I'm a retired Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Tennessee. My wife, Kathy, and I live on the Cumberland River, just north of Nashville. We have three children and eight grandchildren. I like to fish, make things out of wood, sing and play music (mandolin, uke, experimenting with a dobro), play chess (fair), read, play golf. I like to find out who people are and what they think. I am a follower of the Jesus Way, and I'm trying to love the Lord and love my neighbor.
Dismissed in 2012, this diagnosis of GOP ills has now become undeniable
(CNN) — The essay described congressional extremists, their rejection of truth, a party turning into authoritarians or “an apocalyptic cult.” It bore a striking headline:
Published in 2012, that Washington Post piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors, Tom Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the center-right American Enterprise Institute. It shows the disease within the Republican Party had spread long before Trump metastasized it.
Dent, now a CNN political commentator, quit the House after moderates like him became further marginalized. McConnell was shaken by violence inside the US Capitol for which he declared the defeated Republican President “practically and morally responsible.”
Mann and Ornstein described party leaders’ refusal to rein in lawmakers like Allen West of Florida, who falsely asserted that “78 to 81” congressional Democrats were communists. Out of Congress and relocated, West now chairs the Texas GOP.
The filibuster can be conquered: I know — I helped do it
It’s now conventional wisdom that the filibuster — or just the threat of a filibuster — will likely raise havoc with the core of President Biden’s legislative agenda: voting rights, immigration reform, gun control and climate change. Pundits of all stripes are wringing their hands at the prospect of senatorial deadlock. But only a handful have proposed any concrete actions to avoid this legislative cataclysm.
There is one shining example, however, when the filibuster — against all odds — was conquered.
The historic Civil Right Act of 1964 never would have survived in its final form unless the bipartisan pro-civil rights coalition found a way to defeat Sen. Richard Russell (D-Ga.) and his band of 18 Southern Democrats. More to the point, what happened then — 57 years ago — provides a useful roadmap for today.
A few basic facts:
All the smart money in 1964 said the filibuster, led by Sen. Russell, could not be defeated. The reasons were obvious. In 1964, Senate Rule XXII provided that 67 senators were needed to limit debate. Optimistic nose-counts indicated the bipartisan pro-civil rights forces lacked 12 “critical” votes to reach 67.
These votes could only be found from among traditional mid-western Republicans and conservative western Democrats. In their wildest imaginings, these conservative senators never considered supporting legislation to expand federal authority over personal property rights in granting equal access in restaurants, hotels, and jobs.
Worse yet, if the pro-civil rights forces seriously weakened these provisions as the price for ending the filibuster — the traditional strategy that Sen. Lyndon Johnson had used in 1957 to pass that civil rights legislation — the pro-civil rights allies in the House, especially Rep. William McCullough (R-Ohio), would revolt. The legislation would then likely perish in conference.
One could not escape the reality that breaking the filibuster was simply impossible.
The strong bill passed by the House (H.R. 7152) and supported by President Lyndon Johnson would fall victim to various weakening amendments and either die outright or be rendered toothless.
That was the well-established pattern. And that was what most observers forecast when the legislation finally cleared the House in February 1964.
Sen. Russell was expected to divide his 18 senators into three teams that would alternate holding the floor, thus permitting the other two to rest. The pro-civil rights senators, on the other hand, had to produce 51 senators at any time, day or night, to defeat southern quorum calls or motions to adjourn. This was expected — to erode pro-civil rights resolve over time and make likely weakening amendments or outright defeat.
Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) asked his assistant leader, Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) to serve as the floor leader of the House-passed bill. As Sen. Humphrey’s principal assistant for domestic issues, I ended up coordinating with the staff of other senators, communicating with the Department of Justice, and working with outside allies.
Working together, we hammered out a detailed strategy that we believed could eventually force Senator Russell to surrender:
Make the Southern Democrats hold the floor and debate the bill itself. Don’t let them read from the Chicago phone book or discourse on Auntie Sue’s fried chicken. Pro-civil rights senators, both Democratic and Republican, were assigned responsibility for major titles of the legislation. These “captains” would force Southern Democrats to debate, not just ramble on.
Deal fairly and openly with the Southern Democrats so no one — especially undecided conservative Republicans — could claim that the filibusterers had been denied a fair shot.
Establish and enforce a whip system that would ensure 51 pro-civil rights senators were present whenever Southern Democrats “suggested the absence of a quorum.” In 60 days of debate, the whip system failed but once.
Never schedule a cloture vote until victory was assured. No “test votes.” No amendments prior to cloture. A premature loss could only weaken the pro-civil rights forces.
Organize and focus outside groups supporting the bill. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights served as the coordinating body. Actively seek support among the three mainline religious denominations to make racial justice a compelling moral issue.
Operate an intelligence system that focused in detail on developing leverage with undecided senators. One example: We telephoned “talking points” each morning to the wife of a conservative mid-western senator so she would be well-armed for their nightly dinner conversation.
Publish a daily mimeographed “Pro-Civil Rights Newsletter” that would be delivered each morning to every senator and the media, outlining what to expect each day and to refute Southern Democratic arguments.
The recounting of what happened in 1964 points the way in 2021.
Force the opposition to hold the floor and talk. No more premature “test votes.” No weakening amendments prior to cloture. Get organized by assigning senators to monitor the floor and be ready to defeat likely quorum calls. Coordinate closely with outside support groups and the media. Stay on the offensive.
Make a special effort to get religious denominations fully involved. Protecting the right to vote in 2021 has the same potential to become a moral issue as compelling as the defeat of Jim Crow was in 1964.
Force a rules change — using the nuclear option, if necessary — that shifts the load to those filibustering. Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute has suggested amending Rule XXII to provide that filibusterers would have to produce 41 votes to maintain the floor. Having to produce 41 votes at all hours, day or night, possibly for weeks, shifts the burden to those wanting to block action.
This approach has the compelling advantage of preserving the filibuster itself, thus recognizing the concerns of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and, I’m willing to bet, a handful of moderate Republicans.
The moral imperative of the struggle to preserve the right to vote as the foundation of American democracy must be hammered home relentlessly. As the filibuster drags on, and if the forces for passage hang tough, pressure for positive action will grow.
This battle can be won. And it surely is worth waging.
I spent much of today thinking about the Republican Party. Its roots lie in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in spring 1854, when it became clear that elite southern slaveholders had taken control of the federal government and were using their power to spread their system of human enslavement across the continent.
At first, members of the new party knew only what they stood against: an economic system that concentrated wealth upward and made it impossible for ordinary men to prosper. But in 1859, their new spokesman, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, articulated a new vision of government. Rather than using government power solely to protect the property of wealthy slaveholders, Lincoln argued, the government should work to make it possible for all men to get equal access to resources, including education, so they could rise to economic security.
As a younger man, Lincoln had watched his town of New Salem die because the settlers in the town did not have the resources to dredge the Sangamon River to increase their river trade. Had the government simply been willing to invest in the economic development that was too much for the willing workers of New Salem, it could have brought prosperity to the men who, for lack of investment, failed and abandoned their town. The government, Lincoln thought, must develop the country’s infrastructure.
Once in power, the Republicans did precisely that. After imposing the first national taxes, including an income tax, lawmakers set out to enable men to be able to pay those taxes by using the government to give ordinary men access to resources. In 1862, they passed the Homestead Act, giving western land to anyone willing to settle it; the Land-Grant College Act, providing funds to establish state universities; the act establishing the Department of Agriculture, to provide scientific information and good seeds to farmers; and the Pacific Railway Act, providing for the construction of a railroad across the continent to get men to the fields and the mines of the West.
In 1902, Republicans fascinated with infrastructure projects joined forces with southern Democrats desperate for flood control to pass the Newlands Reclamation Act. Under the act, the federal government built more than 600 dams in 20 western states to bring water to farmland. “The sound and steady development of the West depends upon the building up of homes therein,” President Theodore Roosevelt wrote. Water from the western dams now irrigates more than 10 million acres, which produce about 60% of the nation’s vegetables and 25% of its fruits (and nuts).
Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt combined this focus on infrastructure development with the need for work relief programs during the Depression to create the 1933 Civilian Conservation Corps, which planted trees, built fire towers, built trails, stocked fish, and so on. In 1935, Congress created the Works Progress Administration. During its existence, it employed about 3 million workers at a time; built or repaired more than 100,000 public buildings, including schools and post offices; and constructed more than 500 airports, more than 500,000 miles of roads, and more than 100,000 bridges. It also employed actors, photographers, painters, and writers to conduct interviews, paint murals of our history, and tell our national story.
As the country grew and became more interconnected, pressure built for a developed road system, but while FDR liked the idea of the jobs it would produce, building the road fell to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Three years after he became president, Eisenhower backed the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, saying, “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods.” The law initially provided $25 billion for the construction of 41,000 miles of road; at the time, it was the largest public works project in U.S. history.
In America today, there is good news. The Biden administration has rolled out vaccines at a faster pace than anyone foresaw. Today, President Biden announced that health care workers have administered 150 million doses of the vaccine and, at an average of 3 million shots a day, they are on track to administer 200 million by his 100th day in office. He is moving the date for states to make all adults eligible for a vaccine from May 1 to April 19.
The vaccines have dovetailed with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan from last month and the spring weather to speed up the economic recovery. Economists had expected a job gain of about 660,000 in March, but nonfarm payrolls actually rose by about 916,000. And now Biden has rolled out a dramatic new infrastructure proposal, the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan.
So why was I thinking about the Republicans today?
In this moment, Republican lawmakers seem weirdly out of step with their party’s history as well as with the country. They are responding to the American Jobs Plan by defining infrastructure as roads and bridges alone, cutting from the definition even the broadband that they included when Trump was president. (Trump, remember, followed his huge 2017 tax cuts with the promise of a big infrastructure bill. As he said, “Infrastructure is the easiest of all…. People want it, Republicans and Democrats.”) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) warns that Biden’s plan is a “Trojan horse” that will require “massive tax increases.”
Biden has indeed proposed funding the Democrats’ infrastructure plan by raising taxes on corporations from their current rate of 21% to 28% (but before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, that rate was 35%). It ends federal tax breaks for oil and gas companies, and it increases the global minimum tax—a tax designed to keep corporations from shifting their profits to low tax countries– from 13% to 21%.
This is in keeping with our history. Americans since Lincoln have proudly used tax dollars to develop the country. During Eisenhower’s era, the corporate tax rate was 52% (and the top income tax bracket was 91%). The Newlands Act was designed to raise money through public land sales, but in 1928, when Congress authorized what would become Hoover Dam, the Bureau of Reclamation began to operate out of the government’s general funds.
But it was Lincoln’s Republicans who first provided the justification for investing in the nation. In the midst of the deadly Civil War, as the United States was hemorrhaging both blood and money, Republican lawmakers defended first their invention of national taxes. The government had a right to “demand” 99% of a man’s property for an urgent need, said House Ways and Means Committee Chair Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT). When the nation required it, he said, “the property of the people… belongs to the [g]overnment.”
The Republicans also defended developing the country. In a debate over the new Department of Agriculture, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME), famous both for his crabbiness and for his single-minded focus on the war, defended the use of “seed money.” With such an investment, he said, the country would be “richly paid over and over again in absolute increase of wealth. There is no doubt of that.”
The Republican outrage over Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game out of Georgia after the passage of the state’s new voter suppression law reveals a bigger crisis in American democracy: the mechanics of our current system do not reflect the will of the majority.
Consumer-driven corporate America is increasingly throwing its weight against the new voter suppression measures across the country. While MLB and Coca-Cola are out front on the new Georgia voting law, American Airlines, Microsoft, and Dell are all opposing the new Texas voter restriction measures. These corporations are focused on those Americans with buying power, and on those they predict will have that buying power going forward. When they take a stand against voter suppression laws, they are making a bet that the future of America is moving away from the Republicans toward a more inclusive society.
They have drawn the fury of current Republican lawmakers, especially those in Georgia, who are insisting that these corporate decisions are part of a culture war in which Democrats are pressuring corporate leaders to “cancel” things with which they disagree. But MLB is not known as a progressive league. Its fanbase is primarily White and does not tend to lean left. The players were not involved in MLB’s decision to move the All-Star game out of Atlanta, a decision that will cost Georgia about $100 million. Nonetheless, former president Trump yesterday called for his supporters to boycott “Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS and Merck,” all companies on the record against the new voter suppression bills.
The emphasis of corporate America on what its directors think the majority of its consumers want shows the same sort of disconnect national polls reveal. Americans as a whole do not like the policies of current-day Republican lawmakers. Seventy-seven percent of us like the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and yet not a single Republican voted for it. Eighty-four percent of us like background checks for gun purchases, and yet that policy is anathema to Republicans.
Seventy-nine percent of us want the government to fix our roads, bridges, railroads, and ports. Seventy-one percent of us want the government to make sure we all have high-speed internet. Sixty-eight percent of us want the government to replace our lead pipes, the same percentage as people who want the government to support renewable energy with tax credits. Sixty-four percent of us want to pay for these things by increasing taxes on corporations and big businesses.
Republican lawmakers oppose all of these popular measures.
Because our political system is currently skewed toward the Republican Party, its members’ opposition in Congress is far more powerful than it is on the ground. Because of gerrymandering, Democratic candidates in 2020 defeated their Republican opponents by 3.1 percentage points nationally and yet lost a dozen seats in the House of Representatives.
The Senate is even less fairly representative. It is currently divided evenly, with 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats (technically, 48 Democrats and 2 Independents who caucus with the Democrats). But the 50 Democrats represent 41.5 million more people than the Republicans do (the U.S. has a population of about 328 million).
That Republican minority can currently stop all legislation other than budget bills and judicial appointments through the process known as the filibuster, which forces 60 members of the Senate to agree to a bill before it can move forward.
As current-day Republican lawmakers fall farther out of sync with what the majority of Americans want, they have turned to the courts to shore up their vision of a world in which government cannot regulate business, protect civil rights, or provide a basic social safety net, but can enforce rules popular with evangelical religious practitioners (although evangelical religion is also on the wane, apparently in part because of its political partisanship). “By legislating from the bench, Republicans dodge accountability for unpopular policies,” writes Ian Millhiser in a terrific piece in the New York Times on March 30. “Meanwhile, the real power is held by Republican judges who serve for life — and therefore do not need to worry about whether their decisions enjoy public support.”
And yet, the party is nervous enough about its eroding power base that a Republican-aligned group has launched an initiative called the “American Culture Project,” intending to redirect the “cultural narrative” that its organizers believe “the left” now controls with “cancel culture” and “woke supremacy.” Set up as a social welfare organization, the American Culture Project does not have to disclose its donors or pay federal income taxes. Through ads on Facebook and other platforms, it hopes to swing voters to the Republicans; it is organized in at least five states– Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia—under names like “Arise Ohio,” “Stand Up Florida,” and “Mighty Michigan.”
A fundraising email shared with Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post, who broke the story, says, “We are building assets to shape and frame the political field in advance of the 2022 election and beyond…. [Y]our support of our outreach can be the difference between the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate staying under control of the Democrats or shifting back to pro-freedom Republican majorities.”
How the Yankees’ Luckiest Batboy Ended Up in an Unmarked Grave
Eddie Bennett earned fame in the dugouts of the Major Leagues. He had almost slipped from memory when New Yorkers teamed up to honor his short, dramatic life.
April 2, 2021
Eddie Bennett in 1921, the year he became the Yankees’ batboy.via Library of Congress
For 85 years, visitors to St. John’s Cemetery in Queens skipped past an unmarked grave in Section 34, Row DD. This is where Edward Bennett, a batboy for the New York Yankees — maybe the most famous batboy in the Major Leagues — was buried and forgotten.
For most of the 1920s, Eddie Bennett was the Yankees’ handyman, mascot and good luck charm. He was the first to shake hands with a player after he crossed the plate, and he ferried Babe Ruth’s bats from the locker room to the dugout for the slugger to find the perfect fit — sometimes as many as 33 of them. “There ought to be a law,” Eddie jokingly complained to an adoring press corps that had made him a fixture of the sports columns.
He was such an integral part of the team, in fact, that he was voted a share of the team’s earnings. When the players got diamond rings to celebrate the Yankees’ crushing World Series victory against the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1927, the batboy got one, too. “Feel the weight of it,” he bragged to a reporter.
How Mr. Bennett ended up in an unmarked grave in Middle Village, Queens — and how it was discovered and marked by a lifelong Yankees fan and a diocesan priest — is a tale of luck and charity and a fitting denouement to his drama-filled life.
Babe Ruth in 1927 with his favorite batboy, who served as the team’s handyman, mascot and good luck charm.The Stanley Weston Archive, via Getty Images
His back story was a big part of his appeal. By the time he got to the Yankees, Eddie Bennett had come a long way. He was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in 1903, and as an infant, he fell out of his carriage and twisted his spine, which stunted his growth and left him with a misshapen back.
When he was around 16, he was sacked from his job as a courier on Wall Street, the year after the Spanish flu swept through Brooklyn and killed both his parents. Looking for work, he found himself walking to the Polo Grounds, where the Chicago White Sox were visiting the Yankees for a doubleheader.
As he slipped under the bleachers to get a drink of water, Happy Felsch, a White Sox center fielder, spotted him. He laid his hand on the lump on the teenager’s back.
“Kid, are you lucky?” Mr. Felsch asked.
“Well, of course,” Eddie replied. What else could he say?
A newspaper profile the year after the Yankees’ 1927 World Series victory gave Eddie Bennett’s career a boost.The Brooklyn Citizen
Where many of the time would have dismissed the youth for his physical ailment, Mr. Felsch saw a talisman.
“In baseball, it was a superstitious age, far more than we can appreciate today,” said Gabriel Schechter, a baseball historian and author of a biography of Charlie Faust, a mentally challenged mascot for the New York Giants.
The White Sox went on to win the second game. They had gotten themselves a new mascot, and Mr. Bennett, a new job. In time, his reputation as a jinx chaser made it to Miller Huggins, the Yankees’ manager. In 1921, he offered Mr. Bennett $25 a week to serve as a batboy, the equivalent of $335 today.
Mr. Bennett’s arrival came a year after Babe Ruth’s. Ruth’s thunderous homers would catapult the Yankees to seven pennants and four World Series, but the sportswriters always ensured that the batboy got some of the credit. “Both are doing much to bring the Yankees home first in the pennant race,” said the caption to a syndicated picture of Mr. Bennett and Ruth.
Eddie Bennett, front row, second from left, with the 1921 Yankees team at the Polo Grounds.Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images
By the time Murderers’ Row trampled the Pirates in the 1927 World Series, the orphan’s domain had expanded to organizing transportation and handling baggage, duties normally assigned to the traveling secretary. He took to wearing well-tailored suits and brightly colored ties.
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On the road, Mr. Bennett roomed with Urban Shocker, a pitcher. Shocker’s heart disease forced him to sleep sitting up, and he was worried he would lose his job if the team found out. But he knew he could trust Mr. Bennett with his secret, said Steve Steinberg, a baseball historian who wrote a biography of Shocker.
Yankees (including Babe Ruth, far left, Eddie Bennett, center, and Lou Gehrig, far right) heading for spring training in the 1920s. Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images
Alas, the jinx the batboy chased off the field caught up to him. And then, it all ended, no less improbably. In May 1932, a taxicab pinned him against a pillar, breaking one of his legs and sending him to the hospital. Hobbling about on crutches, he tried to return to the dugout but was soon replaced by Jimmy Mars, an ambitious youngster who ran away from his Chicago home as soon as he heard about the mascot vacancy.
The Daily News
Three years later, Mr. Bennett was found dead in a furnished room on West 84th Street. Autographed photos from Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt, both pitchers for the Yankees, hung on the walls, The New York Times reported. Balls and bats signed by Ruth and Lou Gehrig decorated the room. An autopsy found that Mr. Bennett had died of alcoholism. He was 31.
A few staff members from the Yankees front office braved the January cold to attend his funeral. None of the players went, possibly because they were scattered about owing to the off-season. The team paid for the burial at St. John’s.
The team would go on to win 23 more World Series, but the batboys who came after Eddie Bennett would never be as famous.
As big a Yankees fan as Charles Papio was, he had never heard of Mr. Bennett. One day in the fall of 2019, he came across the mascot’s name on the St. John’s Cemetery website, listed among the famous buried there, like Carlo Gambino, the crime boss, and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Mr. Papio, a 73-year-old retired police officer, has a family grave at St. John’s and is a regular visitor. He had little trouble locating Mr. Bennett’s plot the next day, right next to Cooper Avenue.
When he got there, all he found was a patch of grass littered with dead leaves and a small American flag staked in it. There was no stone. Mr. Papio said a silent prayer. “My feelings were that he was a child of God and a mother’s child who had fallen through the cracks,” he said.
He started reading up on Mr. Bennett’s life. A practicing Catholic and an equally devoted Yankees fan — he owns mementos signed by Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle — he felt like something had to be done to honor the batboy’s memory.
Soon, he’d persuaded Ed Wilkinson, an editor at The Tablet, the Brooklyn diocese’s newspaper, to write a story about Mr. Bennett’s short, sad life.
The article soon made the rounds, and word that Mr. Bennett’s grave remained unmarked made it to the owner of a monument company on Long Island, who offered to donate a marker. The coronavirus pandemic delayed plans to hold a memorial service.
Finally, one sunny day last November, Mr. Papio put on a dark suit and drove to St. John’s. He stood by Mr. Bennett’s grave as the Rev. Michael Udoh, the cemetery’s chaplain, sprinkled holy water on a newly installed granite stone. It read: “Edward Bennett, 1903-1935. New York Yankees Mascot/Batboy, 1921-1932.”
Honoring Mr. Bennett at his gravesite were, from left, Anthony Spadolini, whose company donated a marker; the Rev. Michael Udoh; Anthony Nicodemo of the Catholic Cemeteries Office; and Charles Papio, a Yankees fan who initiated the effort to commemorate Mr. Bennett’s life.Ed Wilkinson/The Tablet
Father Udoh, who was born in Nigeria, had learned of Mr. Bennett only the day of the service, but he said he was moved by his story. “Even in his condition,” he said, “he was dedicated to bringing joy to people.”
Synopsis: Systemic racism is alive and well in the South, the part of the country where I have lived my life. My educated opinion is that racism permeates our entire country, but everywhere may not be like Georgia where I saw it first-hand for seven years and which attempts to normalize racism with its voter suppression laws. Here’s the short version of Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s article: When Ronald Reagan talked about the “Welfare Queen (a Black woman who stole tax dollars through social services fraud), when tea partiers called our first Black president a “socialist,” when Trump voters claimed to be reacting to “economic anxiety,” they were calling on a long history. Today, Republicans talk about “election integrity,” but their end game is the same as that of the former Confederates after the war: to keep Black and Brown Americans away from the polls to make sure the government does not spend tax dollars on public services.
Since the Civil War, voter suppression in America has had a unique cast.
The Civil War brought two great innovations to the United States that would mix together to shape our politics from 1865 onward:
First, the Republicans under Abraham Lincoln created our first national system of taxation, including the income tax. For the first time in our history, having a say in society meant having a say in how other people’s money was spent.
Second, the Republicans gave Black Americans a say in society.
They added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing human enslavement except as punishment for crime and, when white southerners refused to rebuild the southern states with their free Black neighbors, in March 1867 passed the Military Reconstruction Act. This landmark law permitted Black men in the South to vote for delegates to write new state constitutions. The new constitutions confirmed the right of Black men to vote.
Most former Confederates wanted no part of this new system. They tried to stop voters from ratifying the new constitutions by dressing up in white sheets as the ghosts of dead southern soldiers, terrorizing Black voters and the white men who were willing to rebuild the South on these new terms to keep them from the polls. They organized as the Ku Klux Klan, saying they were “an institution of chivalry, humanity, mercy, and patriotism” intended “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States… [and] to aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws.” But by this they meant the Constitution before the war and the Thirteenth Amendment: candidates for admission to the Ku Klux Klan had to oppose “Negro equality both social and political” and favor “a white man’s government.”
The bloody attempts of the Ku Klux Klan to suppress voting didn’t work. The new constitutions went into effect, and in 1868 the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union with Black male suffrage. In that year’s election, Georgia voters put 33 Black Georgians into the state’s general assembly, only to have the white legislators expel them on the grounds that the Georgia state constitution did not explicitly permit Black men to hold office.
The Republican Congress refused to seat Georgia’s representatives that year—that’s the “remanded to military occupation” you sometimes hear about– and wrote the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution protecting the right of formerly enslaved people to vote and, by extension, to hold office. The amendment prohibits a state from denying the right of citizens to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
So white southerners determined to prevent Black participation in society turned to a new tactic. Rather than opposing Black voting on racial grounds—although they certainly did oppose Black rights on these grounds– they complained that the new Black voters, fresh from their impoverished lives as slaves, were using their votes to redistribute wealth.
To illustrate their point, they turned to South Carolina, where between 1867 and 1876, a majority of South Carolina’s elected officials were African American. To rebuild the shattered state, the legislature levied new taxes on land, although before the war taxes had mostly fallen on the personal property owned by professionals, bankers, and merchants. The legislature then used state funds to build schools, hospitals, and other public services, and bought land for resale to settlers—usually freedpeople—at low prices.
White South Carolinians complained that members of the legislature, most of whom were professionals with property who had usually been free before the war, were lazy, ignorant field hands using public services to redistribute wealth.
Fears of workers destroying society grew potent in early 1871, when American newspaper headlines blasted the story of the Paris Commune. From March through May, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, French Communards took control of Paris. Americans read stories of a workers’ government that seemed to attack civilization itself: burning buildings, killing politicians, corrupting women, and confiscating property. Americans worried that workers at home might have similar ideas: in italics, Scribner’s Monthly warned readers that “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”
Building on this fear, in May 1871, a so-called taxpayers’ convention met in Columbia, South Carolina. A reporter claimed that South Carolina was “a typical Southern state” victimized by lazy “semi-barbarian” Black voters who were electing leaders to redistribute wealth. “Upon these people not only political rights have been conferred, but they have absolute political supremacy,” he said. The New York Daily Tribune, which had previously championed Black rights, wrote “the most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power,… [are] taxed and swindled… by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen.”
The South Carolina Taxpayers’ Convention uncovered no misuse of state funds and disbanded with only a call for frugality in government, but it had embedded into politics the idea that Black voters were using the government to redistribute wealth. The South was “prostrate” under “Black rule,” reporters claimed. In the election of 1876, southern Democrats set out to “redeem” the South from this economic misrule by keeping Black Americans from the polls.
Over the next decades, white southerners worked to silence the voices of Black Americans in politics, and in 1890, fourteen southern congressmen wrote a book to explain to their northern colleagues why Democrats had to control the South. Why the Solid South? or Reconstruction and its Resultsinsisted that Black voters who had supported the Republicans after the Civil War had used their votes to pervert the government by using it to give themselves services paid for with white tax dollars.
Later that year, a new constitution in Mississippi started the process of making sure Black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted, effectively getting rid of Black voting.
Eight years later, there was still enough Black voting in North Carolina and enough class solidarity with poor whites that voters in Wilmington elected a coalition government of Black Republicans and white Populists. White Democrats agreed that the coalition had won fairly, but about 2000 of them nonetheless armed themselves to “reform” the city government. They issued a “White Declaration of Independence” and said they would “never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” It was time, they said, “for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95% of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by Negroes.”
As they forced the elected officials out of office and took their places, the new Democratic mayor claimed “there was no intimidation used,” but as many as 300 African Americans died in the Wilmington coup.
The Civil War began the process of linking the political power of people of color to a redistribution of wealth, and this rhetoric has haunted us ever since. When Ronald Reagan talked about the “Welfare Queen (a Black woman who stole tax dollars through social services fraud), when tea partiers called our first Black president a “socialist,” when Trump voters claimed to be reacting to “economic anxiety,” they were calling on a long history. Today, Republicans talk about “election integrity,” but their end game is the same as that of the former Confederates after the war: to keep Black and Brown Americans away from the polls to make sure the government does not spend tax dollars on public services.
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Notes: I don’t link to my own books usually, but if anyone is interested, the argument and quotations here are from my second book, “The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North,” (Harvard University Press, 2001).
The Senate does not speak for you. Photo: Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images
As we wait for the Senate parliamentarian to let us know if 41 senators will be able to block a minimum-wage increase that a comfortable majority of Americans supports, it’s as good a time as any to be reminded of the non-representative nature of the Senate Republican Conference.
Daily Kos Elections has come up with a chart displaying the percentage of the population represented by senators from each party since 1990, along with the percentage of Senate votes each party captured (displayed in three-cycle averages, since only one-third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years):
Republican senators haven’t represented a majority of the U.S. population since 1996 and haven’t together won a majority of Senate votes since 1998. Yet the GOP controlled the Senate from 1995 through 2007 (with a brief interregnum in 2001–02 after a party switch by Jim Jeffords) and again from 2015 until 2021.
As Stephen Wolf observed in his write-up of the results, there have been consequences for this disconnect:
Five Supreme Court justices (and many more lower court judges) were confirmed by senates where the GOP majority was elected with less popular support than Democrats. Those right-wing hardliners are now poised to use their control over the court to attack voting rights and preserve Republican gerrymanders while striking down progressive policies. This same minority rule has also paved the way for massive tax cuts for the rich under George W. Bush and Donald Trump that have facilitated an explosion in economic inequality.
Thanks to the filibuster, of course, on many key measures, the 43.5 percent of voters represented by a Republican minority in the Senate have as much clout as the 44.7 percent represented by a Republican majority when the GOP won a trifecta four years ago. That’s why Democrats are trying to cram as much legislation as they can into a budget-reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered and why the parliamentarian’s ruling on the scope of that bill is such a big deal for Americans trying to survive on minimum wage.
Understanding the realities of our constitutional system means recognizing its injustices, too — along with injustices like the filibuster, which cannot be attributed to the Founders.
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This horror has to stop.’ Spiritual advisers to death row inmates decry recent wave of federal executions
Yusuf Nur, the spiritual adviser for Dustin Higgs, holds a Quran while he talks about his experiences with Higgs, outside the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on January 15, 2021.
(CNN) — It wasn’t until Yusuf Nur was inside the execution chamber, standing next to a condemned man strapped to a gurney, that he understood why he’d been asked to be present.
The inmate, Orlando Hall, had asked Nur to be his Muslim spiritual adviser in the weeks leading up to his execution by the United States government and to serve as the minister of record when he was put to death on Thursday, November 19, 2020.
“At the beginning, it was not clear to me that being a spiritual counselor would entail being there in the death chamber,” Nur told CNN, “and be there only a few feet from the gurney where they execute the person.”
“But the day of the execution, standing there right beside his gurney where he’s lying, in that death chamber, that’s when I realized why he needed me there,” Nur said. Even with the inmate’s family in an adjoining witness room, “I was the only person he knew there.” Between July 2020 and January 2021, 13 federal death row inmates were executed by the US government in the final months of the Trump administration — the first federal executions since 2003, when an informal moratorium halted the death penalty for 17 years. It was a historic series of executions. Prior to the hiatus, only three federal inmates had been executed since 1988, making this schedule of executions the most prolific in decades. The 10 executions that took place in 2020 alone were the most federal civilian executions in a calendar year since the 1800s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Many of the inmates had spiritual advisers like Nur, who ministered to them in the weeks before they were executed and stood next to them inside the execution chamber at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Four advisers who served as ministers of record for six of the 13 inmates recently spoke to CNN. They described their relationship with the inmates, however brief, and what it was like to watch them be put to death. Despite coming from different faiths and walks of life, they described similar experiences and a confluence of emotions — both a sense of duty to be there for the inmates and an undercurrent of anger or sadness at what they witnessed.
And while they were clear they did not condone the violent crimes of which the inmates were convicted, each of the spiritual advisers who spoke to CNN believe the death penalty is wrong.
For Father Mark O’Keefe, a Catholic priest and a professor of moral theology, being the minister of record for Dustin Honken’s execution only affirmed that belief.
“I witnessed them killing someone, and I knew him, and I had a connection with him,” O’Keefe said. “It made the death penalty very, very real to me, and the moral wrong of it clear to me at a deeply personal level.”
Could I stand there and watch somebody being killed and not want to stop it?
Sister Barbara Battista
“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said in a statement at the time.The death penalty remains legal in 28 states, though governors in California, Oregon and Pennsylvania have imposed moratoriums on executions in their states. But the federal government has the authority to pursue capital punishment in all 50. A series of legal challenges pushed the first executions back until last July, when Daniel Lewis Lee, who’d been convicted of three murders, was put to death. A dozen executions followed over the next six months, culminating with the execution of Dustin Higgs on January 16, just days before Donald Trump left office.
“I wasn’t surprised at all that Trump did it,” said Rev. Bill Breeden, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister who’s been the spiritual adviser to death row inmate Chadrick Fulks for more than a decade. “I was surprised at the number of the ones he did and the persistence of it.”
Breeden has been working with prisoners since the 1990s. That work, he said, eventually led to a relationship with Fulks, who Breeden said was “like a son” to him. When the death penalty was set to resume, he feared Fulks would be executed.
Fulks was spared, but Breeden, a vocal opponent of the death penalty, knew he’d be at the prison gates, protesting as many executions as he could. And that was before he became the minister of record to Corey Johnson, who was executed in January for murdering seven people during a 1992 killing spree.
Sister Barbara Battista of the Sisters of Providence, a congregation in nearby Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana, felt similarly. As her congregation’s justice promoter, capital punishment became a focus of her work soon after the executions were announced. She and others formed the Terre Haute Death Penalty Resistance and committed themselves to “making as much noise as we possibly could,” she said. As each execution was carried out, the group stood near the prison, carrying signs and protesting.
“There was a sadness in me, and an anger, too,” said Battista. “It was like, we have to make sure people know this is happening.”
Battista said protesters had tried to honor pain on all sides of the executions, including the families of the inmates’ victims. While they stood vigil outside the prison, they tried to recite the victims’ names to acknowledge their families’ suffering. Another group, she said, had signs printed that included the victims’ names.
‘I can’t pass this cup’
When Keith Nelson first asked Battista to be the minister of record at his execution, she prayed about it, she told CNN.
That afternoon, she’d learned her oldest brother was killed in a car accident, she said. Despite her grief, she wanted to say yes. Still, as a physician’s assistant, she wondered if standing by as someone was killed would be “unnatural.”
“Could I stand there,” she wondered, “and watch somebody being killed and not want to stop it?”
Nelson was sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of 10-year-old Pamela Butler in 1999. Nelson abducted her while she was rollerblading in front of her Kansas home, according to the Justice Department, and Nelson confessed to strangling her with a wire.
Battista did not condone the inmate’s actions, she said. But she ultimately accepted Nelson’s request, because, she said, “As a Catholic Christian, I firmly believe that all persons deserve my compassion, deserve to be treated with dignity, no matter what.”
Nur, a business management professor, first received the request to be Orlando Hall’s spiritual adviser through Breeden, who’d reached out to Nur’s Bloomington mosque searching for one on Hall’s behalf.
The two met at Breeden’s home, in a stretch of forest in southern Indiana, and discussed what the role would involve.
“I said, as you take this on, he’s very likely going to ask you to be in the death chamber with him,” Breeden recalled. “And I said if you don’t feel like you can do that, I won’t respect you any less.”
Nur couldn’t understand. “I kept thinking, what will he get of me being there? In the back of my mind, I was hoping that he would not ask me to be there.”
Hall was sentenced to death for the 1994 kidnapping, rape and murder of 16-year-old Lisa Rene. Hall, along with several accomplices in a marijuana trafficking operation, kidnapped her from her Arlington, Texas, home while searching for her brother. After repeatedly raping her, they dug a grave in an Arkansas park, beat her with a shovel and buried her alive, according to the Justice Department.
Hall embraced Islam after his conviction, Nur said, and they spent a lot of time discussing the Quran. But it was “surreal” and “awkward,” Nur said, to talk to Hall about dying. At 49, he was in good shape and looked much younger, Nur said, and it was strange to discuss his impending death.
Just as Breeden predicted, Hall asked Nur to be with him during the execution. Nur still didn’t understand why, but he said yes.
The execution chamber
Father O’Keefe, the Catholic priest, regularly offered mass at the Terre Haute prison, but he generally did not do so on death row. It wasn’t until he filled in for another priest that he first met Dustin Honken.
Honken was sentenced to death for killing five people in 1993 — including Lori Duncan, a single mother, and her daughters, Kandi and Amber, ages 10 and 6 — in an effort to hide his multistate methamphetamine drug operation.
The two only met about four times, O’Keefe said, but he was struck by Honken’s “sincere faith,” and he thought Honken “wanted a deeper relationship with God.” But their own relationship was short lived, and when they said goodbye for what O’Keefe believed would be the last time, Honken had been scheduled to be executed.
About two weeks before Honken’s execution, Father O’Keefe received a request from the inmate through his lawyers that he be the minister of record at his execution. O’Keefe didn’t hesitate to say yes.
“It’s the ministry of priests to accompany the dying,” he said. He also recognized “spiritual depth” in Honken, and said the inmate believed a priest “would give him a sense that God was present to him in that final moment.”
“I couldn’t deny that to him,” O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe acknowledged the suffering of the families of Honken’s victims. He said he agreed to be Honken’s minister of record because the inmate was a human being who deserved to have someone with him at the end.
“It doesn’t change the crime he committed, and it doesn’t change the terrible suffering of that family,” he said. “Those families — what a horrible thing to live with all these years.”
“But killing Dustin didn’t change that…his death changed nothing,” he said.
The day of the execution, O’Keefe said he had expected to spend a significant amount of time with Honken, but in the end they only had a few minutes, with a piece of glass between them.
“We were both upset about that, but both of us knew, don’t fight this because there’s not enough time,” he said.
O’Keefe heard Honken’s confession, and they spoke briefly. Honken was mostly concerned about his family.
“He told me he was at peace,” O’Keefe said, “and that he was more concerned about his daughter,” who had come to visit her father but would not attend the execution.
From there, O’Keefe was escorted into a viewing room. He waited there until he was taken into the execution chamber itself, where Honken was already strapped to the gurney.
“It was sterile,” said O’Keefe, a statement echoed by all the ministers of record. “The color, the tile — it could have been an old hospital room. And all the accoutrements of trying to heal somebody were there — the oxygen monitor, what appeared to be the heart monitor, the IV.”
“But none of that was to save him,” the priest said. “It was all to kill him.”
All the spiritual advisers who spoke to CNN described largely the same experience, with slight deviations. Each was told to stand next to a piece of tape by the gurney. They were given an opportunity to speak with the inmate, pray, give last rites, read scripture or recite a declaration of faith. Prison officials, witnesses from the media, the inmates’ family and friends, and the victims’ family watched from adjacent viewing rooms.
Corey Johnson, who didn’t read well, according to Breeden, had asked Breeden to read his last words, the minister said. But Breeden said he was not allowed to and that an official said Johnson had to read the words.
Johnson’s lawyers released the inmate’s final words after the execution.
“I would have said I was sorry before, but I didn’t know how. I hope you will find peace,” he said. “To my family, I have always loved you, and your love has made me real. On the streets, I was looking for shortcuts, I had some good role models, I was side tracking, I was blind and stupid. I am not the same man that I was.”
And then the lethal injection began.
The ministers of record mostly described silence as the executions they each witnessed were carried out.
Breeden said Johnson turned to the witness room used by his family and said, “I love you.” Breeden said he heard Johnson’s brother yelling, “I love you, bro. I love you, bro!”
The inmate’s breathing slowed until someone came from an adjacent room and used a stethoscope to check Johnson’s pulse before he was declared dead.
In their statement, Johnson’s attorneys said they saw him as a “gentle soul” who had tried to earn his GED.
“We wish also to say that the fact Corey Johnson should never have been executed cannot diminish the pain and loss experienced by the families of the victims in this case,” they said. “We wish them peace and healing.” The executions gave some families the opportunity to close a painful chapter of their lives. After William LeCroy was executed for the 2001 murder of Joann Lee Tiesler in Georgia, her father said in a statement, “justice was finally served.”
“I regret that it took nineteen years to get to this point, but it has brought some needed closure to Joann’s family and friends,” Tom Tiesler said. Not all the victims’ families supported the executions. Despite then-Attorney General Barr’s statement the US was seeking justice for the victims and their families, Earlene Peterson, whose daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law were tortured and killed by Daniel Lewis Lee, told CNN prior to his execution that she didn’t want it done in her name.
“It would shame my daughter,” she said, “that someone has to die for her.”
Renewed opposition
Nur and Battista would both end up going back to the execution chamber to serve as the ministers of record for two other inmates: Dustin Higgs and LeCroy, respectively.
“To tell you the truth, I really didn’t want to go back there,” Nur said of receiving the request from Higgs, the last inmate to be executed. “But what can you do? That’s the least you can do for somebody in that position.”
Like the other spiritual advisers, Nur had always been opposed to capital punishment. After witnessing Hall’s execution, however, something shifted.
“From the moment I realized what was happening, that the death penalty issue is no longer on my periphery, that I am facing it, I became committed to the abolition of the death penalty,” he said. “This horror has to stop.”
Nur tested positive for Covid-19 about a week after Hall was put to death, and while he was asymptomatic, Nur believes he contracted the virus during the execution. He later lent his account to a complaint in which other inmates at Terre Haute argued for halting the remaining executions, citing the risk posed by Covid-19. The effort was unsuccessful.The executions drew additional scrutiny because of the fact they were carried out during the pandemic. Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, previously told CNN the executions were possible super spreader events because of the number of people involved.
“The decision to move forward with all these super spreader events in the midst of a pandemic…is historically unprecedented,” Dunham said.After Hall’s execution, at least six members of the execution team and more than a dozen Terre Haute prison staffers tested positive for Covid-19, according to a motion filed in court. Attorneys for Johnson also called on the Justice Department to withdraw his execution date after he tested positive for Covid-19 and said proceeding exhibited “reckless disregard for the lives and safety of staff, prisoners and attorneys alike.”
In his confirmation hearing before the Senate, Biden’s pick for Attorney General, Judge Merrick Garland, said the death penalty had given him “great pause.”
As an associate deputy attorney general, Garland was involved in the decision to seek the death penalty in the case against Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. During his February confirmation hearing, Garland said he supported capital punishment in that case and he did not regret pursuing it.
But he had developed concerns over the death penalty in the last two decades, he said. He pointed to the exonerations of wrongfully convicted people, the arbitrary nature with which the death penalty is applied and its “disparate impact on Black Americans and members of other communities of color.”Garland said he expected Biden would be “giving direction in this area” and indicated it was “not at all unlikely” the Department would return to the “previous policy.”
“We need to abolish capital punishment,” Battista said. “Yes, we need President Biden to affect a moratorium, but that’s just a stop gap measure.” She’s hopeful, pointing to states like Virginia, which is on the verge of outlawing capital punishment. “It gives me great hope,” she said. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, legislators in a number of states, including California and Kansas, among others, have recently introduced bills to abolish the death penalty in their states.
I was honored to be there. But I was also ashamed to be there, because this is done with my taxes.
Rev. Bill Breeden
O’Keefe has also experienced a shift after witnessing Honken’s execution. He’d always believed the death penalty was wrong. But as an academic, he said it was something he’d largely only thought about in theory.
“Intellectually, I know the Catholic Church’s arguments against the death penalty and I adhere to those. I am against the death penalty,” he said. “But I must admit, for me, it was always kind of abstract.”
But witnessing Honken’s execution changed something. The next day, his emotions caught up to him, and he realized what he had seen.
“It struck me that being present when another human being is killed just ought not to be,” he said. “That’s when my belief against the death penalty became real.”
Following Johnson’s death, Breeden said he turned to the execution team and told them, “I would be remiss in my role as a minister if I did not advise you to find another line of employment before you lose your souls.”
Outside, Breeden spoke to reporters and the group of protesters who’d held vigil nearby.
“I was honored to be there,” he told them, according to a video of his remarks that was streamed live on Facebook. “But I was also ashamed to be there, because this is done with my taxes.”
CNN’s Christina Carrega contributed to this report.
Democrats can’t kill the filibuster. But they can gut it.
Three reforms Manchin and Sinema might consider
Norman Ornstein
Democrats won both Georgia Senate seats in January’s runoffs, giving them control of both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time in a decade. But their ability to advance legislation — from raising the federal minimum wage to democracy reforms in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — can be thwarted by the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority filibuster rule.
Progressives’ anger at Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his caucus, who use the filibuster to block every initiative they can, is nearly matched by their frustration with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), whose opposition to getting rid of the filibuster means Democrats are stuck with it, since they’d need all 50 votes in their caucus, plus Vice President Harris as a tiebreaker, to do it. Last month, the progressive No Excuses PAC, whose leaders helped elect Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) in 2018, said Manchin and Sinema “stand in the way of progress” by abetting Republican efforts “to shrink their own party’s pandemic relief, climate, and economic investment plans.” The political action committee has talked up primary challenges to both of them to show “‘how angry Democratic primary voters are going to be’ if they continue to support the filibuster.”
Manchin hasn’t budged, though. Monday, when asked if he’d reconsider his stance on eliminating the filibuster, he shot back: “Jesus Christ, what don’t you understand about ‘never’?”
Democrats are right to see the urgency: Republican state lawmakers around the country are moving to enact voter suppression measures that will, if passed, put the slender Democratic majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives in jeopardy in 2022 and beyond. Without democracy reform, and with the Supreme Court’s recent assaults on the Voting Rights Act, sticking with the filibuster could make it nearly impossible for the Biden administration to pursue its agenda.
But Democrats should proceed with caution: In 2001, I warned that if Republicans harangued Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) over his apostasy on their party’s policy priorities, they would regret it. He would switch parties and, in a 50-50 Senate, shift the Senate majority. The next month, it happened. The same concern now applies to Democrats with Manchin. Push too far, and the result could be Majority Leader McConnell, foreclosing Democrats’ avenue to pursue infrastructure, tax reform and health reform legislation.
So, what can Democrats do?Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) demurred when asked on March 2 if he would support ending the legislative filibuster. (The Washington Post)
For a West Virginia Democrat, heavy criticism from key members of his own party, up to and including President Biden, might wind up working to Manchin’s advantage. That was true of an earlier apostate, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), who’s been reelected several times after switching from Democrat to Republicanin 1994, after butting heads with President Bill Clinton.
Instead of naming and shaming them, Democrats might consider looking at what Manchin and Sinema like about the filibuster. Sinema recently said, “Retaining the legislative filibuster is not meant to impede the things we want to get done. Rather, it’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be. I believe the Senate has a responsibility to put politics aside and fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans.” Last year, Manchin said, “The minority should have input — that’s the whole purpose for the Senate. If you basically do away with the filibuster altogether for legislation, you won’t have the Senate. You’re a glorified House. And I will not do that.”
If you take their views at face value, the goal is to preserve some rights for the Senate minority, with the aim of fostering compromise. The key, then, is to find ways not to eliminate the filibuster on legislation but to reform it to fit that vision. Here are some options:
Make the minority do the work. Currently, it takes 60 senators to reach cloture — to end debate and move to a vote on final passage of a bill. The burden is on the majority, a consequence of filibuster reform in 1975, which moved the standard from two-thirds of senators present and voting to three-fifths of the entire Senate. Before that change, if the Senate went around-the-clock, filibustering senators would have to be present in force. If, for example, only 75 senators showed up for a cloture vote, 50 of them could invoke cloture and move to a final vote. After the reform, only a few senators in the minority needed to be present to a request for unanimous consent and to keep the majority from closing debate by forcing a quorum call. The around-the-clock approach riveted the public, putting a genuine spotlight on the issues. Without it, the minority’s delaying tactics go largely unnoticed, with little or no penalty for obstruction, and no requirement actually to debate the issue.
One way to restore the filibuster’s original intent would be requiring at least two-fifths of the full Senate, or 40 senators, to keep debating instead requiring 60 to end debate. The burden would fall to the minority, who’d have to be prepared for several votes, potentially over several days and nights, including weekends and all-night sessions, and if only once they couldn’t muster 40 — the equivalent of cloture — debate would end, making way for a vote on final passage of the bill in question.
Go back to the “present and voting” standard. A shift to three-fifths of the Senate “present and voting” would similarly require the minority to keep most of its members around the Senate when in session. If, for example, the issue in question were voting rights, a Senate deliberating on the floor, 24 hours a day for several days, would put a sharp spotlight on the issue, forcing Republicans to publicly justify opposition to legislation aimed at protecting the voting rights of minorities. Weekend Senate sessions would cause Republicans up for reelection in 2022 to remain in Washington instead of freeing them to go home to campaign. In a three-fifths present and voting scenario, if only 80 senators showed up, only 48 votes would be needed to get to cloture. Add to that a requirement that at all times, a member of the minority party would have to be on the floor, actually debating, and the burden would be even greater, while delivering what Manchin and Sinema say they want — more debate.
Narrow the supermajority requirement. Another option would be to follow in the direction of the 1975 reform, which reduced two-thirds (67 out of a full 100) to three-fifths (60 out of 100), and further reduce the threshold to 55 senators — still a supermajority requirement, but a slimmer one. Democrats might have some ability to get five Republicans to support their desired outcomes on issues such as voting rights, universal background checks for gun purchases or a path to citizenship for Dreamers. A reduction to 55, if coupled with a present-and-voting standard would establish even more balance between majority and minority.
In a 50-50 Senate, and with the GOP strategy clearly being united opposition to almost all Democratic priorities, Biden and Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) need the support of Manchin and Sinema on a daily basis. They won’t be persuaded by pressure campaigns from progressive groups or from members of Congress. But they might consider reforms that weaken the power of filibusters and give Democrats more leverage to enact their policies, without pursuing the dead end of abolishing the rule altogether.
Correction: An earlier version of this story referenced 40 senators as “two-thirds” of the full Senate. Forty senators equal two-fifths.
(Illustration by Dave Murray for The Washington Post)
Jenna Ryan seemed like an unlikely participant in the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. She was a real estate agent from Texas. She flew into Washington on a private jet. And she was dressed that day in clothes better suited for a winter tailgate than a war.
Yet Ryan, 50, is accused of rushing into the Capitol past broken glass and blaring security alarms and, according to federal prosecutors, shouting: “Fight for freedom! Fight for freedom!”
But in a different way, she fit right in.
Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years. She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that. She filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and faced another IRS tax lien in 2010.
Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.
The financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters — many with professional careers and few with violent criminal histories — were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president’s rhetoric painting him and his supporters as undeserving victims.
While no single factor explains why someone decided to join in, experts say, Donald Trump and his brand of grievance politics tapped into something that resonated with the hundreds of people who descended on the Capitol in a historic burst of violence.
“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity — combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something away — mobilized a lot of people that day.”
U.S. Capitol Police officers confront supporters of President Donald Trump outside the Senate Chamber at the Capitol on Jan. 6. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
The financial missteps by defendants in the attempted insurrection ranged from small debts of a few thousand dollars more than a decade ago to unpaid tax bills of $400,000 and homes facing foreclosure in recent years. Some of these people seemed to have regained their financial footing. But many of them once stood close to the edge.
Ryan had nearly lost everything. And the stakes seemed similarly high to her when she came to Washington in early January. She fully believed Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen and that he was going to save the country, she said in an interview with The Post.
But now — facing federal charges and abandoned by people she considered “fellow patriots” — she said she feels betrayed.
“I bought into a lie, and the lie is the lie, and it’s embarrassing,” she said. “I regret everything.”
The FBI has said it found evidence of organized plots by extremist groups. But many of the people who came to the Capitol on Jan. 6 — including Ryan — appeared to have adopted their radical outlooks more informally, consuming conspiracy theories about the election on television, social media and right-wing websites.
The poor and uneducated are not more likely to join extremist movements, according to experts. Two professors a couple of years ago found the opposite in one example: an unexpectedly high number of engineers who became Islamist radicals.
In the Capitol attack, business owners and white-collar workers made up 40 percent of the people accused of taking part, according to a study by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. Only 9 percent appeared to be unemployed.The Post obtained hours of video footage, some exclusively, and placed it within a digital 3-D model of the building. (TWP)
The participation of people with middle- and upper-middle-class positions fits with research suggesting that the rise of right-wing extremist groups in the 1950s was fueled by people in the middle of society who felt they were losing status and power, said Pippa Norris, a political science professor at Harvard University who has studied radical political movements.
Miller-Idriss said she was struck by a 2011 study that found household income was not a factor in whether a young person supported the extreme far right in Germany. But a highly significant predictor was whether they had lived through a parent’s unemployment.
“These are people who feel like they’ve lost something,” Miller-Idriss said.
Going through a bankruptcy or falling behind on taxes, even years earlier, could provoke a similar response.
“They know it can be lost. They have that history — and then someone comes along and tells you this election has been stolen,” Miller-Idriss said. “It taps into the same thing.”
Playing on personal pain
Trump’s false claims about election fraud — refuted by elections officials and rejected by judges — seemed tailored to exploit feelings about this precarious status, said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who studies political extremism.
“It’s hard to ignore with a Trump presidency that message that ‘the America you knew and loved is going away, and I’m going to protect it,’” Haider-Markel said. “They feel, at a minimum, that they’re under threat.”
While some of the financial problems were old, the pandemic’s economic toll appeared to inflict fresh pain for some of the people accused of participating in the attempted insurrection.
A California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack, according to public records. A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a nearly $2,000 state tax lien.
Several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.
Riley June Williams walks with her attorney, Bryan McQuillan, after being released from Dauphin County Prison in Harrisburg, Pa., on Jan. 21. (Dan Gleiter/Patriot-News/AP)
The parents of Riley June Williams — a 22-year-old who allegedly helped to steal a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office — filed for bankruptcy when she was a child, according to public records. A house owned by her mother faced foreclosure when she was a teenager, records show. Recently, a federal judge placed Williams on home confinement with her mother in Harrisburg, Pa. Her federal public defender did not respond to a request for comment.
People with professional careers such as respiratory therapist, nurse and lawyer were also accused of joining in.
One of them was William McCall Calhoun, 57, a well-known lawyer in Americus, Ga., 130 miles south of Atlanta, who was hit with a $26,000 federal tax lien in 2019, according to public records. A woman who knows Calhoun, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly, said he started to show strong support for Trump only in the past year. An attorney for Calhoun declined to comment.
Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police when she tried to leap through a door’s broken window inside the Capitol, had struggled to run a pool-service company outside San Diego and was saddled with a $23,000 judgment from a lender in 2017, according to court records.
Financial problems were also apparent among people federal authorities said were connected to far-right nationalist groups, such as the Proud Boys.
Dominic Pezzola of Rochester, N.Y., is accused of helping lead the charge into the Capitol on Jan. 6. Over the past five years, he has had a history of state tax warrants totaling more than $40,000. (AP)
Dominic Pezzola, who federal authorities said is a member of the Proud Boys, is accused of being among the first to lead the surge inside the Capitol and helping to overwhelm police. Up to 140 officers were injured in the storming of the Capitol and one officer, Brian Sicknick, was killed.
Pezzola, of Rochester, N.Y., also has been named in state tax warrants totaling more than $40,000 over the past five years, according to public records. His attorney declined to comment.
The roots of extremism are complex, said Haider-Markel.
“Somehow they’ve been wronged, they’ve developed a grievance, and they tend to connect that to some broader ideology,” he said.
The price of insurrection
Ryan, who lives in Frisco, Texas, a Dallas suburb, said she was slow to become a big Trump supporter.
She’s been described as a conservative radio talk show host. But she wasn’t a budding Rush Limbaugh. Her AM radio show each Sunday focused on real estate, and she paid for the airtime. She stopped doing the show in March, when the pandemic hit.
But she continued to run a service that offers advice for people struggling with childhood trauma and bad relationships. Ryan said the work was based on the steps she took to overcome her own rough upbringing.
Twice divorced and struggling with financial problems, Ryan developed an outlook that she described as politically conservative, leaning toward libertarian.
But politics was not her focal point until recently. She recalled being upset when President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012. And she preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton four years later. But she said she wasn’t strident in her support for Trump.
That changed as the 2020 election approached.
She said she started reading far-right websites such as Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit. She began streaming shows such as Alex Jones’s “Infowars” and former Trump campaign manager Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic.” She began following conspiracy theories related to QAnon, a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology. She said she didn’t know if the posts were true, but she was enthralled.
“It was all like a football game. I was sucked into it. Consumed by it,” Ryan said.
She attended the first protest in her life in April, going to Austin to vent about the state’s pandemic lockdown orders. That was followed by a rally for Shelley Luther, who gained national attention for reopening her beauty salon in Dallas in defiance of the lockdown.
Ryan said she traveled to Trump’s “Save America” rally on a whim. A Facebook friend offered to fly her and three others on a private plane.
They arrived in Washington a day early and got rooms at a Westin hotel downtown, Ryan said.
It was her first trip to the nation’s capital.
The next morning, Jan. 6, the group of friends left the hotel at 6 a.m., Ryan said. She was cold, so she bought a $35 knit snow hat with a “45” emblem from a souvenir shop. They then followed the crowd streaming toward the National Mall.
“My main concern was there were no bathrooms. I kept asking, ‘Where are the bathrooms?’” she said. “I was just having fun.”
They listened to some of the speakers. But mostly they walked around and took photos. She felt like a tourist. They grabbed sandwiches at a Wawa convenience store for lunch. They hired a pedicab to take them back to the hotel.
She drank white wine while the group watched on television as Congress prepared to certify the electoral college votes. They listened to clips of Trump telling rallygoers to walk to the Capitol and saying, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
They decided to leave the hotel and go to the Capitol.
Ryan said she was reluctant.
But she also posted a video to her Facebook account that showed her looking into a bathroom mirror and saying, according to an FBI account of her charges: “We’re gonna go down and storm the capitol. They’re down there right now and that’s why we came and so that’s what we are going to do. So wish me luck.”
Trump supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
She live-streamed on Facebook. She posted photos to Twitter. She got closer to the Capitol with each post. She stood on the Capitol’s steps. She flashed a peace symbol next to a smashed Capitol window. The FBI also found video of her walking through doors on the west side of the Capitol in the middle of a packed crowd, where she said into a camera, according to the bureau: “Y’all know who to hire for your realtor. Jenna Ryan for your realtor.”
The FBI document does not state how long Ryan spent inside the building. She said it was just a few minutes. She and her new friends eventually walked back to the hotel, she said.
“We just stormed the Capital,” Ryan tweeted that afternoon. “It was one of the best days of my life.”
She said she realized she was in trouble only after returning to Texas. Her phone was blowing up with messages. Her social media posts briefly made her the infamous face of the riots: the smiling real estate agent who flew in a private jet to an insurrection.
Nine days later, she turned herself in to the FBI. She was charged with two federal misdemeanors related to entering the Capitol building and disorderly conduct. Last week, federal authorities filed similar charges against two others on her flight: Jason L. Hyland, 37, of Frisco, who federal authorities said organized the trip, and Katherine S. Schwab, 32, of Colleyville, Texas.
Ryan remained defiant at first. She clashed with people who criticized her online. She told a Dallas TV station she deserved a presidential pardon.
Then Trump left for Florida. President Biden took office. And Ryan, at home in Texas, was left to wonder what to do with her two mini-goldendoodle dogs if she goes to prison.
“Not one patriot is standing up for me,” Ryan said recently. “I’m a complete villain. I was down there based on what my president said. ‘Stop the steal.’ Now I see that it was all over nothing. He was just having us down there for an ego boost. I was there for him.” A
Yusuf Nur, the spiritual adviser for Dustin Higgs, holds a Quran while he talks about his experiences with Higgs, outside the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on January 15, 2021.
Randy H-D's Sight 