Rarely has the GOP fixation on race shown all its ugly facets like this

Rarely has the GOP fixation on race shown all its ugly facets like this

Washington Post

Opinion by 

Dana Milbank

Columnist

May 26, 2021 at 7:53 a.m. GMT+9

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.

From “I can’t breathe” to “I won’t confirm.”

President Biden had set a deadline of Tuesday for Congress to enact legislation to counter police brutality. But while the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act almost three months ago, Republican objections have bottled up negotiations in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office said the timing of Tuesday’s vote was a coincidence. (He had been trying to get a confirmation vote for nominee Kristen Clarke since she cleared the Judiciary Committee two weeks ago, but faced a Republican filibuster.) Still, Democrats were happy to point out the convergence.

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The Floyd murder by a Minneapolis police officer set off “a fight for justice,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “And here in the Senate, we will continue that fight when we vote to confirm the first Black woman to ever lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division.”

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the majority whip, also cited the Floyd anniversary in urging his colleagues to “consider the historic importance of this moment.”

Republicans considered. And then all but one (Susan Collins of Maine) voted not even to allow Clarke a confirmation vote — and, when that failed, voted by an identical tally against confirming Clarke. Not a single Republican spoke against Clarke on the floor Tuesday, not even when Durbin yielded to them for a final summation. Republicans in both the Senate and the House had other things they wanted to talk about on the Floyd anniversary.

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who previously floated the antisemitic notion that Jewish space lasers cause forest fires, began the day on Twitter by likening covid restrictions to the Holocaust.

On the Senate floor, 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.

Soon after Thune’s speech (and before the Clarke votes), Republican senators rose 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. Only five of the 50 Republican senators supported this health-policy veteran.

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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.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) on April 14 asked Justice Department nominee Kristen Clarke about a college opinion piece that she said was satirical. (Senate Judiciary Committee)

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s vote, Republicans had falsely portrayed Clarke as a defund-the-police wacko. Never mind that Clarke had the endorsement of dozens of police chiefs and the Major Cities Chiefs Association. And never mind that Clarke, educated at Harvard and Columbia, has had a storied career with the Justice Department, the New York attorney general’s office, the NAACP and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. So desperate were they for material to use against her that they highlighted a letter she co-wrote 27 years ago, at age 19, to her college newspaper — and even that was taken out of context.

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Last month, Republicans employed a similar smear against Vanita Gupta in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the nomination of the highly qualified Indian American woman to serve as the No. 3 Justice Department official over similar objections. (In her case, they took issue with a nine-year-old op-ed.) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who used the “defund” cudgel, called Gupta and Clarke “two of the most radical nominees ever put forward for any position in the federal government.”

“Look behind the smokescreens and remember that the No. 1 strategy of the Republican Party for 2022 is to keep voters from voting,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) charged Tuesday on the Senate floor. “And guess what? Ms. Clarke will run the voting rights section of the [Justice] Department, and Ms. Gupta . . . will supervise her.”

It’s not just a 2022 phenomenon. As The Post’s David Nakamura reported, Republicans have blocked the civil rights division from having a Senate-confirmed chief for eight of the 16 years of the Clinton and Obama presidencies — going all the way back to when Republican senators ridiculed Clinton nominee Lani Guinier, who is Black, as the “quota queen,” and the opposition to her was summarized as “strange name, strange hair, strange writings.”

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The family of George Floyd, invited to the White House Tuesday by Biden, also made the rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Karen Bass (Calif.) and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.). The only Republican on the Floyd family’s schedule, reportedly, was the GOP point man on police legislation, Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) — the chamber’s lone Black Republican.

Perhaps that’s just as well. In the year since Floyd’s murder, Republicans’ actions have only disgraced his memory.

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