Is Trump The Strom Thurmond Of 2020?

If you remember Strom Thurmond at all, you probably recall him as a senile, diaper-wearing far right Republican Senate pal of Joe Biden's, who died in 2003 (age 100)-- but that Republican part wasn't part of the equation until 1966. He was prominent politically decades earlier-- even as a presidential candidate. Earlier still, he was elected governor of South Carolina in 1946 as a Democrat (and with no opponent). Two years later, furious that Truman had desegregated the U.S. military, he jumped into the crowded 1948 presidential election as a Dixiecrat (States' Rights Democratic Party), winning 1,175,930 votes (2.41%), carrying 4 states-- South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana-- and being awarded 39 electoral votes, including one from a faithless Harry Truman elector from Tennessee. His most famous campaign speech included the line: "I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

Even after that shit-show-- which could have thrown the election to Thomas Dewey-- and after the beginning of an unending rant about the Democrats being "socialists," the Democratic Party was still happy to have him and his blatant racism in the party. Big tent! In 1952, he endorsed Republican Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson... but the Democrats still kept him in the party.

Two years later, still as a Democrat, he lost the Democratic Senate primary to incumbent Olin Johnston and then 4 years later (1954) ran as a write-in candidate ("Independent Democrat") and won over 63% of the vote against Democrat Edgar Brown. After that, he ran as a Democratic incumbent (1956) and (1960) winning with no opposition. He was the longest-serving senator in U.S. history but left the Democrats in 1964 over passage of the Civil Rights Act. (In 1957 he had conducted the the longest filibuster ever by a single senator-- 24 hours and 18 minutes-- against a very modest GOP-backed Civil Rights Act). It's worth noting that when he was 22 he had raped his family's 15 year old African-American maid, and never acknowledged their daughter, Essie Mae Washington, but did pay for her education and gave her money from time to time to keep her from exposing him, although she says she kept silent out of respect for him.

Having switched parties in the middle of his term, he was reelected 1966 as a Republican and became the first Republican to win a South Carolina Senate seat since 1872. He was reelected in 1972, 1978, 1984, 1990, and 1996, after which he retired, barely cognizant of his name and unable to control his bowels at his Senate desk.





If Trump keeps running the kind of campaign he's running today he's likely to win the same 4 seats Thurmond won plus Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Wyoming, West Virginia, Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, probably Kansas and possibly Nebraska and South Dakota. That's 82 electoral votes. But, according the Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent, that-- and all the House and Senate seats they would lose with Trump at the top of the ticket-- would be just the beginning of the pain for the GOP. His point yesterday was that young people’s attitudes toward the protests should worry the Republicans, which, he wrote, "could create long-term problems for the party. He noted that the New York Times has a good report on how dramatically the culture is shifting on questions involving systemic racism and police brutality, and how isolated President Trump has become on these issues. This quote really jumps out:

“Younger Republicans want to see racial disparities fixed,” said Wesley Donehue, a South Carolina-based G.O.P. strategist. “If Republicans don’t address these issues now, we will lose the next generation of young voters, just as we have minorities.”

Sargent backs it up with poll numbers, noting that 60% of Americans "think Trump has been delivering the wrong message about the protests. Remarkably, a majority of white Americans, 52%, say the same." And it gets worse for the GOP as you dig down:

The youngest U.S. adults, those ages 18 to 29, have the harshest assessment of the message Trump has been delivering about the protests. About three-quarters (76%) of those ages 18 to 29 say his message has been wrong, including close to half (48%) who say it has been completely wrong. Just 22% say it has been right.

"What’s more," wrote Sargent, "the new Pew polling also finds that an extraordinary 80 percent of those young Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement, 54 percent of them strongly. A recent Post Schar School poll helps underscore the point. Here’s what it found among Americans aged 18 to 29 years old:

• 82 percent of them support the protests
• 77 percent of them see the killing of George Floyd as a sign of broader problems in police treatment of black people
• 63 percent of them disapprove of Trump’s response to the protests
• 83 percent say police need to keep making changes to treat blacks equally to whites
• 58 percent prefer a president who will address the nation’s racial divisions, as opposed to restoring security by enforcing the law

Domestic Terrorism: The Oval Office by Nancy Ohanian

This group was born roughly between 1990 and 2003, when Thurmond finally died in a pool of his own excrement. "For them," wrote Sargent, "the touchstones we keep using to discuss this moment-- the racial turbulence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Nixon, 'law and order,' the 'silent majority,' hippies, hardhats, etc.-- might as well have unfolded in black and white. The oldest in this group turned 18 at around the time Americans elected their first black president. The youngest spent much of their childhood and teen years with America’s first black president in the White House. A large chunk of them probably don’t have any clear memory of any presidents other than Barack Obama and… Donald Trump."

Yet Trump, the only Republican president many of them really lived under while being politically aware, is entirely out of step with them on the underlying issues at stake. Numerous Trump administration officials have denied in recent days that systemic racism is a problem in law enforcement.

And even when Trump edges toward saying the right things, he does it with a sneer: He just told Fox News that it might be time to end chokeholds, but he also said the tactic “sounds so innocent, so perfect.”

Meanwhile, those young people are seeing mass protests fill cities across the country, in perhaps the largest outpouring of political aspirations they’ve ever experienced.

Yet they’re watching as Trump calls the protesters “THUGS,” rages that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” threatens to send in the military, lords over and then celebrates the tear-gassing of peaceful demonstrators, and urges Republicans to stand behind keeping military installations named after Confederate figures, in effect demanding that the GOP brand itself as an explicitly neo-Confederate party.

“This is a movement that’s questioning the power of the state-- the power of the police to kill people,” GOP strategist Rick Wilson, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “These young people are seeing this up close.”

Wilson added that many young people are experiencing this political movement in an “intimate” way, noting that its “size and demographics” threaten to usher in a “disastrous political moment” for Republicans.

“This has the potential to shape 20 years of American politics," Wilson told me. “It’s got every downside in the world built into it for the GOP."

Historic November Landslide In The Making?

Utah has a couple of blue and purple counties-- Salt Lake and Summit (which Hillary won in 2016) and Grand which she kind of won too-- 1,934 for Hillary and 1,932 for Señor Trumpanzee, a 43.4% to 43.4% tie, with #NeverTrump conservative Evan McMullin and Libertarian Gary Johnson getting most of the balance. In 2018 Mitt Romney lost both Summit and Grand to Jenny Wilson, a Democrat. And a putative Democrat, Blue Dog Ben McAdams narrowly ousted (50.1% to 49.9%) Republican incumbent Mia Love in UT-04, where the D+9 performance of Salt Lake County overcame the massive red tide in Utah, Sanpete and Juab counties.

But we all know that Utah is a beet red, blood red state. Utah voted for FDR and Truman and in 1964 backed LBJ against Barry Goldwater, 219,628 (54.9%) to 180,682 (45.1%). But 1964 was the last time Utah gave its electoral votes to a Democrat. In fact, since 2000, Obama's first race was the only time Utah gave over 30% of it;'s vote to a Democrat. McCain beat him 62.6% to 34.4%. Usually, Democrats get around a quarter of the presidential vote in Utah-- worse than in the Deep South. And that's why the new poll from UtahPolicy.com was so shocking yesterday:

If it gets so bad for Trump that he loses Utah, he'll wind up the way Strom Thurmond did when he ran for president in 1948 on the Dixiecrat Party and won 4 states. The electoral map looked very different then and current Republican bastions now-- like Texas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Georgia and Utah-- were deep, deep blue. But these were the states that went for Thurmond in 1948 and will go for Trump in November:

• Alabama

Thurmond- 79.75%
Truman- not on the ballot
Dewey- 19.04%

• Louisiana

Thurmond- 49.07%
Truman- 32.75%
Dewey- 14.45%

• Mississippi

Thurmond- 87.17%
Truman- 10.09%
Dewey- 2.62%

• South Carolina

Thurmond- 71.97
Truman- 24.14%
Dewey- 3.78

Thurmond also did pretty well in Arkansas, Florida and Georgia. He wasn't on the ballot in Utah. Anyway, as I was saying, if Trump can't win Utah... the national election results in November will be pretty gratifying for normal Americans. How could that happen, though? Well, ever hear of a U.S. president conspiring-- relatively openly-- with Russia and Saudi Arabia to drive up the price of gasoline at the pump? Yesterday the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia and Russia ended their oil price war on Sunday by finalizing a deal to make the biggest oil production cuts in history, following pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to support an energy sector ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic." That may give economically hard-pressed American voters some food for thought... at least about where Trump's priorities really are. Cliff Krauss, writing for the NY Times, noted that with "Trump, facing a re-election campaign, a plunging economy and American oil companies struggling with collapsing prices, [he] took the unusual step of getting involved after the two countries entered a price war a month ago. Mr. Trump had made an agreement a key priority. It was unclear, however, whether the cuts would be enough to bolster prices. Before the coronavirus crisis, 100 million barrels of oil each day fueled global commerce, but demand is down about 35 percent. While significant, the cuts agreed to on Sunday still fall far short of what is needed to bring oil production in line with demand... While the planned cut is slightly smaller than a tentative pact reached last Thursday, the deal should bring some relief to struggling economies in the Middle East and Africa and global oil companies, including American firms that directly and indirectly employ 10 million workers."

Higher gas prices are never popular but Trump is counting on the fact that most Americans aren't using gas now and that they might not notice him driving up the price. Unfortunately for him though, most Americans probably agree with the New Yorker's David Remnick that Trump is the preëxisting condition in the Oval Office that has made everything worse than it had to be. "From the start," he wrote, "the Trump Administration has waged war on science and expertise, making a great nation peculiarly vulnerable to the foreseeable public-health calamity of the coronavirus. When has New York known a grimmer week? The sirens are unceasing. Funeral parlors are overwhelmed. Refrigerator trailers are now in service as morgues, and can be found parked outside hospitals all over town. We’re told that there are 'glimmers of hope,' that hospital admissions are slowing, that the curve is flattening. Yet the misery is far from over... Across the country, the coronavirus continues to ravage the confined and the vulnerable, from inmates of the Cook County jail, in Chicago, to workers at the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Camilla, Georgia. Data from a variety of reliable sources show that African-Americans, who suffer disproportionately from poverty, inadequate housing, limited access to good health care, and chronic illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension, are dying from covid-19 at horrific rates. The pandemic is an event in the natural history of our species, but it is also a political episode. Its trajectory is shaped by policy measures specific to particular governments. The fact that the United States is experiencing tremendous losses-- that it has far more covid-19 cases than any other country in the world-- relates to a number of collective risk factors and preëxisting conditions. The most notable one is to be found in the Oval Office." Remnick joked that from the beginning of his term, Trump "practiced social distancing from anyone who told him what he didn’t want to hear."

The coronavirus has inflicted a level of pain that is deep and global. And yet many nations, from South Korea to Germany, have done far better at responding to it than the United States has. The reasons for the American failing include a lack of preparation, delayed mobilization, insufficient testing, and a reluctance to halt travel. The Administration, from its start, has waged war on science and expertise and on what Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon called “the administrative state.” The results are all around us. Trump has made sure that a great nation is peculiarly vulnerable to a foreseeable public-health calamity.

...The knowledge that we are led so ineptly and with such brazen self-regard is humiliating to millions of American citizens, if not to their leader. Trump gives himself “a ten” for his performance and berates any reporter who dares to challenge that premise. “You should say, ‘Congratulations! Great job!’ ” he told one, “instead of being so horrid in the way you ask the question!”

A nation facing a common threat normally pulls together, but Trump’s reflex is always to divide; he has invoked a multiplying litany of enemies. He directs his fire at the Obama Administration, at the World Health Organization, and at governors from Albany to Sacramento, with their constant pleas for ventilators, test kits, and face masks. The Democrats are to blame for everything. Early in the year, as the pandemic grew, they “diverted” the attention of the federal government, because “every day was all about impeachment,” as Trump’s unfailing loyalist Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, put it.

At a time of medical peril and economic devastation, the President heads to the White House briefing room and frames the terms of his reëlection campaign. It is a campaign of cynicism and authoritarian impulses. To begin with, he has made it clear that he does not approve of efforts to make voting easier in November. Why should he? He takes a dim view of early voting, voting by mail, and same-day registration. Such reforms, he complains, would produce “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Let's hope. As Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) told DWT readers a few hours ago, "Last week, Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.  I will support him wholeheartedly, with no reservations. As many of you know, I supported Elizabeth Warren in the primaries.  Her leadership in our current crisis, as exemplified by her April 8 NYT op-ed, shows why she could have been one of our greatest presidents. After she dropped out of the race, I switched my Michigan primary vote to Bernie Sanders. Why? Because Senator Sanders and I agree on the need to transform our country in bold ways, including:  

•  Medicare for All
• A Green New Deal
• Real worker voice and power in individual companies, industries and society

Bernie didn’t just run two successive presidential campaigns-- he inspired a movement that will have deep impacts on American policy and politics for years to come. Now, Bernie, Elizabeth and I will join with other progressives to create a veritable tsunami of organizing around our priorities to help sweep Joe Biden to power. The more we contribute, the more we help shape the fall campaign with open hearts and our best ideas, the more a Biden presidency will move America towards dignity and justice for all."

If that funny-talking Limey John Oliver thinks he can embarrass "Miss Mitch" McConnell, he's got another think coming

John Oliver tells us all about the "Thurmond Rule" -- and
shows us Miss Mitch calling it "this rule that doesn't exist"


"If the President has trouble doing nothing, we will be more than happy to show him how it is done."

-- Senate Majority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell, as
quoted this morning by the Borowitz Report (see below)

by Ken

First, a confidential to whoever thought it was a good idea to have John Oliver's Last Week Tonight off HBO's airwaves for three months: WTF??? I assume there were Reasons. There are always Reasons, aren't there?) I just trust that somewhere among those Reasons there's some assurance that the LWT team will be on the job with only minimal interruptions between now and the election.

As probably everyone knows by now -- since by this morning I saw the lead item plastered all over the Internet (here, for example, is Marlow Stern at The Daily Beast) -- the LWT gang was back last night. And as John explains, that lead item hadn't been in preparation for three months. It was only precipitated by Saturday's of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and the subsequent declaration by Senate Majority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell that his cabal of crackpots and thugs will not consider any nomination for a new Supreme Court justice which comes from President Obama. And never mind that the Constitution clearly makes such a nomination not only the president's right but his responsibility.


TO CATCH YOU UP ON THE STORY --

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a television appearance on Sunday, the leading Senate Republican warned President Obama “in no uncertain terms” against doing anything in his remaining three hundred and forty days in office.

“The President should be aware that, for all intents and purposes, his term in office is already over,” Mitch McConnell said on Fox News. “It’s not the time to start doing things when you have a mere eight thousand one hundred and sixty hours left.”

While acknowledging that the President has eleven months remaining in the White House, McConnell said that he and the President “have an honest disagreement about how long eleven months is.”

“The President believes it is almost one year,” he said. “I believe it is almost zero years. I’m not a mathematician, but I believe I am right.”

As for how Obama should spend his remaining time in office, McConnell said, “If the President has trouble doing nothing, we will be more than happy to show him how it is done.”

WELL, YOU KNOW THOSE RIGHT-WINGERS!

They don't answer to the law or the Constitution. They answer to a higher power: their megalomania and psychotic delusions.

Writing Saturday night, arguing that "we mustn't pretend that Justice Nino was anything but, you know, what he was," I may have surprised readers by being fairly accepting of Miss Mitch's declaration that his cabal will not allow consideration of an Obama Supreme Court nomination. But I was simply  accepting the reality --

that as our system has evolved, there isn't much chance of Senate consideration of a Supreme Court nomination that's made in the final year of a presidential term, even though the Constitution doesn't offer any such proscription. But it is the reality, isn't it?

I did, though, add a footnote noting that if we were to play the game I'm so fond of, If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot, we could expect Miss Mitch and his fellow cabalists to sing a wildly different tune. "Of course," I wrote,

if it was a Republican president faced with a Supreme Court vacancy in February of the fourth year of his/her term, any attempt by Democrats to interfere with his/her constitutional responsibility to name a replacement would be greeted with choruses of right-wing outrage and cries of "tyranny!"

Even as I wrote, I had a hunch that some version of this game had already been played for real. Now the Last Week Tonight team has given us the video.


DOES THE THURMOND RULE EVEN APPLY HERE?



I confess that when I wrote Saturday, I was fuzzy on the exact time frame specified in what John explains is known as the Republicans' Thurmond Rule. That's why I took pains to describe the situation of a president "faced with a Supreme Court vacancy in February of the fourth year of his/her term." The LWT segment clarifies that the actual terms of the Thurmond Rule would disallow a presidential nomination for a lifetime judgeship in the last six months of his term. (Note: I don't think we have to say "of his/her term" where Strom Thurmond is concerned. For old Strom, the idea of a "her" president was probably as inconceivable as, say, the idea of a "colored" president.)

As John Oliver points out in the segment, the last six months of the Obama administration begin on July 20. Meaning that even under the Thurmond Rule-that-isn't-a-rule, we're nowhere near the Point of No Lifetime Judicial Nominations.


SO WHAT? DOES IT MATTER AT ALL TO MISS MITCH?

Is there any reason to think that Miss Mitch cares any more about the terms of the wholly extra-constitutional Thurmond Rule than he cares about American law or the Constitution itself? He answers to no authority but the "Fuck America!" ethos of the 21st-century American Far Right, whose overriding goal is to turn the country into the toxic cesspool that is their minds.

Because, after all, Miss Mitch has done a lousy job of keeping it secret that throughout the Obama presidency his entire objective has been to obstruct and destroy. Fuck America! If he can't have his diseased vision of a fascist autocracy, then just fuck it, and Fuck All the Americans Who Don't Matter, because that's what right-wingers want to do: Fuck All the Americans Who Don't Matter. Of course for our One-Percenters, which is to say the most important group of Americans Who Matter, there's money to be made off the misery of the Americans Who Don't Matter. And for those who sense -- some rightly, some wrongly -- that they're being screwed but nevertheless embrace right-wing ideology, there's some kind of primitive satisfaction to be had in seeing those other poor souls screwed.

Otherwise, how to explain the existence, let alone the actual popular followings, of life forms like The Donald, Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz, and the world's most immoderate "moderate," Marco Rubio? What has appalled me most about the creatures who have made up the Republican presidential "fields" in this and the last couple of presidential election cycles isn't that their politics is so reactionary and stupid but that they are all such screamingly horrible, inexcusable people.

And in their various ways they have all cynically embraced, even encouraged, modern-day America's Flight from Reality, something I've been squawking about for years now. It's the triumph of reality-substitute over reality -- of, as Stephen Colbert framed it, "truthiness" over truth.


WE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH

In that Saturday footnote in which I speculated about the application of the If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot game to Miss Mitch's declaration of policy-by-hissy-fit. So what if it were to turn out that Miss Mitch was being hypocritical?

For right-wingers nowadays, hypocrisy is considered not just "no foul" but a virtual obligation. If you aren't being hypocritical, it's assumed you aren't really trying.

After all, hypocrisy is the least of it. Reality and truth have been prime casualties of the rise of the modern Far Right. Somewhere in the formative years of the new century, under the influence of propagandists like Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, and under the unwatchful eye and imbecile grin of George W. "Chimpy the Prez" Bush, the Right formally went off the truth standard, disclaiming any obligation at all to reality or truth.

Where Chimpy's own presidency faltered, it wasn't for lack of truthfulness, after all. He was never held to account for any of the lies with which his administration's policies had been sold. But well before he left the White House, Chimpy had begun to disappear before our very eyes, and it seemed clear to me that the public wasn't looking to him for truth -- about the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan policies, for example -- but instead was insisting on its right to newer and better lies.

Instead the people got the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008. And even then they didn't connect the dots: that there's a price to be paid for government by the One Percent for the One Percent. Similarly, if there's any price to be paid for Government by Lies, the bill comes due far, far down the line, and can usually be fobbed off on some poor, unsuspecting souls.

The Right's Grand Disconnect from Reality hit home for me in the 2008 presidential campaign of Young Johnny McCranky, in which the candidate managed not just to avoid ever speaking the truth about anything but on most issues to offer a minimum of two, and usually more, mutually contradictory lies. After the election, I looked at the number of votes McCranky had nevertheless scored, and couldn't help but think there was going to be a price to pay for the GOP's official Disconnect from Reality. Even so, I couldn't have imagined the 2012 and 2016 GOP presidential "fields."

And the hard core of Democratic officialdom managed to remain only a few steps behind, making it official party philosophy that the very most that Dems had to do was be just the merest hair's breadth better than the R's.


Ain't this a kick in the pants? Compared with the nutso ravings of Miss Mitch and The Donald and Ted from Alberta and the rest, Colonel Jessup's argument sounds reasonable.


BONUS: A SCENE FROM THE FLIGHT FROM REALITY

The great David Sipress is currently on "Daily Cartoon" duty at The New Yorker, and today's offering seems very much appropriate to the theme of "Reality as Perceived (and Promulgated) by the Modern-Day Right."

“I had a dream last night that Planned Parenthood
did something new and horrible to a fetus! We need
to launch an immediate congressional investigation.”

#

RIP Julian Bond, A Personal Hero

Saturday night, Julian Bond, one of my personal heroes, passed away. I didn't realize he was 75; I always assumed he was my age, maybe a year or two older. I first met him in 1966, and I'm going to tell you about that in a minute. In more recent years we've both been on the board of People for the American Way, where he has continued to inspire me. He's inspired a lot of people. In fact, this morning Eric Holder tweeted "Julian Bond-- activist, icon. A great man who made the gains of the next generation possible and the nation better. We owe him much."

From his days as the co-founder and communications director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s to his chairmanship of the NAACP in the 21st century, Julian was a visionary and tireless champion for civil and human rights. He served as the SPLC's president from our founding in 1971 to 1979, and later as a member of its board of directors.

With Julian's passing, the country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of justice. He advocated not just for African Americans, but for every group, indeed every person subject to oppression and discrimination, because he recognized the common humanity in us all.

When I was a sophomore at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, I became chairman of the Student Activities Board. In that position, over the years, I brought groundbreaking, mostly then-unknown artists to play at the campus, musicians on the cutting edge of pop culture: Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, The Dead, Otis Redding, the Airplane, Big Brother, Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, Muddy Waters, Country Joe, Ravi Shankar, Pink Floyd, The Byrds... But there was also a speakers series I felt I could use to help expose students to a more overtly cutting edge. I was happy to invite Timothy Leary to speak at the campus. And then there was Julian Bond.

Julian Bond was one of 8 African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in the wake of passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Come January 1966, however, the Georgia House voted 184-12 not to seat him because he publicly opposed the war against Vietnam. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House was depriving him of his freedom of speech and that they must seat him. They did, and I booked him to give a lecture at Stony Brook. Mrs. Couey, my lovely, batty old faculty adviser told me I couldn't present such an unbalanced program at a tax-funded university. I asked her if she wanted me to book the head of the KKK to balance it. "Now, Howie, you're so funny. You do the right thing." So I booked Senator Strom Thurmond as a speaker for the same evening. Balance!

A week before the event-- stoned out of my mind, as I was for my entire four years at Stony Brook-- I called Thurmond's office and explained that we're a struggling state university and the budget is tight and that I couldn't pay him the $5,000 I had offered and could he do it for $2,500? They said OK. I then called Julian and explained there was a change in plans and we would have to give him $7,500 instead of the agreed-upon $5,000. I felt I needed to do more.

The day of the event I picked Julian up at the airport in a fancy rented car and took him to the most exclusive restaurant in Suffolk County, the 3 Village Inn. We had an amazing dinner, and when we were leaving, we were approached in the parking lot by two waiters who said that although almost all the waiters were African Americans, this was the first time they had ever seen an African American eat there. They both had tears in their eyes.

Earlier I had asked my Hospitality Committee chairman to walk over to the Long Island Railroad Station and meet Thurmond. I gave him $10 and asked him to take the senator to a beer-and-pizza joint down the road from the campus for dinner. I knew Stephen would be very polite and charming to him-- it's in his nature. He was the most flamboyantly gay person I knew at the time.

Julian spoke, and the audience gave him a standing ovation. Then Senator Thurmond took the stage, and the entire audience-- as one and with no prompting-- got up and walked out of the gym. Mrs. Couey and Stephen, forever the most courteous and proper guy I had ever run across, stayed to hear Thurmond. No one ever told me what he talked about.

Julian served in the Georgia state legislature for two decades. Soon after he spoke at Stony Brook he was fighting on the floor of the Democratic convention in Chicago as the head of an alternative delegation trying to unseat the racists in the official delegation headed by Governor Lester Maddox, best known for having barred black students who wanted to eat at his segregated restaurant next to Georgia Tech with an ax handle-- and then for claiming LBJ and the communists put him out of business. The wave of the future. (The video at that link can't be embedded but I urge you to watch it.)

Sunday, President Obama issued this statement about Julian's passing: 

Julian Bond was a hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend. Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life-– from his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to his founding role with the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his pioneering service in the Georgia legislature and his steady hand at the helm of the NAACP. Michelle and I have benefited from his example, his counsel, and his friendship-– and we offer our prayers and sympathies to his wife, Pamela, and his children. Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that?

A few years before I met Julian, he wrote this poem (1960):

I too, hear America singing
But from where I stand
I can only hear Little Richard
And Fats Domino.
But sometimes
I hear Ray Charles
Drowning in his own tears
or Bird
Relaxing at Camarillo
Or Horace Silver doodling,
Then I don't mind standing
a little longer.

The "Thurmond rule" and the GOP's "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to government

Say, has anyone checked lately to see if Ol' Strom, that worthless, doody-sucking old pile of puke, is still dead?

The “[Thurmond] rule,” named for the late senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, posits that, sometime in the summer in a presidential election year, no judges will be confirmed without the consent of the Republican and Democratic leaders and the Judiciary Committee chairman and ranking minority member.

Democrats have refused to recognize the rule and are known to flout it, blissfully confirming Republican presidents’ nominees well into the fall — thus cutting the number of vacancies that an incoming Democratic president might be able to fill.

The Republicans not only adhere to the rule but have been most adept at a fine four-corner stall until the rule might plausibly be invoked.

by Ken

Well, sure, his North Carolina neighbor Jesse Helms was worse, but that doesn't mean Strom didn't devote every ounce of his being to being the vilest, scummiest human being he had it in him to be, right up to the end. Remember those months (years?) when only the people closest to him, who kept him tightly protected off from public scrutiny, knew for sure whether the giant blob of protoplasm was genuinely alive or not?

Now Al Kamen reminds us, in this item from his Washington Post "In the Loop" column, that whatever the present state of his vital signs, the shame of South Carolina continues to befoul the Republic. To make it even more delicious, it's with the complicity of Senate Democrats, but then, what would you have them do? There is a principle involved, after all.

Still, while Senate Dems stand by their modest principle, Senate Republicans get to screw them both ways, no matter which party holds the White House. Brother Al --

Here come the judges

The Senate on Monday confirmed the last three of 17 judges under a deal cut by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican leader Mitch McConnell in March. The three nominees — one to an appellate court, the others to U.S. District Court seats — had been confirmed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The three are Jacqueline H. Nguyen for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California, John Z. Lee for a District Court seat in Illinois and Kristine G. Baker for a District Court seat in Arkansas. Nguyen would be the first Vietnamese American federal appeals court judge.

The action leaves 19 judicial nominees awaiting votes on the Senate floor, five of them for appeals courts and 14 for trial or district court slots.

While some observers — including, sadly, this column — too often dismiss the district judges as chopped liver, it should be noted that they are the ones who do the heavy lifting in keeping the federal courthouses running and case backlogs as low as possible.

As it turns out, many of those confirmed under the deal are filling seats in courthouses where there are judicial “emergencies,” meaning there aren’t enough judges to keep up with the work.

So the 19 pending nominees, all of them approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year, will sweat it out until the August recess, when the “Thurmond rule” often shuts down the process.

The “rule,” named for the late senator from South Carolina . . . .

Which of course is where we came in, dear reader.

One more thing about those district judges "often dismissed as chopped liver." It is, of course, true that "they are the ones who do the heavy lifting in keeping the federal courthouses running and case backlogs as low as possible." They are also the "bench" for those circuit-court appeals judges, who in turn have their shot at positioning themselves for Supreme Court vacancies. The more the Republicans are able to pack the district courts with their scum and the Democrats are unable to get confirmation even for their inoffensive (except to out-of-touch-with-reality zealots) moderates, the more the weight of the judiciary is stacked against judicial reason.

At this point, while it remains theoretically possible, though practically speaking improbable, that the Obama administration may be able to get itself fully staffed by the time its first -- and possibly only -- term draws to a close, it's not possible that the president will succeed in replenishing the dangerously depleted federal judiciary. Imagine how the America-hating vermin who make up the Senate Republican Infestation must be congratulating themselves for successfully Democratic judicial appointments, keeping them to a bare minimum, until the sacred "Thurmond rule" kicks in and lifts the weight of the obstructionist burden from their shoulders.

I'm also thinking, as we take this stroll down memory lane revisiting the ghosts of Strom and Jesse, of the relief many of us felt when the pair of them finally had the decency to depart the Senate. (Strom was finally pronounced officially dead six months later, but Jesse, clinging to his reputation as the country's biggest son of a bitch, hung on for another five years.) Not to mention the same-cycle skedaddling of putrid Phil Gramm. Surely, we thought, the caliber of Republican senators couldn't help but be upgraded with those departures. The joke is on us.

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Reform, American Style

If you caught NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) on Meet the Press laying out, lamely, the GOP's "gauzy agenda," you may have noticed two things-- that DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen looks brilliant and energetic in comparison (which is a riot-- but even high ranking Republicans admit that Sessions is a catastrophe for the Party of No) and that the GOP has no agenda except to go back to the Bush era nostrums that nearly wrecked the economy and from which the Republicans are now endeavoring to prevent President Obama from digging out from under. Yesterday at Washington Monthly Steve Benen didn't miss a beat in recognizing a clear and developing pattern. "We need to go back to the exact same agenda." Benen seems incredulous. "In context, the agenda Sessions seems to want 'to go back to' was that of the Bush/Cheney administration and the Republican Congress. Indeed, GOP leaders are not only urging a return to failed Bush policies, they're even praising the failed former president.

The chairmen of the two Republican campaign committees defended the presidency of George W. Bush in television appearances over the weekend, a preview of the GOP's planned pushback against expected Democratic attacks on the last president.

"People had jobs when Republicans were not only in charge but George Bush was there," said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas) during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press.

John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told C-SPAN's Newsmakers program that "Bush's stock has gone up a lot since he left office," adding: "I think a lot people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush's administration, and I think history will treat him well."

"Republican committee chairmen like Sessions and Cornyn," Benen reminds us, "are supposed to know better. Indeed, the entire campaign is quickly becoming inexplicable. In recent weeks, we've seen high-profile Republicans urge the party to return to Bush's economic agenda, Bush's Social Security agenda, Bush's tax policies, and Bush's regulatory agenda. With just four months to go before the midterm elections, Republican candidates seem to seriously believe if we just go back to the policies that failed miserably, and created our current mess(es), we'll all be better off. Dems have been trying to push this argument for months, and for some reason, the GOP now appears intent to help. It seems more than a little risky."

So why do Democrats cater to these discredited losers? Why do they water down every good idea so that the end results are things-- like the painfully too small Stimulus and the so-so healthcare reform bill and the Wall Street-friendly financial reform bill-- that just don't do the job Americans elected Obama and the Democrats to do? Yesterday we got word that the latest compromise with the Devil will result in teaching jobs being sacrificed on the altar of perpetual war.

House Democratic leaders will accept the Senate’s plan to pass a stripped-down supplemental spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while seeking another vehicle for money to prevent the layoffs of some 140,000 teachers, a well-informed House aide said Monday.

The decision reflects the reality that Democrats lack the votes in the Senate to attach billions of dollars in help for states to keep teachers on the payroll this fall... In the Senate, Republicans and some Democrats have objected to the added domestic spending being added to a war supplemental, even if it is offset by other cuts. The budget deficit can’t take another hit, those senators say.

They mean, can't take a hit for teachers and education, not for endless, pointless, disastrous wars... that's fine (of course; some things never change, regardless of cute campaign slogans).

So this afternoon the Senate dramatically ended the conservative filibuster on extending unemployment benefits-- at least until after the midterms. Democrats-- from Obama and Pelosi right on down the food chain to... Donna Brazile-- have been castigating Republicans for blocking benefits. "Because of the Republicans, about 33 people lose their benefits every minute," says Brazile in a Democratic Party e-mail (Speaker Pelosi tweeted that 2,642,581 Americans had lost their benefits since the GOP started on this particular hissy fit, so well summed up by Alan Grayson last night). Well, it isn't false, but Brazile forgot to mention-- as did Obama, Harry Reid, Pelosi and everyone else-- that not only have a couple Republicans finally signed on, but that one putative Democrat, Ben Nelson (D-NE), was the single vote that prevented unemployment benefits from passing last time. Taking advantage of Robert Byrd's death, Nelson crossed the aisle and voted with most of the Republicans to ensure the death of unemployment insurance for those 2,642,581 Americans the Speaker was lamenting in her eloquent tweet. 

If you don't think Obama, the DNC, the DSCC and the execrable OFA will do all they can to help Nelson get re-elected in 2012, you haven't been paying attention. "Conservatives in the Senate," wailed Brazile, "have been at this for weeks-- abusing the rules to block Democrats from passing legislation. Their filibuster means millions of people lose their unemployment checks, and the entire economy suffers because of it." Let me look through this letter again for a mention of Ben Nelson. Nope-- zilch. Brazile, the Vice Chair for Voter Registration and Participation for the DNC, offers not a word about Ben Nelson, no mention that if he had died instead of Byrd, millions of unemployment checks would already have gone out.

This all brings us back to the filibuster, and why conservatives-- yes, on both sides of the aisle-- have kept it alive. These kinds of reforms are next to impossible to achieve because there always seems to be a corporate-friendly conservative ruling coalition-- usually always bipartisan-- running the show. The filibuster isn't even etched in stone, and there was once a time when progressives almost got rid of the equally idiotic Electoral College. Allow me to quote from the Gospel According to Rick, actually from Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, on the time progressive reformers almost abolished that profoundly oligarchic impediment to democracy in 1970:

Another longtime dream of reformers was to do away with antiquated and antidemocratic electoral college. The House had passed a bill for direct popular election of presidents in September of 1969 by a vote of 338 to 70. But as Senator Strom Thurmond knew better than anyone else, the South's major political trump card was the threat of a renegade third-party presidential candidate using his electoral votes to keep either of the major parties from an electoral college majority. Thurmond [R-SC] had Senate Judiciary chair James Eastland [D] of Mississippi bottle the bill up in committee. Birch Bayh [the progressive father of the conservative shithead Bayh from the same state] threatened to block consideration of [segregationist posterboy] Harrold Carswell unless the debate came to the floor. When it did, in the summer of 1970, Thurmond, Eastland and Sam Ervin filibustered. Nixon tried to use the presidential bully pulpit to force a vote. Stirringly he intoned, "Our ability to change this system in time fir the 1972 elections is a touchstone of the impulse to reform in America today. It will be the measure of our ability to avert calamity by anticipating it." ... His motives, though, were not noble. Getting rid of the electoral college would crush George Wallace's power as a presidential candidate. Unfortunately for Nixon [well, really for America], cloture failed, and the electoral college survived its greatest threat in two hundred years.

At least the unemployment benefits that were restored today will be retroactive. But what happens on December 1? Will Republicans and a lame duck Congress be ready to deliver a small lump of coal to millions of American families for Christmas this year? Who will be leading the "War on Christmas 2010"? Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Miss McConnell? According to the video below, it looks like McConnell is already practicing:

Isn't it nice to know that in the end Harry Dent, architect of the GOP "Southern strategy," sort of took it back? Never mind, Harry!

I think we're all familiar with the "Southern strategy," the concept by which Republicans took full advantage of Southern white resentment at the civil rights revolution and the minimal empowerment of blacks. It's what got Richard Nixon the GOP nomination for president in 1968 and then put him in the White House, and it was then used to turn the South into the Republican bastion it remains to this day.

I think too that anyone with memories of the Nixon White House knows the name of Harry Dent (seen above in 1969 with President Nixon in the background, back to the camera, talking to Rep. George H. W. Bush), a key Nixon adviser. But I for one didn't appreciate how the South Carolinian Dent and the Southern strategy intersected. Harry Dent was, more or less, the architect and living embodiment of the Southern strategy.

In the New York Times Magazine's annual "The Lives They Lived" issue, out tomorrow, our friend Rick Perlstein has a terrific piece on Dent and his role as the chief conceptualist and enforcer of the Southern strategy--first as right-hand man to South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond (he was, it seems, the man who persuaded Strom to bolt the Democratic Party for the GOP in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater's candidacy) and later as Nixon's "Southern strategist."

The funniest touch is Rick's tribute to Dent's "gift for soothing the egos of powerful men": "On the Nixon Oval Office tapes you can hear him agreeing with whatever the president says almost before he's through saying it." The rest isn't funny at all.

Of Dent's White House service, Rick writes:

Most of Dent's days were spent working the back channels, assuring Southerners that the administration would stonewall federal court desegregation decisions. After Nixon's first Supreme Court nominee, South Carolina's Clement Haynsworth, withdrew under a cloud of corruption allegations, the president ordered Dent to "find a good federal judge further South and further to the right." Dent obliged him with G. Harrold Carswell, who once campaigned for the Georgia State Legislature with the credo, "I believe that segregation of the races is proper and the ONLY practical and correct way of life in our states." Nixon, following Dent's example, argued that the opposition to Carswell's nomination was mere regional bigotry against the South. Liberals, not without reason, regarded Dent, Time reported, as "a Southern-fried Rasputin in the Nixon administration."

Dent was apparently touchy about charges that his career was built on race-baiting, cultivating and politically exploiting racial animus. He seems to have been capable of great indignation at such imputations. But in the end, in a twist that falls somewhere between touching and stomach-turning, "he came clean," as Rick puts it:

The lay preacher in Dent suffered from a guilty conscience. In his 1978 memoir, "The Prodigal South Returns to Power," Dent wrote that his politics were never racist. "The aim of the Southern strategy," he claimed, was merely "to have the South treated just like any other section of the U.S.A." Three years later, when he retired from law to preach the Gospel full time, he came clean. Yes, he admitted, of course he had exploited race to aggrandize Southern power. "When I look back," he said, "my biggest regret now is anything I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people."

Well, thanks for setting the record straight, Harry. I guess, sort of like the late Gilda Radner's SNL Emily Litella character and her addlepated "Never mind," that's supposed to make it all okay.

[P.S.: Would you believe that there's a Wikipedia entry for "Never mind"?]

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