Chris Graham: Repealing 50 years of advances in basic civil rights

[struggle4progress]

... Bill Howell, the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates ... is in Washington today to talk up something called the Repeal Amendment. The language of the proposed amendment calls for the effective repeal of any provision of law or regulation by the states when two-thirds of states approve repeal by legislative resolution ...

The rhetoric here isn’t much different than what we’ve been hearing from partisan Republicans since the inauguration of Barack Obama, whose most egregious sin, like the most egregious sin of Bill Clinton, is being a Democratic president. With Clinton, the GOP’s tactical mistake was to make it personal; the anti-Obama tactic has been less personal but no less over the top, in labeling everything that comes out of the milquetoast liberal-wannabe bipartisan moderate “socialist.” But with this talk about repeal, I’m afraid I’m hearing something more than the usual we-don’t-like-Democrats talk that we’ve been hearing from Republicans the past 15 or 20 years.

The biggest expansion of federal authority .. came in the 1960s with the response of the federal government to the abuses of the Jim Crow South, which for the century following the Civil War had systematically disenfranchised and delegitimized African-Americans into second-class citizenship. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act coinciding with the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson that were aimed at lifting poor blacks and poor Appalachian whites who had also been effectively subjugated as a side-effect of Jim Crow changed not only the fortunes of the Southern people but as well changed forever between the federal government and the states ...

Let’s be clear and upfront on this – what we’re seeing here is an attempt to roll back 50 years of advances in the grand effort by the mainstream to have America live up to the ideals that Thomas Jefferson laid out in that letter of declaration that he wrote back in 1776.

http://augustafreepress.com/2010/11/30/chris-graham-repealing-50-years-of-advances-in-basic-civil-rights/

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Yep, that's real democracy for ya. Have a bunch of yahoos in a state legislature repeal a federal

law via a 'resolution'.

[struggle4progress]

2. It may just be a rightwing organizing tactic: lots of noise about "states rights," the old

anti-civil-rights code-word, a dog-whistle for the older racists who think the White House is uppity

[Doctor_J]

3. Time to start thinking what a Blue America would look like

There is no reason why this idiot and the people who voted for him should have ANY of the same rights that I do. take these secessionist states, stop giving them ANY money, and then eventually just cut them loose so those of us who believe in the real America can live like a civilized nation. We will pick ourselves a spot, run all of the Limbciles and members of Fox Nation out, give sane people a few months to immigrate, and then live like real Americans while they live in West Somalia.