{"id":792,"date":"2003-10-24T12:08:08","date_gmt":"2003-10-24T17:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/792.html"},"modified":"2003-10-24T12:08:08","modified_gmt":"2003-10-24T17:08:08","slug":"when-it-comes-to-race-republicans-are-quickly-confused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/when-it-comes-to-race-republicans-are-quickly-confused\/","title":{"rendered":"When it comes to race, Republicans are quickly confused"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poor Republicans. When it comes to race relations, the party hasn’t had much luck lately. First former-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said America would have been better off with a segregationist president in 1948, then Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-Wyo.) compared African Americans to drug addicts<\/a> on the House floor in April, then Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.), admitting to having “segregationist feelings”<\/a> against African Americans. Making matters worse, last month we learned that Haley Barbour, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi, has been hanging out with a racist, segregationist group<\/a> called the Council of Conservative Citizens.<\/p>\n

It’s little wonder, therefore, that Republicans in Congress and the White House have gotten so excited about the judicial nomination of Janice Rogers Brown, a California judge Bush has nominated to the federal bench.<\/p>\n

Judge Brown is an African American. This means, of course, that Republicans are using her race as a shield for the party’s shortcomings on civil rights. (“We can’t be accused of racism; we’re supporting Judge Brown’s nomination!”)<\/p>\n

Brown, however, is a conservative ideologue known for ideological judicial activism<\/a>. Despite her race and gender, Brown’s nomination has been strongly opposed by groups such as the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Alliance for Justice, the National Organization for Women, and the NAACP.<\/p>\n

“Janice Rogers Brown has a record of hostility to fundamental civil and constitutional rights principles, and she is committed to using her power as a judge to twist the law in ways that undermine those principles,” said Hilary Shelton, director, NAACP Washington Bureau. “For the administration to bring forward a nominee with this record and hope to get some kind of credit because she is an African American woman is one more sign of the administration’s political cynicism.”<\/p>\n

But that kind of sentiment from the civil rights community hasn’t deterred the congressional GOP, which believes Brown’s nomination can and should be manipulated to improve the Republicans’ standing in the African American community.
\n
\nThis is part of a familiar — and disturbing — pattern. Dems oppose Miguel Estrada? They must not like Hispanics, the GOP says. Dems oppose Bill Pryor? They must hate Catholics. Dems oppose Priscilla Owen? They must dislike women. It’s contemptuous politics at its worst.<\/p>\n

That being said, the problem with Judge Brown is that Republicans can’t quite figure out how<\/i> to manipulate the nomination properly.<\/p>\n

As a couple of my DC sources mentioned yesterday (you know who you are), Roll Call had an amusing item about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) trying to alert interested reporters in the GOP’s demagoguery on the Brown nomination.<\/p>\n

This week, Frist sent out an email announcement inviting “black journalists and reporters” to participate in a conference call on Brown’s nomination battle. Obviously, Frist hoped to play the race card, telling African-American reporters about how the big, bad Democrats aren’t being nice to an African-American judicial nominee.<\/p>\n

But the email caused more problems than it solved. As several Dems noted, why was Frist only inviting “black journalists and reporters” to participate in the conference call? Isn’t that some kind of bizarre affirmative action scheme whereby white reporters are discouraged from hearing Frist’s perspective on this controversy?<\/p>\n

Embarrassed, Frist’s office quickly tried again, sending another email invitation alerting all “reporters on the judicial nominees beat as well as African-American journalists” to join the call. Alas, this too was wrong because it implied African-American journalists weren’t covering judicial nominations.<\/p>\n

You know the party has a problem with race when it can’t send out a simple conference call announcement without offending people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poor Republicans. When it comes to race relations, the party hasn’t had much luck lately. First former-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said America would have been better off with a segregationist president in 1948, then Rep. Barbara Cubin (R-Wyo.) compared African Americans to drug addicts on the House floor in April, then Rep. Cass Ballenger […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}