Friday Reads: Are Republicans Re-fighting the Civil War for the South this Time?

Good Morning!

We may not all be taking up arms right now,  but, I think a very good argument can be made that the success of Nixon’s Southern Strategy has basically aligned right wing loons in a manner where we are refighting the civil war with the political party that actually won the war for the North back in the day.  Fully 15 nullification bills were forwarded in a variety of state legislatures dealing with everything from federal gun bills to issues dealing with health insurance. 

It was a big week for the nullification movement, with more than 15 bills moving forward, including an Arizona bill to shut down a critical enforcement mechanism for the Affordable Care Act and Virginia bills that would help bring down a recently-revealed nationwide license-plate tracking program.

An Arizona house panel voted 5-1 to pass HB2643 – a bill that would prohibit the Arizona Department of Insurance (DOI) from investigating or enforcing any violations of federally mandated health insurance requirements. This would be extremely problematic for the feds. Since they don’t have a health insurance enforcement agency, passage would mean that no one would investigate claims of violating the federal act.

The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that the federal DEA has been tracking the location of millions of drivers – without suspicion of any crime. They get access to much of this location data from state-operated Automated License Plate Readers. In Virginia, both Houses passed bills that would restrict the use of these ALPRs and block the transfer of their data to the federal government for general surveillance. As the Tenth Amendment Center’s Mike Maharrey put it, “No data means no national tracking program.” The two Virginia chambers are currently working out some technical differences in the bill and it should be off to the Governor’s desk soon.

Also in Arizona, bills to block federal gun control, executive orders, and new EPA rules moved forward. In North Dakota, an industrial hemp farming bill passed its first step by a 13-0 vote. And in Utah, the state house voted 71-1 to pass the Right to Try Act – a bill that would effectively nullify in practice some FDA restrictions on terminally-ill patients.

Some of the most famous nullification statements this year have come from religious kooks like Mike Huckabee who insists that states can ignore Marriage Rights for GLBT even if the Supreme Court upholds them.

When the Tea Party wave arrived in 2010, it swept away much of the Republican Party’s existing structure, and instituted a more populist approach. But as waves tend to do, it left some even older debris in its wake. “Nullification,” the theory that states can invalidate federal laws that they deem unconstitutional, had its heyday in the slavery debate that preceded the Civil War, but it has found new currency since 2010.

The theory has never been validated by a federal court, yet some Republican officeholders have suggested states can nullify laws, including Senator Joni Ernst, who gave the GOP rebuttal to the State of the Union. Missouri legislatorspassed a bill that would have nullified all federal gun laws and prohibited their enforcement. My colleague James Fallows has described efforts by Republicans in Congress to block duly passed laws—refusing to confirm any director of an agency established by an act of Congress, for example—as a new form of nullification.

Now Mike Huckabee seems to be opening up a new front. The Supreme Court last week agreed to hear a case on whether same-sex-marriage bans are unconstitutional. There’s no such thing as a sure bet with the Court, but many watchers on both sides of the issue believe the justices will strike down the bans. Some conservatives seem resigned to the fact that the fight is lost; not Huckabee.

There are actually 200 nullification laws sitting out there now.   The movement is generally one that surrounds so-called State Rights or the 10th Amendment.  It’s been used to justify everything from slavery to ignoring marijuana prohibitions so the modern nullification “movement” is an odd combination of Tea Party radicals and dudebro Libertarians.  It was also used to support Jim Crow laws in the 1950s so it has a very weird history.

Besides a renewed interest in nullification, there are some radical things going on in the U.S. Senate above and beyond that possible violation of the Logan Law by those 47 Republican idiot Senators.  For example, the treatment of US Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch is basically an unprecedented attack on the Presidency mostly coming from Republicans who don’t like the executive orders on immigration.

But what we’re seeing here is a tendency among many conservatives to cast pretty much every argument between the branches as the ultimate test of whether Republicans are willing to do what it takes to rescue the republic from Obama lawlessness.

Hawkings notes that it’s remarkable that the battle over Lynch is no longer viewed as remarkable, despite being extraordinary by historical standards. I’d only add: It’s also remarkable that the hyping of so many of these fights — into a litmus test of GOP resolve to save the country from Obama tyranny and ruin — is no longer viewed as remarkable.

This statement basically is on an article from Roll Call by David Hawkings that covers the historic aspects of Republican Rage against Obama in terms of blocking even the most mundane function of governing.

For essentially the first two centuries under our Constitution, senators afforded the president free rein to stock his Cabinet as he chose, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. Getting over the “advice and consent” hurdle was about proving competence for public service, demonstrating good manners and keeping your moral nose clean.

It would not have been newsworthy at all — let alone a rationale for disqualification — for an attorney general nominee to take the same position as the president who nominated her in a balance of powers battle with Congress. (In fact, it would have been much more problematic for a nominee to openly break with the president in such a dispute.)

And yet in the past three decades, a new standard has been taking hold so firmly it’s no longer generating much notice. At least once every presidential term, the party out of the White House campaigns to bury at least one nominee for a senior executive branch post — almost entirely by complaining about their differing ideologies. (At the start of George W. Bush’s presidency, the conservative John Ashcroft survived one such experience at the hands of the Democrats by winning confirmation despite 42 “no” votes, the record for opposition to a successful attorney general nominee.)

This time, there’s been an important additional twist: The single biggest reason Republicans oppose Lynch is that she disagrees with them on a single matter of public policy. They say her sticking up for the president’s immigration executive orders reveals one of two larger problems: that she won’t steer Justice in some fundamentally new and centrist direction (as if that was ever going to happen) and she can’t be counted on for the independence an attorney general sometimes needs to pursue the rule of law over the pull of politics.

Three GOP senators rejected these arguments and supported her in the Judiciary Committee:Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona. So far her only other declared Republican backer is Susan Collins of Maine, who voted the way Obama wanted more than any other member of her caucus last year — 74 percent of the time, according to CQ Roll Call’s most recent annual votes studies. (All those details will be available for subscribers Friday on CQ.com.)

It’s like the Republicans refuse to believe the results of the last two Presidential Elections.  The outrage continues as former, future, and current Republican Presidential contenders say things that border on treason and basically sound like racist fools.  Rudy Giuliana thinks Obama should be more like Bill Cosby.  I don’t have to remind you about Bill Cosby’s behavior or his habit of lecturing down black people on their lives.

Just when you thought Rudy Giuliani couldn’t get crazier, the former NYC mayor blamed Obama for the brutal beatdown at a Brooklyn McDonalds —and said the president should be more like Bill Cosby.

Obama is ignoring “enormous amounts of crime” committed by African-Americans, Giuliani said Thursday. And he said President Obama is to blame for the brawl inside a McDonald’s in Brooklyn as well as the shooting of two cops in Ferguson because of the anti-police “tone” coming from the White House.

The former mayor, speaking on AM970 radio this morning, was asked what he thought about a number of disturbing issues in the news.

Host John Gambling asked for Giuliani’s take on the vicious McDonald’s fight, the recent police shootings in Ferguson and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton getting booed Thursday at a City Council hearing by protesters.

“It all starts at the top. It’s the tone that’s set by the President,” Giuliani said.

He added he just returned from a multi-city trip overseas and the United States is constantly derided there as a “racist state.”

“It is the obligation of the President to explain … that our police are the best in the world,” said Giuliani.

He also said Obama should have used his “bully pulpit” to stop protests in Ferguson over the summer, but didn’t.

The behavior of the Ferguson Police Department has been outrageous leading the recent resignation of its Chief and an extended document history of racism just put out by the US Justice Department.  The history of racism in police departments like the NYPD and LA are legendary and well document.  Guiliani is clearly losing it.   However, his level of hyperbole is nothing compared to the level of activity by the wingnuts in Washington coming from Southern and outback states as witnessed by the whacko Senator from Arkansas and his basically treasonous antics.  White Male, Southern, neoconfederate anger is driving Republican politics and it is a serious danger, once again, to the State of our Union.  It is being driven by almost a surreal level of paranoia against women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and the GLBT community.

Since Reagan, then, conservatism’s principal issues cannot be extricated from what animated them in the Southern milieu of their birth. The North, if now only a phantom, prefigured the foreign other always at work in the modern conservatism borrowed from the South. Every major issue is argued in terms of persecution and attack. The racial minority is not the oppressed subaltern but a threat, whether physical or fiscal. Liberatory advances for women and LGBT Americans are assaults upon the family. Religious pluralism and fortifications of the wall between church and state evoke biblical accounts of Christian persecution. Deviations from increasingly neoliberal capitalism are described as authoritarian socialism. Relaxation of military aggression, especially under Obama, is even seen as collusion with the enemy.

Broun, a skilled purveyor of a Southern politics of persecution, was an early alarmist, predicting a violently oppressive, explicitly Hitlerian regime just days after President Obama’s election in 2008. Broun’s repeated evocation of Hitler and Stalin would later find its way into the crass iconography of Tea Party protests. The stakes have always been existential to Broun. In an almost mystical ritual, Broun, a born-again Christian, snuck onto the inaugural stage in 2009 to anoint the door through which Obama would pass with holy oil, entreating God to come to the aid of His besieged and cleanse the new president of his tyrannical evil. Broun’s persecution narrative, dismissed by many at the time as hayseed hyperbole, now forms the basis of conservative arguments on nearly every issue. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, likely 2016 presidential candidate whose star is still rising, adopts the “we want our country back” language and eschatological stakes of the Tea Party. Cruz is joined by newcomer Sens. Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Rand Paul to form a conservative insurgency in a chamber historically governed by staid and statesmanlike members.

There is a problem, though, for the GOP in the 2014 and subsequent elections: Once the Fort Sumter-like salvo of superlatives and hyperbole is launched, it is likely impossible to quiet the fear and anger of the party’s base. Broun’s successor to represent the shamed land of Sherman’s path brings his own scorched earth rhetoric, sounding more 1860 than 2014. The presumptive successor, Rev. Jody Hice, whose primary win makes November’s general little more than a formality in the heavily conservative district, speaks uniformly in the language of persecution and insurrection. Like, actual insurrection. Hice regularly demands that Americans be permitted the full means of war — e.g., rockets, missiles, etc. — in order to prepare for an eventual armed conflict with the “secular,” “socialist” state. Hice, an evangelical pastor, is an unapologetic theocrat whose persecution complex pervades the entirety of his apocalyptic politics. Hice makes Broun look cuddly by comparison.

The GOP suffers through an internecine fight that shows little sign of slowing. The party’s internal conflict reached its latest peak in primary battles in two prominent Confederate locales: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s historic loss in the old capital of the Confederacy and Sen. Thad Cochran’s controversial victory in Jefferson Davis’ Mississippi, a state whose flag still bears the Confederate battle emblem. Cantor’s primary defeat would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but the very fervor stoked by Cantor for what many saw as an eventual run at the speakership metastasized further into an implacable anti-establishment impulse from which even Cantor was not exempt. Cochran, targeted as an establishment senator, had to resort to DEFCON 1 tactics and openly beseech Mississippi’s black Democrats to lift him over Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel, a move that became something of a right-wing Alamo. In a late primary strategy, Jody Hice went public with the assertion that his opponent, a pro-business, establishment candidate, was courting the enemy in what the Hice campaign called a “Mississippi Strategy.”

A sort of Mason-Dixon line has begun to trace its way along the GOP’s internal fissures, threatening the coalition solidified by Reagan and sustained through the Bush presidency. After more than a generation of cultivating a narrative founded on persecution and insurrection, the GOP runs the risk of falling victim to a Maslow’s hammer-type predicament. If all you have is victimhood, all disagreement starts to look like oppression,

Joining the ranks of outspoken neoconfederate haters like Tom Cruz and Ron Paul is Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.  He’s no longer a newbie back bencher.  His #47Traitors letter to the Iranian Government has compelled the press to take a look at his horrid, bullying ways and views.

Hailing from Arkansas, 37-year-old Senator Cotton boasts the title of being the youngest member of the Senate, but he spouts the old warmongering rhetoric of 78-year-old Senator John McCain. From Guantanamo to Iran, food stamps to women’s rights, here are ten reasons why Tom Cotton is a dangerous dude.

You can read the usual hater agenda and rhetoric at that site.  Let’s just say he has issues with just about every one that’s not a white male.

In one of the strangest cases of denial of federal authority, the Catholic Church is now arguing that paying criminal fines to victims of pedophilia priests is a violation of its ‘religious freedom’ and that the federal government has no authority at all over them. WTF?  Clearly, white male patriarchy is fighting back with some of the most reprehensible arguments possible.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee, which owes victims of pedophile priests (including one, Think Progress notes, who was accused of assaulting approximately 200 deaf children) $17 million has decided to put that money into a fund reserved for cemeteries and claims that to pay the victims what they’re owed is a violation of the church’s religious freedom. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Jesus is that he would have likely also placed millions of dollars into an untouchable fund to avoid paying the victims of his followers. It’s just the christly thing to do.

The archdiocese claims that the church has much to do before they pay any victim any money for anything. According to their religious guidelines, the church must maintain any and all burial places and mausoleums in perpetuity lest they fall into disrepair. The Archdiocese has been bankrupt since 2011 and in 2013 a court agreed that they had the right to transfer the money into an account meant for the upkeep of religious burial places, but the seventh circuit court of appeals has issued an important message to the church: Hell naw.

What’s even more heinous than the fact that the church doesn’t want to pay the victims the money they’re owed (and Think Progress points out that the latest appeal isn’t about paying anyone anything, the verdict just means that the money the church is hoarding can’t only be used for cemetaries) is that the “burial places account” wasn’t even created until after the archdiocese was told they needed to pay the victims and that other lawsuits against priests could “go forward.” So they must not have been that worried about mausoleums then? But now, they’re all about them.

 I can only type WTF so many times so that’s my diatribe for the day.  What’s on your reading and blogging list?  Feel free to discuss anything!!!