Douglas Turner: GOP is courting angry white males
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WASHINGTON — With their votes against Sonia Maria Sotomayor last week, Republicans snuggled up to their broadcast image as the incredible shrinking frat house of white males.
The GOP once courted the Latino vote. But on Thursday, both Republican senators from three states carved out of old Mexico in the 19th century— Texas, Arizona and Utah— all voted against the newest Supreme Court justice.
OK, one of the six was a woman, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas. But she is running against an incumbent governor, Rick Perry, who is courting macho extremists who think secession from the United States might not be a bad idea.
Twenty-five other Republicans joined the sextet. Were they oblivious to the old news that Hispanics are the fastest-growing share of
registered voters? Texas and Arizona are nearly a third Hispanic.
Opposing Republican senators acted out a version of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of appealing to angry white males, now backed by the drumbeat of hired brown-shirts wrecking Democratic town meetings in the August recess, racist cartoons flooding the Internet and the rant on Fox News that President Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
In the midst of this eruption of Republican ill will, something seriously basic and good happened on Thursday, courtesy of Obama and Democratic leaders like Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N. Y.
That’s the ending of, or at least the suspension of, the drive to mold the Supreme Court in the image of the Federalist Society, a group set up by disgruntled alumni of the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Chief Justice John
G. Roberts Jr. and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. were once leaders of this society.
The Federalist Society claimed it wanted jurists who would follow the precedents, and the law, not their ideological vibes in making decisions. Schumer never bought their story and he voted against confirming Roberts and Alito.
In his floor speech last week, Schumer said 31 Republican senators voted their ideology and not the actual court record of Federal Appeals Judge Sotomayor. “My [Republican] colleagues say that they don’t want ‘activist’ judges,” Schumer said. “What they really mean is that they don’t want judges who will put the rule of law first.”
And the onetime funny man now Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., turned earnestly serious, sketching out the phoniness of the Roberts court, and by implication the counterfeit claims of the Federalist Society.
Franken said that instead of following the law and precedents, the Roberts court has restricted protections Congress passed for older employees, and has narrowed the rights of female workers, eroded protections of small businesses against corporate price-fixing and limited investors’ ability to protect themselves against crooked businesses.
The Roberts court, Franken said, is “poised to overturn” parts of the Voting Rights Act, and the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform law. “This is judicial activism in one direction: away from long-standing protections for the individual and toward a more friendly law for the powerful.”
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Obama Promise Watch: In the 2008 campaign, Obama supported buying lower-cost prescriptions from Canada or Europe, and negotiating with the drug industry for cheaper prices. Los Angeles Times reporter Tom Hamburger disclosed that the White House promised former Republican Congressman Billy Tauzin, the ethically challenged top lobbyist for the drug makers, that the Obama administration won’t press for cheaper imports or price bargaining with industry giants.
As a senator, Obama got nearly twice as much money from the drug industry as any other who ran over two decades. As a presidential candidate, Obama took in more than $20 million from the health care business.
dturner@buffnews.com
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