Republicans Figured Out How To Stall Biden’s Agenda; Joe Manchin…

It seems to me that W.E.B. DuBois’s state­ment, “Either America will destroy igno­rance or igno­rance will destroy the United States,” takes on more res­o­nance today than at any oth­er time since he made that statement.
What does it say about the coun­try’s state when the wife of the most senior mem­ber of the Supreme court is a major play­er in the dis­in­for­ma­tion QAnnon con­spir­a­cy movement?
At the bare min­i­mum, it pos­es a seri­ous con­flict of inter­est that Ginny Thomas would be a major play­er in right-wing caus­es, some of which are so out of the main­stream they ought to be under Federal eyeballs.
It bears men­tion­ing that Clarence Thomas, an unapolo­getic right-wing judge, in his three decades on the Supreme Court, has ruled con­sis­tent­ly in sup­port of Republican causes.
Regardless of a Judge’s pol­i­tics, it is hard to rec­on­cile that a judge would be as par­ti­san as Clarence Thomas has been. Even the much-vaunt­ed and idol­ized Antonin Scalia, the stan­dard of right-wing jurispru­dence, at times vot­ed with the most lib­er­al wing of the court. Not so with the insuf­fer­able Clarence Thomas.
Among some of the most eye­brow-rais­ing things that Clarence Thomas has done has been the dis­sent­ing & con­cur­ring opin­ions he has writ­ten and joined.

• He dis­sent­ed when the court inval­i­dat­ed the con­vic­tion of a black man tried six times for the same crime by the same pros­e­cu­tor with juries that were either all white or near­ly all white.
• He called for over­turn­ing Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 land­mark deci­sion requir­ing that crim­i­nal defen­dants, too poor to pay for a lawyer, be pro­vid­ed an attor­ney paid for by the government.
• In anoth­er first, he called for over­turn­ing the 1964 land­mark free­dom-of-the-press deci­sion New York Times v. Sullivan, which set in place stan­dards to make it more dif­fi­cult for pub­lic fig­ures to sue for libel with­out proof that false­hoods were know­ing­ly published.

According to (npr​.org), Clarence Thomas’s dis­sent­ing opin­ion on that land­mark deci­sion was not joined by a sin­gle mem­ber of the 9‑member court, but that it lined up con­ve­nient­ly with the world­view of Donald Trump.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia did not have such a purist view (NPR posit­ed); unlike Thomas, he did believe in prece­dent. As he famous­ly put it, “I am an orig­i­nal­ist, but I’m not a nut.”

“God bless each of you,’ Ginni Thomas wrote in a Facebook post to sup­port the attempt­ed takeover of the Capitol.
In one post, she shared “LOVE” to the MAGA crowd, offer­ing sup­port and sug­gest­ing oth­ers tune in to the riot. In anoth­er Facebook sta­tus, she stat­ed, in most­ly all caps, “God bless each of you stand­ing up or pray­ing!”This is not her first time in the spot­light for sup­port­ing racism. ( theGrio) report­ed Mrs. Thomas request­ed the may­or of Clifton, Virginia, to remove a Black Lives Matter ban­ner in the town. Would you please remove the BLM sign from Clifton?” Thomas wrote to Holloway accord­ing to (theGrio). “As lead­ers of this com­mu­ni­ty, you should be smarter than pro­mot­ing such a group as this, who uses race to foment chaos to desta­bi­lize the nation.”

But Clarence and Ginny Thomas’s con­flicts of inter­est are only the tip of the ice­berg when it comes to what the polit­i­cal right is allowed to get away with, even while pon­tif­i­cat­ing about the fideli­ty of pub­lic bod­ies and institutions.
Economic con­ser­vatism and fideli­ty to the con­sti­tu­tion are only impor­tant when Republicans are out of office.
As soon as Joe Biden won the 2020 elec­tion, it struck me that Republicans would return to the tired old fis­cal con­ser­vatism argu­ments to harass the new Administration.
They found their man in West Virginia to dilute the Democratic pow­er in the Senate; that man is Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin has not flinched from play­ing ball in servi­tude to Mitch McConnell and the right-wing agen­da, declar­ing oppo­si­tion to the Biden eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus’s size, a view in direct oppo­si­tion to his own Governor’s, and declar­ing his oppo­si­tion to a key Biden nom­i­nee to head the Office Of Management & Budget.
That is not all; anoth­er clear sign that Manchin does not sup­port the Democratic agen­da is his pub­lic oppo­si­tion to elim­i­nat­ing the Fillibuster.
Manchin told CNN that he would oppose his par­ty’s effort to get rid of the fil­i­buster, a stall tac­tic fre­quent­ly used by the Senate’s minor­i­ty par­ty, requir­ing 60 votes in the cham­ber to over­come. “That’s bull­shit,” Manchin said.
When asked about the Democratic push to elim­i­nate the fil­i­buster, he not­ed that he opposed the Democratic effort in 2013 to elim­i­nate the fil­i­buster on most pres­i­den­tial nominees.
This means that to get the most basic aspect of his agen­da passed, Biden will have to seek buy-in from Republicans, usu­al­ly Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, or Lisa Murkowski, even on his cab­i­net nom­i­nees, essen­tial­ly ren­der­ing the idea that a pres­i­dent is enti­tled to his cab­i­net moot.
Who needs Republicans when there are Democrats like Joe Manchin?

It did not take long, with over half a mil­lion dead as a result of Donald Trump’s neg­li­gence and com­plic­i­ty for COVID-19, unem­ploy­ment claims sky­rock­et­ing, and peo­ple in seri­ous need of relief, Republicans en-masse has a seri­ous prob­lem with the Joe Biden $1.9 Trillion COVID relief plan, but had no prob­lem with Donald Trump’s $2.3 Trillion give­away to the rich­est 1% who did not need for it.
To add insult to injury, Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, is against the pack­age’s size and con­tent while his Republican Governor is lob­by­ing for the bil­l’s pas­sage that would vast­ly ben­e­fit res­i­dents of that state.
Additionally, Manchin is opposed to Joe Biden’s choice to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, because of sup­posed mean tweets she made as pres­i­dent of the Center for American Progress, a think tank aligned with the Democratic establishment.
It is laugh­able that Manchin wants to be a power­bro­ker in the 50 – 50 sen­ate; he choos­es the pres­i­den­t’s cab­i­net pick and a woman of col­or, no less, as the hill on which he wants to take a stand. The hyp­ocrite did not utter a sin­gle syl­la­ble in oppo­si­tion to Donald Trump’s tweets that dis­par­aged and demeaned every per­son who did not bow down to him.
Both Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine have indi­cat­ed that nei­ther of them will be sup­port­ing Tanden’s nomination.

As if by some strange comedic joke by the Universe, Josh Hawley and Raphael Cruz are mem­bers of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary com­mit­tee is this week attend­ing to the nom­i­na­tion of pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s nom­i­nee for Attorney General of the United States.
To hear Josh Hawley and Raphael Cruz, the Senate point men for Trump’s big lie, “stop the steal,’ ask ques­tions of Merrick Garland when they both should be locked away in Federal jail cells await­ing tri­al for sedi­tious activ­i­ties, has been just too much for me to stomach.
In a nation of laws, nei­ther Josh Hawley nor Raphael Cruz would have the oppor­tu­ni­ty, much less the temer­i­ty, to ask Judge Garland ques­tions on the issues of fideli­ty to law and the con­sti­tu­tion. Hawley and Cruz are co-con­spir­a­tors, in my hum­ble view, but the laws in America only work against the poor and pow­er­less, and so they get to sit in judg­ment of peo­ple with char­ac­ter. I almost said the framers must be turn­ing in their graves, then I stopped myself.….their behav­ior was noth­ing to brag about either, so there is that.
And so we laugh at the spec­ta­cle of the crim­i­nals ques­tion­ing the judge, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, putting into the record a let­ter sup­pos­ed­ly writ­ten to him by some right-wing hack, detail­ing how the Trump insur­rec­tion crowd was peace­ful and friend­ly until they were pro­voked and assault­ed by the capi­tol police.
The American peo­ple vot­ed in extra­or­di­nary num­bers to repu­di­ate Donald Trump, his hate­ful & racist poli­cies; true to form as they did in President Obama’s first term, Democrats are fail­ing to force­ful­ly apply the same strength and for­ti­tude Republicans employ when they are in power.
The steps Republicans are tak­ing to make vot­ing expo­nen­tial­ly more dif­fi­cult across mul­ti­ple states are designed to negate the con­se­quences of whites becom­ing a minor­i­ty by 2045. If Democrats con­tin­ue to allow this to hap­pen, America will sink into despo­tism, the next strong­man to occu­py the White House (Josh Hawley), or whomev­er already has a blue­print on what to do to get there.
In the end, preser­va­tion of white pow­er in white men’s hands is what all this is about, that includes what Ginny Thomas and her hus­band are doing, to what Joe Manchin is doing in stop­ping peo­ple of col­or from hold­ing pow­er­ful posi­tions in the American government.
It is time to restore a key ele­ment of the Voting Rights Act, stalled in the con­gress to hon­or civ­il rights icon John Lewis.
Democrats have no excuse not to move this leg­is­la­tion to a vote imme­di­ate­ly; let the nation see which Republican vote against it, then use the results against them in 2022.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.