Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) thought he’d try and rewrite the history of his party on Tuesday, but he immediately got smacked down by the facts about the GOP which are written in bigotry and hatred.
During a debate on whether or not to eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, McConnell said the procedure — through which one senator can bring all business in the upper chamber to a screeching halt — had not been used in the past (by Republicans) to delay passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950s:
“It has no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.”
That’s a lie, and McConnell said it knowing damn well it was a lie.
History shows that the longest filibuster ever held in the Senate was made by the blatantly racist GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, speaking continuously for 24 hours and 15 minutes to prevent black Americans from having the same rights as whites.
Steven S. Smith, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, explained the use of the filibuster by Republicans during the bad old days:
“The histories of the filibuster, civil and voting rights, and race in America are intertwined.”
How racist is the history of the Senate filibuster? It was once used to block anti-lynching bills. That is the shameful past of the procedure McConnell tried to paper over.
Fortunately, however, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance of Alabama was quick to counter McConnell, noting:
When he started getting criticism, McConnell’s office tried to walk back what he’d said:
For those who aren’t familiar with the full history of the Republican Party, it was once the Party of Lincoln. But then Richard Nixon was elected, followed by Ronald Reagan (who railed against “welfare queens” in a blatant attack on African-American women), and later was the party of choice for Donald Trump, who called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and suggested that anyone who dared to protest was a hoodlum or an “animal.” The GOP has become the party of bigotry and racial hatred. And the filibuster is part of that legacy, despite what McConnell or any other revisionist historian tries to assert.
How can you tell when someone is a racist? When they deny their own past, their support of bigots, and their cozy relationship with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and white separatists.
Nice try, Mitch, but you’re just as full of shit as ever. And you’re also a terrible liar.
