The Republican vow to block any candidate President Obama nominates to the Supreme Court—any candidate, no mattered how qualified—says, at base, that this president doesn’t have the authority of a real president. He doesn’t have the authority of Ronald Reagan, who got Justice Anthony Kennedy confirmed in the last year of his presidency, or of any of the other presidents who have done the same.
Hmm. What could possibly make this president so different from every other president? Some people have a theory:
“Our president, the president of the United States, has been disrespected from Day 1,” Carol Richardson, 61, said on Wednesday as she colored a customer’s hair at Ultra Beauty Salon in Hollywood, S.C., a mostly black town near Charleston. “The words that have been said, the things the Republicans have done they’d have never have done to another president. Let’s talk like it is, it’s because of his skin color.”
As sure as the sun comes up in the morning, Republicans will be outraged by any suggestion that the president’s race plays a role in their opposition to him doing his job and them then doing theirs. But you reap what you sow, and Republicans have been sowing enthusiastically for seven years now:
“I can tick instance after instance over the last seven years where Republicans have purposely tried to diminish the president’s authority,” [Rep. G.K.] Butterfield said. “This is just really extreme, and leads me to the conclusion that if this was any other president who was not African-American, it would not have been handled this way.” [...]
“You hear the thing about: ‘He’s not a citizen. He oversteps his bounds. He’s divisive.’ One thing after another,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge, Democrat of Ohio. “This has been going on since the day he was elected in 2008.”
Sure, today’s Republicans would oppose anything any Democratic president did, but after seven years we know that their attacks on Obama have a very particular edge. They’re not just opposing him, time and time again they’re insisting that his presidency is illegitimate, that he has less authority than the Constitution grants or than his predecessors have enjoyed. That’s not just partisanship. Republicans don’t have to be sitting around together saying “the [racial slur] doesn't get his way on this” for it to be racially motivated. The fundamental disrespect is long since baked in to how they view Obama.
The president may not be able to say it bluntly, but the rest of us can and should: Race is at work here.
