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Surprise! Bigots Running For Senate In Alabama

Surprise! Bigots Running For Senate In Alabama

In the final third of his political career, George Wallace retreated from the politics of rage and resentment, apologizing to black Alabamians for his support of white supremacy and winning the votes of many of them. But he is remembered, still, as the fiery segregationist who stood in the schoolhouse door, the politician who insisted “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” His legacy is stubbornly resistant to a makeover.

White Southern politicians of the 21st century ought to think long and hard about the Wallace legacy and whether they want to be remembered for more than their political expediency and prejudices. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., seem to be ignoring the lessons of the Wallace era.

Both men are seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate that is currently held by an Alabama Democrat, Doug Jones. And in a hotly contested Republican primary, both men are appealing to a right-wing Republican base that remains resentful of the social and cultural changes wrought by the civil rights movement. To do so, Sessions and Byrne are diving unabashedly into hoary stereotypes and offensive rhetoric.

For Sessions, this is familiar territory. (He is seeking to win back the seat he gave up to become Trump’s first attorney general.) He is a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who has long fought to curtail voting rights for black citizens and who wants to limit even legal immigration. When Sessions was in the Senate, one of his chief aides was the infamous Stephen Miller, now an aide to President Donald Trump. Miller has a long history of trafficking in white nationalist beliefs and supporting the views of self-avowed racists.

So it’s no great surprise that Sessions has a new campaign ad in which he not only denounces Democratic politicians as “socialists” — a time-honored tactic by conservatives — but also accuses them of wanting “open borders” and having a plan to give “free health care to illegal immigrants.” Never mind that the claims don’t bear scrutiny.

Byrne, however, is a more recent convert to the politics of racism and resentment. Once upon a time, he was a moderate Republican with a track record of working within the mainstream. Not anymore. Since Trump’s rise to power, Byrne has been busy tacking to the right, courting ultraconservative extremists, enmeshing his campaign in racially charged rhetoric.

His latest campaign ad is incendiary, featuring images of women of color in Congress and, of all people, former professional football player Colin Kaepernick. At least Sessions has the decency to denounce some white Democrats. Byrne doesn’t. He homes in, instead, on a picture of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wearing the hijab, and attempts to associate her with terrorism. Kaepernick, who is famous for refusing to stand for the national anthem, is supposedly a traitor to his country. The ad may delight Alabama’s white bigots, but it also makes Byrne appear to be one of them.

And his cynicism shows through as he looks solemnly into the camera to declare that he will not let the people whom he targets in the ad “tear the country apart.” That’s precisely what Byrne is doing with a campaign that takes its cue from the George Wallace who ran for president in 1968, pledging to “Stand Up for America.” In “The Politics of Rage,” a seminal work analyzing Wallace’s appeal, historian Dan Carter writes: “In speech after speech, Wallace knit together the strands of racism with those of a deeply rooted xenophobic ‘plain folk’ cultural outlook which equated social change with moral corruption.”

It is quite likely that a Republican will win the race for the Senate. Jones won a special election in crimson-red Alabama only because the winner of the Republican primary was Roy Moore, a former jurist who was damaged by credible accusations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls. Trump remains hugely popular here in my home state.

But like neighboring Mississippi, Alabama has serious challenges, including high rates of infant and maternal mortality and a poor system of public education. It deserves to be represented by politicians prepared to meet the future, not those mired in the reprehensible politics of the past.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

GOP Panic Over Roy Moore’s Candidacy In Alabama Senate Primary

GOP Panic Over Roy Moore’s Candidacy In Alabama Senate Primary

Republicans are panicking after alleged pedophile Roy Moore announced on Thursday that he is jumping into the U.S. Senate race in Alabama.

“We’ll be opposing Roy Moore vigorously,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. That was not true in Moore’s first Senate campaign in 2017, when McConnell said he hoped Moore would withdraw his candidacy but never vigorously opposed him or endorsed his Democratic opponent.

“This place has enough creepy old men,” said Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ).

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) said “the people of Alabama are smarter than that,” referring to Moore’s candidacy.

“I can assure everyone that by running, Roy Moore is going against my father and he’s doing a disservice to all conservatives across the country in the process,” wrote Donald Trump Jr., lashing out at his fellow Republican.

Republicans are clearly concerned that Moore’s candidacy could keep the seat in the hands of Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who defeated Moore in a special election in 2017. Moore is the most visible and well-known figure (for all the wrong reasons) running in the crowded Republican primary.

Politico reported that South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott has talked to Jeff Sessions, who vacated that Senate seat to become Trump’s attorney general, about running for his old seat now that Sessions is out of a job, having been fired by Trump.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said Republicans would “probably lose the seat” unless Trump “came out forcefully against him.”

Trump said last month that he didn’t want Moore to run again, for fear he would lose, but he added that he has “nothing against” Moore.

Jones’ victory over Moore in 2017 was a black eye for the Republican Party after they gave up a Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country.

The loss came after it was revealed that Moore, when he was 32, groped a 14-year-old girl he was dating at the time.

The disgusting episode immediately came to mind as Moore promised at his campaign kickoff Thursday to “make more personal contact with people.”

Embarrassingly, Trump won Alabama by 28 points just a year before Moore’s loss. The campaign flop was an early harbinger of the blue wave that washed away the Republican majority in the House in the 2018 midterms.

Republicans are already on edge about the upcoming election, and Moore’s candidacy puts them on the defense in territory that has historically favored Republicans.

Pedophilia is once again a problem for the Republican Party, and they are on full alert.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: Roy Moore, brandishing a pistol at a campaign event.

Alabama Senator Tells IRS To Stop Picking On Southern Poor

Alabama Senator Tells IRS To Stop Picking On Southern Poor

On Monday, ProPublica published a map showing where IRS audits are most concentrated. The South stood out.

The reason is because of an intense focus at the IRS on auditing recipients of the earned income tax credit. The EITC is one of the country’s largest antipoverty programs, in the form of a tax refund for low-income workers, especially those with children. The typical EITC recipient earns less than $20,000 per year.

In practice, the IRS’ emphasis on EITC recipients means states with concentrations of low-income workers see the highest audit rates. One of those states is Alabama. Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), wasn’t pleased.

“To take such a large portion of limited IRS resources and to focus them so intensely on rural communities in Alabama and the Southeast makes little fiscal sense,” Jones wrote in a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. “Moreover, the practice appears to be blatantly discriminatory.” (An agency spokesperson previously told ProPublica that audit subjects are chosen without regard to race or where the taxpayer lives.)

The map, which stemmed from a study by Kim M. Bloomquist, formerly a senior economist in the tax agency’s research office, showed that the highest audit rates were to be found in rural, mostly African American counties in the South. Among states, Alabama had the fifth highest audit rate in the country, behind Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and Florida.

“In an effort to focus its resources and ensure fair treatment of all taxpayers, I believe the IRS should undertake a full and thorough review of the policies and practices that led to such a disparate geographic impact of its annual audits,” Jones wrote. He ended his letter with a number of questions about IRS audit policies.

As we explained in December, Republicans in Congress have pressured the IRS since the 1990s to prevent payments of the credit to people who aren’t eligible for it. Meanwhile, critics, some within the IRS, such as Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, have long criticized the focus on EITC audits as disproportionate, especially since IRS studies show that far more revenue is lost through cheating by those higher up the income scale. Furthermore, in recent years, budget cuts have hampered the IRS’ ability to pursue wealthy taxpayers, while audits of EITC recipients, which are largely automated, have been slower to decline. The result is an increasingly unequal mix of audits.

Lawmakers will have an opportunity to ask Rettig about the audit choices in a hearing next Wednesday before the Senate Finance Committee.

“There are two tax codes in America, and there are also two enforcement regimes,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR), the committee’s ranking member. “It takes significant resources to go after wealthy tax cheats with savvy lawyers and accountants, and the IRS simply doesn’t have those resources after years of Republican attacks. Ensuring wealthy taxpayers pay what they owe shouldn’t be a partisan issue, and this will be a focus with Commissioner Rettig.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

IMAGE: Senator Doug Jones, the Alabama Democrat who criticized the IRS for conducting too many senseless audits of his rural poor constituents.

Senator Who Fought KKK Says Trump Encourages Violence Against LGBTQ

Senator Who Fought KKK Says Trump Encourages Violence Against LGBTQ

Alabama Sen. Doug Jones says the hatred promoted by Trump and Mike Pence is giving a “green light” to violent bigots to commit hate crimes.

In an interview with Newsweek published Tuesday, the Democratic senator was asked about his February tweet that praised actress Ellen Page for passionately condemning Pence and the Trump administration for their anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

Jones was asked if he worries about “the Trump administration inciting hatred and violence against the LGBTQ community.”

“Yes,” Jones replied. “I do think sometimes people get so caught up in their own zealousness about an issue that they forget how much words matter. They have a pulpit by which people can take things the wrong way, and there’s a lot of people out there looking toward them for a green light to do bad things.”

He added that he does not believe Trump officials are “intentionally trying to incite violence.” But, he said, “I do believe that some of their words unintentionally can give a green light to people, and that’s what we’ve got to be careful of.”

Before he was elected to office, Jones led the successful prosecution of Ku Klux Klan members who planted a bomb that killed four black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, nearly 40 years after they committed the crime.

Jones understands how violent bigotry works, and he is correct that it doesn’t matter whether Trump officials intend to incite violence. They are still doing it — and are still refusing to change course despite mounting evidence that their actions are causing harm.

Since Trump’s election, the FBI has found that reports of hate crimes have increased in America. Despite this data and the moral crisis it has provoked, Trump’s fellow Republicans have largely chosen inaction on hate crimes legislation.

Trump has also refused to stop calling journalists the “enemies of the people,” despite evidence that his words have specifically incited violence and attempted violence against journalists. He continues to spread dangerous lies about Democrats supporting “infanticide,” despite America’s decades-long history of violent anti-abortion terrorism. And he has only reluctantly condemned white supremacy, despite a recent surge of white supremacist terrorism.

Specifically on the issue of LGBTQ equality, Trump and Pence have been trying to turn the clock back. The administration is currently trying to overturn the right of transgender service members to wear the military uniform, after President Barack Obama changed policy to allow equal service.

Trump is also plotting to manipulate federal law so that LGBTQ people are no longer protected by anti-discrimination laws.

These actions are a clear attempt to hold on to the loyalty of anti-LGBTQ voters, who support the Trump presidency in part thanks to Mike Pence, a long-time homophobe.

Trump and Pence have embraced hate and even made it official government policy. Violent bigots have taken their words to heart, and hurt and killed innocent Americans.

And Jones is calling them out for the harm they are causing every day.

Published with permission of The American Independent.