Elizabeth Warren vs. the Senate …
Three months ago today, a bitterly
contested and almost certainly fraudulent election put Donald Trump
in the U.S. Presidency. Since then, voices of reason and humanity in
the United States and around the world mourned that result, then
turned to detailing item after item demonstrating his manifest
unfitness for that office and predicting its dire results, and then
to inspiring mass and legal efforts to resist his projects in it. But
yesterday, the courageous and insistent Elizabeth Warren, speaking in
the Senate with the voice of the late Coretta Scott King, showed us
what we're really up against: The crisis facing the country and the
planet is not the presence of Trump in the White House, but that
of the far-right and, may we now say, manifestly fascist-minded,
extreme right wing of the Republican Party he led to command of the
American Empire.
It started innocently enough. The
Senate was considering Trump's nominee Jefferson Beauregard Sessions
for the post of Attorney General, and Sen. Warren rose to speak in
opposition to his confirmation, as she had opposed those of Secretary
of Homeland Security John Kelly (confirmed January 20), Rex Tillerson
as Secretary of State (confirmed February 1), and, most recently,
Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education (confirmed by a tie-breaking
vote by Vice President Mike Pence—about whom more below—and sworn
in by him earlier yesterday). Opposing Sessions for the post was
hardly a radical move; The great, gray New York Times had
called his nomination, proposed by Trump in November, an “insult to
justice”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/opinion/jeff-sessions-as-attorney-general-an-insult-to-justice.html.
But then something almost unprecedented happened: Senate Republicans
used a rule formerly honored far more in the breach than in the
observance, as it should be.
The Senate's Rule 19 reads, in part,
"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." It can perhaps be
argued that such a rule prevents serious political debate from
degenerating into mere name-calling, but all too clearly, it can too
easily be invoked to stifle debate altogether—as it was last night,
when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called upon Rule 19 to
stop Warren from reading a 1986 assessment of Sessions by the late
Coretta Scott King.
Written to the Senate Judiciary
Committee in opposition to the nomination of then-U.S. Attorney
Sessions to a federal judgeship, King's assessment of him consisted
of a brief letter to the late Strom Thurmond, then heading the
committee, and a longer statement. The letter summarized Session's
record on voting rights, asserting that he had “used the power of
his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free
exercise of the ballot by citizens.” The statement then went on to
relate in detail his use of his office to prevent Black Alabamans
from voting.
The details are chilling, yet the heart
of her statement lies in the epic march in 1965 from Selma, Alabama,
to Montgomery, the state's capital, for voting rights. She returns,
again and again, to the march (much of which was along Alabama's
Jefferson Davis Highway—note the name and think of whose
appointment she was protesting!), and to the brutality that had met
voting rights activists before, during, and after the march.
The march was a turning point in
history, leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that
year—the very act that Sessions had subverted for his entire
career. Warren was attempting to read that history, and Sessions'
career-long battle against its victories, into the Senate record, and
the Senate voted to stop her from doing so.
… and What It Says
This happened during Black History
Month. The suppression from the record of Black history during this
month particularly points to a pattern, and it's not just the Chief
Executive's, nor is it new.
As soon as the Black Lives Matter
movement arose to draw attention to murders by usually white police
officers of usually unarmed Black women, men, and children, a
counter-current arose in response. Across the right-wing media,
indignant white commentators insisted that not all white police are
killers, not all dead Black people are innocent, and that Black Lives
Matter was intended to obscure those realities, a
through-the-looking-glass reversal of everything the movement—and
the facts—were revealing. Later, during the Trump campaign, came
his attempt to throw the “fraud” label elsewhere and profit from
the myth of massive voter fraud.
Now those frauds are being perpetrated
from the highest levels of U.S. power, and in a ghastly trickle-down
effect, supporting their expression at every level. Trump's speech on
International Holocaust Remembrance Day blotted out the genocidal
thrust of Germany's Third Reich, and within hours, swastikas appeared
on New York subways and Jewish doorways. Yesterday, the ruling
Republicans rose as one to prevent Black history from reaching the
Senate record. The impact of that act will no doubt appear as
quickly.
For a moment around the election—if
it deserves that name—it appeared that there was a substantial and
visible wing of the Republican Party that opposed Trump and his
far-right cadre. That wing has disappeared; the Republican Senators
have voted all but unanimously to confirm Trump's cabinet nominees,
nor was a single GOP voice raised in opposition to the silencing of
Elizabeth Warren and with her, Coretta Scott King.
In other words, it's not Donald Trump
against the world. It appears that he's only the nominal head of a
now very powerful apparatus bent on destroying diversity of every
kind along with democracy and maybe the planet and making America
white, Christian, and plutocratic again.
The battle lines are drawn on this
front of that effort. It's definitely time to start—in the words of
Julia Ward Howe, recently echoed on Facebook by my friend Ethan Young
(http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/mapping-the-left/)—“trampling
out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”
Confrontations on the many fronts of the war will appear here as they
play out.
Stay tuned.
©2017 Judith Mahoney
Pasternak
PS I more than welcome comments. Please—that's how I know you're there.
