Nevertheless, She Persisted.

This 1906 Cartoon depicts the Senate as a more fearsome place than it is today.

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Galatians 3:28-29

Nevertheless.

She persisted.

This should not be a partisan issue.

The United States Senate has done something that they ought not to have done.

They have confirmed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General of the United States, which means they have placed a man with a public record of racism in charge of overseeing the Civil Rights laws that are supposed to protect our citizens against racial discrimination. And they have placed a man opposed to the equal treatment of our LGBTQ citizens in charge of protecting those citizens.

Along the way they silenced Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren using an obscure Senate regulation  called “Rule Nineteen,” which dictates polite discourse in Senate debates and states in its second section:

“No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”

Her sin was in reading a letter from Coretta Scott King written in opposition to the appointment of Sessions to a Federal judgeship after he was nominated by President Reagan. In her letter she detailed how Sessions had worked against Civil Rights and had used the Voting Rights Act to harass civil rights workers who were trying to help African Americans to vote by absentee ballot.

He used an act designed to prevent voter suppression in order to suppress voters.

Sessions was defeated for the judgeship, but he was elected to the senate a few years later. And as a senator he has continued to oppose Civil Rights for African Americans as well as for LGBTQ persons. 

Curiously, after voting to use Rule Nineteen to silence Senator Warren, no one objected a day later when several of her male colleagues read the full text of the letter into the Congressional Record.

In an article published in TheAtlantic.com, Russell Berman reviewed the genesis of Rule Nineteen:

“In February 1902, the Senate was debating a treaty to annex the Philippines when Senator Benjamin ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman became infuriated that his fellow South Carolina Democrat and onetime close friend, John McLaurin, had switched his position to join Republicans in supporting the accord. McLaurin, Tillman raged, had succumbed to ‘improper influences’; Republicans had showered him with perks and privileges, Tillman charged, and he had caved in return.

“A former South Carolina governor whose statue still stands on the statehouse grounds, Tillman has drawn more recent attention for being a white supremacist who advocated until his death the lynching of black people who tried to vote. Back then, he was known for his outspokenness and his ‘less than courteous’ manner of debating in the Senate. Alerted to Pitchfork Ben’s comments, an incensed McLaurin ‘dashed into the Senate chamber and denounced Tillman's statement as “a willful, malicious, and deliberate lie,’” according to a Senate history of the incident. Tillman responded by physically attacking McLaurin ‘with a series of stinging blows,’ the historians wrote, and efforts to separate the brawling Southerners ‘resulted in misdirected punches landing on other members.’”

The problem is not that Attorney General Sessions engaged in racist acts thirty years ago. The problem is that he has not apologized, nor has he clearly stated a present understanding that what he did then was wrong. But it does not end there. He has continued to oppose Civil Rights from that time until now.

The unintentional connection to “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman through the invocation of Rule XIX is worth a closer look.

In an article published in the Washington Post, Sarah Larimer cites an Associated Press report that up until his death in 1918, Tillman was an unapologetic defender of his “post-Reconstruction tactics to restore white rule in the then-majority-black state by killing any black who tried to vote.”

“The purpose of our visit was to strike terror,” he said in the Senate in 1900 about the so-called Hamburg Massacre of 1876, where his militia killed black Republicans. “And the next morning when the Negroes who had fled to the swamp returned to the town the ghastly sight which met their gaze of seven dead Negroes lying stark and stiff certainly had its effect.”

So a rule first voted into effect to civilize the behavior of a man who once practiced the most extreme form of voter suppression was used to suppress the witness of Coretta Scott King  and silence the dissent of Elizabeth Warren. And this was done in order to support the nomination of a man who continues to oppose the civil rights of minorities.

Nevertheless.

She persisted.

Sometimes it feels like we have gone through the looking glass.




Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Voting Rights and the Supreme Court

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God”?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord
shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
Isaiah 40:27-31

Yesterday the Supreme Court eviscerated the most important part of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. They eliminated the provision requiring states and counties with a history of discrimination to get pre-approval from the Justice Department before implementing changes in voting rights laws. Before the day was done, lawmakers in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas rushed to implement laws that will make it harder for African Americans to vote.

In 2006 when Congress extended the Voting Rights Act, the Senate passed it unanimously and the House had only 33 dissenting votes. President Bush signed the measure and gave a speech reminding all Americans that this was one of the most important bulwarks of our democracy.

Without the requirement for pre-approval, states can pass and implement restrictive laws which can only be challenged after the fact. And those challenges would typically work their way through the court system after one or more election cycles had already gone by. If the court did not like the way that states and counties were identified, then it would be better to require pre-approval for every change to voting requirements in every state.

I find myself coming back to Dr. King’s famous declaration of hope, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King adapted the phrase from the great 19th century abolitionist and preacher, Theodore Parker. King made that affirmation of faith in a speech given on March 25, 1965, in Montgomery, Alabama, at the conclusion of a march from Selma. The whole campaign was “centered around the right to vote.”

The Civil Rights movement was not aimed at achieving “equality” as an abstract concept; it was aimed at achieving equality as a practical reality. Achieving equality as a practical reality required laws. Voting was (and is) critical to changing laws.

In an impassioned dissent from the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared, "The Voting Rights Act became one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation's history." She added, "Thanks to the Voting Rights Act, progress once the subject of a dream has been achieved and continues to be made."

Later this summer, when we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, we will hear a great deal about equality as an abstract intellectual concept. But Dr. King was not killed, or jailed, or reviled, because of an abstract concept. He was killed because he led a movement that was changing America.