New Orleans to Congress: Hold neo-Confederate Louisiana conservatives accountable
The spectacle of five Louisiana Republicans refusing to accept legitimately cast ballots in a presidential election on Jan. 6, after a violent Trump mob trashed the U.S. Capitol, is a stark reminder of history. It’s instructive that Trump’s Republican defenders invoked the election of 1876 as a precedent for their efforts to overturn the election of 2020. Electoral violence and accusations of fraud in 1876 succeeded in muddying the waters enough to necessitate a “corrupt bargain,” the Compromise of 1877. The bargain hinged on leaving black southerners at the mercy of state leaders who proceeded to cut them completely out of the citizen’s community of the United States, in clear violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which extended citizenship and voting rights to formerly enslaved African-Americans.
The outcome of the latest attack on democracy from white supremacist conservatives is nowhere near as decisive, but the symbolism resonates. It’s a reminder that the key historical lesson of Trumpism is that the project of Reconstruction was never completed. Just as majority black counties and parishes needed to disenfranchise voters to ensure the continuity of minority rule in the 19th Century South, the Republicans of our time hung their hopes on throwing out ballots to continue the minority rule of the past four years.
We’ve always known that Donald J. Trump never won the majority of votes, not even in 2016, and that the Republican Senate majority of the Trump years represented a smaller number of Americans than the opposition party did. Yet the refusal of Trump conservatives to accept his electoral college loss — in addition to an even larger loss of the popular vote than in 2016 — shows that today’s brand of conservatism cannot survive if everyone’s vote is allowed to count.
I wish I could say that my home state contributed to a rebirth of democracy in 2020, but the opposite is true. It fell to another former Confederate and Jim Crow state — Georgia — to topple the Trump occupation of the people’s government. Republican leaders in Louisiana, including Attorney General Jeff Landry, Sen. John Kennedy, and Congressman Steve Scalise, were on the opposite side, committed to overturning a free and fair presidential election by throwing out millions of votes from at least four states, including Georgia.
Read more: https://thelensnola.org/2021/01/21/new-orleans-to-congress-hold-neo-confederate-louisiana-conservatives-accountable/
= new reply since forum marked as read
