Here's One Way for the Never Trumpers to Find Redemption
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Recently, I have become intrigued by President Benjamin Harrison. I am, as has been said by editors and friends, very easily intrigued. I fell into this most recent interest when, while backgrounding myself on tariffs, I learned that President Harrison had as pets two possums. One was named Mr. Reciprocity and the other was named Mr. Protection. This seems a lot of effort to make sure you get your message out but, what the hell, both of them probably understood tariffs better than the current occupant of Harrison’s old job.
(For the record, Harrison also had several dogs and a goat named Old Whiskers. Which, come to think of it, might have been Harrison’s nickname, too. Harrison was our last fully bearded president. Mustaches hung on through Taft.)
As I continued to wander through the heretofore unfamiliar territory that was our 23rd president’s term of office, I found an intriguing quote from him on the subject of voting rights. Harrison, it seems, was a stalwart defender of civil rights. When the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was overturned, and when he was a senator from Indiana, Harrison spoke to several meetings of African-American citizens outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision. In Indianapolis one night, addressing one of these gatherings, Harrison laid down a vision of an interracial America that was way ahead of its time.
…I noticed to-day as I walked down from my house in the morning young colored children, with their books under their arms, going to the high school, entering there with the children of the white men, rich and poor, of Indianapolis, upon equal terms, to acquire the higher branches of education.
Laws, he said, significantly in his inaugural address, should be general and their administration uniform. Harrison was especially wary of what was going on with the franchise, especially as it concerned African-Americans, who were just then coming under the horrors of Jim Crow when Harrison took office in 1889. In 1890, working with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Harrison pushed hard for something called the Federal Elections Bill, the brainchild of Henry Cabot Lodge and George Frisbie Hoar, the two senators from the Commonwealth (God save it.) It would have allowed federal circuit judges to appoint federal election supervisors for the purpose of making sure nobody, but especially African-American citizens, was getting euchred out of their right to vote by some guy in a county clerk’s office.
The bill, alas, was filibustered into an early grave, but Harrison kept pushing. In December of 1889, he spoke to the Congress and said:
The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us; they were brought here in chains and held in communities where they are now chiefly bound by a cruel slave code...when and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law? When is that quality of influence which our form of government was intended to secure to the electors to be restored? … in many parts of our country where the colored population is large the people of that race are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political rights and of many of their civil rights. The wrong does not expend itself upon those whose votes are suppressed. Every constituency in the Union is wronged.
Ultimately, however, not much came of these fine sentiments. Jim Crow settled in like cement throughout the old Confederacy, as the Republicans in the Congress dealt off the civil rights of black citizens in exchange for Southern support on their trade policies and everybody else went running off after the big money of the Gilded Age. Harrison’s presidency ended dismally. His wife died of tuberculosis two weeks before election day, and Harrison got trounced by that comeback kid, Grover Cleveland, in one of the worst beatings any incumbent president received until the raven came calling on Herbert Hoover.
That quote has stayed with me, however. It is the same truth spoken in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson when he appealed to Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which would bring Benjamin Harrison’s efforts finally to fruition in the country’s laws. Where Harrison pointed out that the denial of the franchise to any citizen devalues it to us all, Johnson said, in the finest speech delivered by an American president in my lifetime:
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.
The franchise is everything. If we all can’t agree on that, then none of the rest of it is worth a damn.
I am asked, often, what would be a sufficient act of contrition for our Never Trump brethren for having created a political party in which Donald Trump could be nurtured as a presidential candidate, let alone a president*. I mean, I welcome their efforts but, truth be told, they’re all still conservative Republicans, still swept up in the cult of Reagan, still devoted to crackpot economics. But here’s what I always come up with when someone asks me what it would take for me to trust these folks thoroughly.
Lay off the franchise, is always my answer. Give people their full voting rights. Support a new Voting Rights Act that would cover the entire nation, thereby depriving Chief Justice John Roberts of one of the alleged concerns that underpinned his declaration of the Day of Jubilee in Shelby County v. Holder. (I say “alleged” because Roberts had the VRA in his sights since the beginnings of his career as a conservative government lawyer.)
Get word to your majorities in state legislatures that Republicans have made a decision to get with Benjamin Harrison once again. No national-party money for anyone who supports voter suppression, and a thoroughgoing effort to cut off dark money aimed at that goal as well. No more phony studies. No more phony commissions. Do all that, and I will be convinced that you have seen the error of your ways that led to the election of a vulgar talking yam.
Make no mistake. The Republican Party at every level has abandoned any serious attempt at attracting any voters who are not voting for it right now. This is an odd phenomenon in American history, because every other party that fell into this kind of entropy disappeared within a year. The Federalists vanished because nobody wanted to be a Federalist anymore, and the people who ran the party decided against trying to break off any of the people buying what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were selling across the street. This was stupid and suicidal. Our modern Republican Party realizes this, so it has found a way around the problem. It is easier to keep inconvenient people from voting than it is to find a way to appeal to any of them, and you can use the institutions of democratic government to do this.
The most recent baroque example of this comes from Texas, where the appointed secretary of state, the now-departed David Whitley, got caught running a woodchipper of a voter purge project. Whitley and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is a real lulu himself, announced that they had found 95,000 people who might not have been U.S. citizens registered to vote in the state. This fairy tale sent Hispanic civil-rights groups straight into court, where Whitley got whacked so hard he had to resign.
However, over the past couple of weeks, some of the material gathered in discovery in those lawsuits has emerged, and it is clear from various communications that Texas Governor Greg Abbott was intimately interested in what Whitley was doing. There is no evidence anywhere that any Texas Republican stood up and said what Whitley was doing was both racially divisive and an offense against the most fundamental element of a democratic republic.
Nor have I heard any important Republican stand up and announce that they will not support the ongoing effort to rebuild Jim Crow, or that the whole enterprise is as thoroughly un-American as any effort undertaken by a major political party in our history. Granted, it’s entwined with a lot of the other symptoms of the prion disease that has been allowed to run wild in the Republican Party’s higher functions. It’s a natural manifestation of deeper problems. But it’s one easily solved. Just stop doing it.
It would be nice if the national Republicans would join in the effort to safeguard our elections from the ratfckers of many lands, but I don’t expect miracles. Right now, I’d just like a national consensus that everybody who qualifies to vote gets to vote, and that using government to prevent this is something of which we should have seen the last around when Old Whiskers was roaming the White House.
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