Black history suppression, and now this,” Morial said in an interview. “It’s another piece of fruit of the same poisonous tree, the effort to suppress and contain.”
Republicans have decided that, since general election voters hate what they stand for, the best way forward is to do bad things but not talk about them. That won't shield them (see Ron DeSantis and his 6-week abortion ban), but they're still in FAFO mode.
The Harvard Gazette:
Rising political tide of young adults, Gen Z
The expulsion of two Black state Democratic lawmakers in their 20s by the predominantly white, Republican-controlled Tennessee House in late March ignited backlash across the country. Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were ousted for rallying in the House with local activists and student protesters in support of stricter gun controls following a school shooting in Nashville that left six dead. Both men were voted back into office last week.
What started as a modest gun-control protest outside the Tennessee state house erupted into a national cause after Jones and Pearson characterized their removal as an effort to silence Gen Z voices, disempower communities of color, and weaken democracy.
The incident is yet another example of the political potency of Generation Z, the 70 million young Americans born between 1997 and 2012 (aged 11-25). Since 2018, members of Gen Z have become politically engaged on issues like gun control, the environment, reproductive health, education, and racial justice, and, increasingly, running for office.
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent/The Washington Post:
A rural Texas county just blinked on library closures. Pressure worked.
But one of the big surprises of these sagas has been outbreaks of resistance to book purges in the reddest places, and here again, some locals dissented. One said: “We have to be a community that values knowledge.” Another fretted: “We are all over the media, and this is making us look pretty bad as a community.”
It turns out that even in an overwhelmingly conservative place (Donald Trump won nearly 80 percent of Llano’s votes in 2020), plenty of people value free expression. Many Republicans aren’t on board with the right’s censorship agenda. And these folks can organize.
Oliver Willis/”Oliver Willis Explains” on Substack:
Beer Is Transgender Now, Because The Money Is In Transgender Beer
This Is Capitalism At Work
To be very clear, the Anheuser–Busch companies do not give a single damn about LGBTQ rights. That is, sure, maybe some of the executives personally care about these civil rights matters as part of their personal consciousnesses, but the corporate entity that sells Budweiser does not give a single damn.
What Anheuser–Busch does care about is making money, and that’s why the company has allied themselves with a transgender influencer and has a marketing campaign professing support for transgender and gay equality. The company’s decision is the latest in a long line of corporate decisions in this direction, not because corporate America is “woke,” but because corporate America is in the business of making money and there isn’t a whole lot of money (comparatively) in being bigots
Steven Beschloss/”America, America” on Substack:
The GOP's Rejection of America
Over and over, Republicans ignore voters’ concerns. This deeply cynical behavior will not succeed.
In a disturbing bit of news on Easter weekend, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced his plan to pardon Daniel Perry, who less than 24 hours earlier on Friday was convicted of murdering 28-year-old Garrett Foster at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Austin...
Rather than such news fueling our anger, I would suggest we may be at a turning point—that the accumulation of bad behavior and the possible response to it offers a useful roadmap for those of us who value democracy and justice and seek change. From Texas to Tennessee, to Wisconsin to Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court, elected Republicans and their acolytes have made clear their disinterest in representing the will of the people and serving justice—and more, that they are determined to reject the majority, no matter how corrupt doing so requires them to be, in pursuit of their self-serving interests.
Consider a few of the outcomes this week and the responses.
Monica Hesse/The Washington Post:
The abortion-pill ruling will make abortions as harrowing as possible
Pill abortions meant convenience and grace. Taking them away means making a hard experience worse.
The feminists were right all along. They were right when they tried to warn the country that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned the second Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg left the building. They were right that antiabortion activists weren’t going to settle for overturning Roe v. Wade. This was never about individual states being allowed to make their own abortion laws. The endgame was always: No abortions for anyone, anywhere. Earlier this week, Idaho passed an “abortion trafficking” law, making it a crime for an adult to help a minor access an abortion without parental consent, even by traveling to a state where abortion is legal.
Gun absolutists don’t trust democracy because they know they’re losing
It comes down to a variant of the old Maoist slogan: All liberty grows out of the barrel of a gun. When Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a White House rally before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, “Let’s have trial by combat,” he was speaking for a sentiment that runs deep in the gun rights movement.
A particularly dramatic example of how opposition to gun regulation is increasingly linked to efforts to undermine democracy itself: the Tennessee House Republicans’ recent vote to expel two duly elected legislators for protesting against the body’s inaction on guns after the Nashville school massacre.
It was no accident that the two since-reinstated representatives, Democrats Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, are not only both young and Black but also represent urban areas — Jones is from Nashville, Pearson from Memphis. Republican legislators, in Tennessee as elsewhere, regularly diminish the power of the big metro areas through gerrymandering and state overrides of local control.
Jonathan Weiler/”Jonathan’s Quality Kvetching Newsletter” on Substack:
Remembering Jackie Robinson
Robinson also became embroiled in the larger politics of the country in a way that would remain part of his public image for the rest of his life. In 1949, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the notorious entity that hunted for subversives in American society, asked Robinson to testify against another Black icon, the singer and political activist, Paul Robeson. Robeson was a political radical, an outspoken critic of the injustices of the American system, including in its treatment of Black people. Earlier in 1949, he'd spoke to a Soviet-sponsored symposium in Paris. An Associated Press story misquoted him as saying that Black people could never join any armed American conflict against the Soviet Union, after which Robeson was vilified as an enemy of the United States.
Robinson did not share Robeson's politics. He grew up in a Republican household and remained one for most of his life. His parents gave him the middle name Roosevelt in honor of Teddy Roosevelt. But Robinson also knew that he was being used by HUAC to denounce Robeson because of his race. And Jackie was intimately familiar with some of America's deficiencies. He told HUAC that if Robeson made the comments he did, that "sounded very silly to me" and rejected the notion that Robeson spoke for Black people in general. Otherwise, Robinson largely avoided taking the bait, telling HUAC:
"The fact that it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges. Just because communists kick up a big fuss over racial discrimination when it suits their purposes, a lot of people try to pretend that the whole issue is a creation of communist imagination, but they’re not fooling anyone with this type of pretense, and talk about communists stirring up Negroes to protest only makes present misunderstanding worse than ever. Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then, as well.”
Jill Lawrence/The Bulwark:
Dianne Feinstein’s Health and the Judicial Confirmation Crunch
Plus: It’s long past time to end the dumb “blue slip” tradition for blocking nominees.
Republicans may not admit it or act like it, but the conservative court takeover they engineered is a political emergency for them, given the vast gulf between GOP positions and public opinion on guns and abortion. It is an emergency of another sort for many Americans, as mass shootings and dangerous pregnancies continue to demonstrate.
[...]
The committee did manage a
bipartisan voice vote approving Matthew Brookman’s nomination as district judge in Indiana, and the Senate confirmed him March 29. But
ten nominees for federal district and circuit courts are still awaiting a final vote in committee and
two more had committee hearings March 22. And that doesn’t even count dozens of current and imminent openings: There are 58 district court vacancies and six on circuit courts that are all awaiting nominees,
Christopher Kang, co-founder and chief counsel for the progressive group Demand Justice, told me.
An underground rumble of calls for Feinstein to resign erupted into public view last week. In what the Hill called “a stunning move” by a fellow California Democrat, Rep. Ro Khanna was the first lawmaker to go public. As the tide of angst rose, Feinstein requested a temporary leave from the Judiciary Committee and a replacement to fill in. But a rules change like that requires 60 votes, and at best, Democrats have 50 without Feinstein. And, as an NBC headline put it, “Republicans want to make it difficult for Democrats to replace Feinstein on key panel.”