The Trump Administration Had One Hell of a Black History Month
It's the final day of Black History Month, and a good thing, too. The current administration is really sending it out with a bang. If it went three days longer, you might have heard Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao expounding on the importance of Parliament Funkadelic to the rise of NASCAR. The festivities began with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who has a meeting with the representatives of the country's historically black colleges and universities.
DeVos, whose ongoing search for a clue about education is going to keep us busy for a while, cheerfully sent out a statement of how wonderfully everything had gone at her meeting.
"HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish."
(After reading the statement, I dropped by the bungalow in which resides Friend of the Blog Clio, Muse of History, also known by her Marvel superhero identity, The Proclaimer (!). After kicking aside several empty fifths of Virginia Gentleman, and taking care not to roll an ankle on one of the empty prescription medicine bottles, I found her on the couch. I put a mirror under her nose and it clouded up. So I guess she's going to make it through again.)
Naturally, the electric Twitter machine went wild. After all, this is very much like saying that African-Americans were pioneers in the field of transatlantic travel. However, DeVos' bone ignorance about everything to do with education-including, apparently, her own-was put in the shade by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who spent the entire final week of Black History Month in his family's traditional Black History Month celebration-to wit, doing everything he can to make sure that no more inconvenient black history gets made.
First, he waved into oblivion the Department of Justice's findings regarding police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and also the epic revelations regarding the Chicago P. D., which was one of the last projects of his immediate predecessor, Loretta Lynch, which, by the way, Sessions didn't even bother to read. (Hey, it's 161 whole pages long. He's a busy guy.) From ABC News:
Newly minted Attorney General Jeff Sessions questioned reports published by his agency about policing in Chicago and Ferguson, Missouri, describing "some of it" as "pretty anecdotal and not so scientifically based." While admitting that he had not read the reports, but instead viewed summaries, Sessions questioned the department's findings using the "anecdotal" critique and cautioned that there will always be some mistakes. There are 800,000 police in America, imagine a city of 800,000 people," said Sessions. "There's going to be some crime in it, some people are going to make errors."
(Among these errors, of course, was what was essentially a black-site prison, which the CPD ran in a place called Homan Square.)
Sessions didn't have time to read this report, of course, because he was too busy getting the DOJ out of the business of protecting the voting rights of minority citizens. NPR has the details.
In a motion filed Monday, DOJ asked a federal court to dismiss the department's earlier claim that the ID law was enacted with the intention of discriminating against minority voters. That claim was made by the Obama administration as part of a broader legal challenge to the law, which is among the strictest in the nation. But the Trump administration notes that the Texas legislature is now considering changing the law to address concerns that it hurts minorities. DOJ says those efforts should be allowed to proceed.
Well, if the Texas lege is "considering" changing the law, I certainly am satisfied that justice will roll down like a mighty stream.
The Russian stuff is undoubtedly important, but what is being done on all fronts to "deconstruct the administrative state," as Harkonnen heir Steve Bannon puts it, is going to hit people harder than they can imagine. And every department of the executive is in on the project. Hell, Scott Pruitt hasn't even gotten warmed up at EPA. Is there a punchline to this story? Of course, there is. Remember, however, that none of this is About Race because nothing is ever About Race.
Update (6:02 PM): Well, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III clearly was going to celebrate Black History Month right up until midnight Tuesday. From The Hill:
"We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness. And I'm afraid we've done some of that," Sessions said during a meeting with attorneys general from across the country. "So we're going to try to pull back on this," he continued. Sessions said the decision is not "wrong or insensitive to civil rights or human rights." Instead, he said, the federal government must help police combat violent crime in poor and minority communities. While crime rates are half what they were in recent decades, Sessions said recent increases in violent crime are "the beginning of a trend" rather than a "one-time blip."
Maybe Joe Manchin (D-Bituminous) can explain why this is a good idea. He voted for JeffBo after all.
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