Somewhere, John C. Calhoun is smiling
Haughtiness is a bad look for anyone. Worse still for the insecure who spend a lifetime propping up their self-esteem — for the entitled rich, with conspicuous consumption; for the less “endowed” (materially or intellectually), with boasting and false bravado; for a certain indicted ex-president, with both.
For example, Tennessee GOP state Rep. Andrew Farmer’s dressing-down of fellow Rep. Justin J. Pearson last week before the body’s vote to expel him. Farmer didn’t utter the word “boy” in his speech. His tone spoke it loudly enough for the entire world to hear.
Then the GOP majority in the Tennessee House voted to void the elections won by Black Democrats in two of the state’s districts.
In Texas on Saturday. GOP Gov. Greg Abbott declared he would with all haste work to pardon Daniel S. Perry, convicted on Friday by a Travis County jury for the murder of Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Austin in 2020:
“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” Mr. Abbott wrote on Twitter.
Nullification. Now where have you heard that word before?
In Abbott’s mind, Perry (who is white) had a right to self-defense. Foster (a BLM supporter) had none. Damn the law. The findings of the jury do not matter. John C. Calhoun couldn’t have said it better.
The potential pardon of Mr. Perry threatens to undermine the Travis County District Attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case.
This week, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill in the State Senate that would curtail the power of elected prosecutors, particularly those in left-leaning counties who decline to pursue certain cases, like some related to abortion bans.
In Wisconsin last week, voters elected liberal Janet Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court. She routed her conservative opponent by 11 percentage points. The New York Times called the victory “a staggering margin in an evenly divided battleground state that signaled just how much last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has transformed American politics.” Good or bad transformation depending on which side of the voting majority one’s champion falls.
And the Republican response? Let Adam Serwer tell it (The Atlantic):
Unsurprisingly, even before the ballots were counted, Wisconsin Republicans were raising the possibility of impeaching Protasiewicz should she make the mistake of believing that how the electorate votes should matter. The state constitution allows the legislature to impeach “all civil officers of this state for corrupt conduct in office, or for crimes and misdemeanors,” and for some state Republicans, disagreeing with them qualifies as corruption.
Wisconsin has had a Potemkin democracy for some time, Serwer suggests.
Just after the 2018 election, in which Republicans retained nearly two-thirds of the assembly despite getting only 46 percent of the vote, Speaker Robin Vos explained that it was only fair that Democratic voters’ ballots should count less.
“If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority—we would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature,” Vos told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “As much as they complain about gerrymandering and all things that I think are made up issues for their failed agenda, I think we won a fair and square election.”
In other words: The party that should have won the most votes should win, not the party that actually got more votes, because certain people’s votes—the kind of people who live in cities, you know who I mean—really shouldn’t count.
That’s the kind of logic that leads to a mob breaching the Capitol in a violent attempt to overthrow a presidential election. It’s also the kind of logic that leads lawmakers to believe they can do anything they want without ever having to face consequences for it.
Nullification is back, in spirit if not in fact. In Tennessee (seriously). And in Texas. And in Wisconsin.
Heather Cox Richardson reminds readers how attempts at nullification worked out a century and a half ago for a haughty aristocracy determined to preserve white supremacy. On this date in 1865, to be exact, in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia:
By spring 1865, the Confederates who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that their wealthy aristocrats would beat the North’s moneygrubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while, backed by a booming industrial economy, the Union army could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment’s notice.
The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by men like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier’s uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work.
No one here needs reminding that white supremacists lost the Civil War but won the peace because the North lacked the will to finish the job. We are still paying the price for that mistake (see above). Pray we do not make it again.
Update: Mistakenly identified Garrett Foster as Black. He was a BLM supporter. (h/t CC)