It should be obvious that right's relentless bashing of our duly elected President has brought out the worst among us. In droves, it seems. This has happened from a national all the way down to a state level in which Governors of red states ran against the President in 2014 instead of their Democratic opponents. Stoking the hate and fear of the "other" brought out the hard right base, all right.
And hate is precisely what is driving Attorney General, Governor Elect Greg Abbott's recent lawsuit against the President.
Greg Abbott has filed a lawsuit against President Obama's executive action on immigration.
Greg Abbott joins other right wing states in calling the President's actions "an abuse of power." Sixteen states have joined the Texas lawsuit. Despite the fact that the U.S. Senate passed a bi-partisan immigration bill last year, the U.S. House Speaker refused to bring the same up for a vote. The tea party fascists, led by TX Senator Ted Cruz, must have bullied or at least frightened John Boehner into inaction.
The President, a deeply reflective man and a Constitutional lawyer to boot, is hardly one to charge recklessly ahead with cowboy amnesty. But none of this matters to a group that is blinded by hate.
Texas is leading a 17-state coalition suing over President Barack Obama's recently announced executive actions on immigration, arguing in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that the move "tramples" key portions of the U.S. Constitution.
This is one of many
frivolous lawsuits that the Texas Attorney has filed against the Obama Administration.
As it turns out, it is Greg Abbott himself who is trampling on Texas taxpayers.
For the past 12 years, Abbott has served as attorney general of Texas. Historically a low-key post, it has been best known in recent years as serving as the main vehicle for going after deadbeat parents delinquent on their child support, as well as representing the state in lawsuits. These suits historically have been unifying exercises where the attorney general seeks justice on behalf of Texans. A major example was when a former officeholder, Dan Morales, secured more than $17 billion in a settlement against big tobacco companies. But ever since the creation of the tea party five years ago, Abbott has appeared content with using the office as his personal soapbox. Filing frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit, Abbott brags about his wasteful litigiousness in office, saying his typical day consists of waking up, suing the president and going home.
Unfortunately, Abbott shows no signs of reforming this lacking governing strategy if elected. Stump speeches, TV ads and debate performances show Abbott’s almost pathological obsession with harping on the perceived failures of President Barack Obama rather than focusing on why people should elect Abbott and not his opponent.
It should come as no surprise that Rick Perry and Greg Abbott are waging yet another right wing hate campaign against the POTUS. To the haters it does not matter that just about every President since Eisenhower have issued executive actions on immigration. Indeed, their sainted President Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to three million undocumented residents in 1986.
Now, Republicans will never admit it, but their man-turned-god, Ronald Reagan, was the first Republican president to take executive action on immigration to put a screeching halt to his party’s inhumane treatment of Hispanic immigrants. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the what would prove to be the last comprehensive immigration reform bill to pass Congress. The legislation, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) granted up to 3 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship if they had lived in America “continuously” since 1982, or four years; nearly identical to President Obama’s proposal for comprehensive immigration reform Ted Cruz will not let House Republicans debate or vote on.
Nor does it matter to Greg Abbott that his case is especially lame.
Though widely lauded in conservative circles as a test of presidential powers, the Texas lawsuit was quickly dismissed by immigration lawyers as nothing more than a stunt to appease a base of hard-line conservatives.
“This is completely political theater,” said Robert Loughran, an Austin-based immigration attorney. “The lawsuit fails both on procedural grounds and on the merits.”
David Leopold, a former national president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, called the president’s executive action “absolutely solid,” also predicting Abbott’s lawsuit will eventually fail in court.
“It’s a frivolous complaint, not a serious lawsuit. It’ll be dismissed,” he said. “I don’t see any merits to this lawsuit at all.”
So, if this latest stunt is nothing more than political theater, why is Greg Abbott going there? He won the election in November. Granted, only 34% of registered voters showed up at the polls so the Governor elect hardly has a mandate. That said, he won. So, why does Greg Abbott believe he has to continue to stoke the fear and racism that resides within his hard right base?
It is called the politics of hate and anger.
Jim Moore, a well known Texas journalist and author of "Bush's Brain" nicely sums up the motivation driving Greg Abbott's actions against Texans.
Snip.
He's also wasting money on frivolous lawsuits, which is what Abbott insisted he was trying to stop by pushing tort reform. The Texas AG has bragged that he has a simple job that involves getting up in the morning, going to the office, and suing President Obama. In fact, he's done that 30 times, according to the Associated Press, and has consumed 14,113 hours of time by staff and state lawyers at a cost to taxpayers of $2.58 million dollars. These are not significant cultural touchstones Abbott is trying to change with his interpretations of the law since in most of the cases Texas is the leading, or only plaintiff.
Abbott, undoubtedly, believes he is doing the work of the state of Texas and representing the wishes of the people by fighting gay marriage, abortion rights, voter identification regulations, legislative districts that discriminate against minorities, gun control, and federal laws that make Texas function like much of the rest of the nation. But he's not. Greg Abbott is causing unnecessary pain for innocent people that are trying to live simple lives and he does it while claiming he stands on principle and is protecting the law.
Legal strategies ought to involve more than simply a clinical evaluation of the law. They deserve introspection and evaluation for societal impact. Greg Abbott's entire tenure as attorney general has been based upon political posturing; not the law and the humanity the law is supposed to serve. He just seems angry.
And he's taking it out on Texas.
As far as I am concerned the right wing has never recovered from the fact that President Barack Obama, a black man, has been elected.
Twice.
Obama's election was not a fluke. And yet the right wing continues to cling to a world of white superiority that no longer exists. (Except in the recent tragic cases of police department's excessive use force against African American men).
The black man that white racists have long demonized achieved something that many of them could never realize. In most of their life times.
The right's world has been upended. Cynical and self-serving politicians like Greg Abbott know it and they ratchet up the fear and outrage dial for all that it is worth.
And so there is a reason why Greg Abbott wants to keep undocumented residents in the shadows. God forbid should more "others" have access to the same opportunities as the presumed entitled. Greg Abbott and his colleagues don't seem to care that they are alienating a large segment of our society. This is especially true in Texas where most Latinos fully support the President's action on immigration.
But hate knows no reason or rationality.
Fellow Kossack Bob Johnson brilliantly shined a laser focused light on the conservative demonization of the President in his diary.
Conservative demonization of Obama allowed racists to crawl out from under their rocks.
Indeed it has. The racists that crawled out from under their rocks are blatant. The right wing hate machine driven by self-serving partisan hacks like Sarah Palin, Karl Rove and news outlet Fox "News" and Rush Limbaugh have emboldened the previously closeted racists.
What has happened in the intervening years of the Obama presidency has been nothing less than a great unleashing -- the legitimization of racism and racist expression. The stewards at Fox News will always deny racism, as will others in conservative leadership including a number of conservative members of Congress, but their steady demonization of the president has allowed racists to emerge from their dank holes and voice their hatred openly and without shame.
The rise of the Tea Party during the health care debate, no matter how contrived or staged, was simply the organizing by right wing power brokers of those holding racial resentments. The Tea Party provided racists with a sheepskin, euphemistically labeled "dissent," as a way to publicly espouse their virulent racial hatred. Of course, the Republican Party has long stirred the racial resentment pot as part of their electoral strategy, but never before could they stoke and organize a movement with a primary objective of coalescing the fearful, the bigoted and the blatantly racist. Conservatives exploited the election of Barack Obama to organize their hardcore base.
Reading the message boards of many major media outlets in any part of the country during the Michael Brown/Ferguson coverage shows just how far we have receded as a society. Open expressions of virulent racism are prevalent, with many such comments not even subject to removal by moderators. Virulent racists feel free to express their hatred openly without fear of sanction.
Reports of Republican Party officials making openly racist or subtly racist comments are now so common that we are nonplussed when we read the latest crazed utterances. Over the course of Obama's tenure, the "freedom" to express such thoughts has expanded greatly, and attempts to call out these comments are often met with 1) a denial of racism, and 2) shouts of "Freedom of speech!" and "First Amendment!"
Bob Johnson is not the only one who has noticed a rise in
blatant racism during the Obama years.
Many whites, particularly of the older generation, may have subconscious feelings of superiority to blacks. My father, who passed in 2012 at the age of 92, is an example of this. Although, he evolved and supported Obama in 2008 and beyond, I recall him telling me when I was a kid that there were studies that proved that whites were more intelligent than blacks. I never believed it and even at a young age I felt the deck was stacked against African Americans from having learning and economic opportunities.
But the fact that my dad, a self proclaimed liberal who received a Masters in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and who became a staunch supporter of civil rights in the 1960s, had that belief shows how pervasive that thinking was in the 1940s and 50s.
When President Obama was first elected there were great expectations placed upon him from both sides of the political spectrum. The right has held him to an impossibly high standard and they seem to blame him for anything wrong that happens, domestic and foreign from the humanitarian crisis on our border to the downing of a Malaysian domestic airliner over the Ukraine by Russian forces to the conflict in the Gaza Strip.
Greg Abbott and the other right wing state's lawsuit against Obama's executive actions on immigration is part of this ugly pattern of hatred and divisiveness that pervades and drives the right.
Until we stop electing these people we can continue to look forward to more of the same.
Texas Dems we have three and a half years to make sure Greg Abbott is a one term Governor. We know what we have to do. We cannot let a day go by without calling out the extreme right that are in charge of our state. We will use social media to its full extent. We will write letters to the newspaper editors. We will call out our newspapers and media if any should ignore an evil deed coming out of Austin. We will use the organizing tactics in concert with Battleground TX, the Texas Democratic Party and the Harris Co. Democratic Party (the largest in the state). We will organize phone banks, voter registration and canvassing efforts.
In Houston we will hold a huge voter registration drive at the MLK activities. Most of us will have to become re-duputized in early January. The county clerks offices will post dates for voter registration training in mid December.
We are not giving up because we deserve far better than the likes of Greg Abbott and Dan God Help Us Patrick. Texas deserves better even though most of us don't vote.
A reminder to those of us in the Houston area that we are meeting on Saturday at 1:00 p.m. at Cafe Express. Please email me if you need the address.
