The GOP’s leading obstructionist and spin-master slipped on Wednesday.
Every now and then, a politician speaks the truth by accident. The columnist Michael Kinsley wrote years ago, “It used to be, there was truth and there was falsehood. Now there is spin and there are gaffes. Spin is often thought to be synonymous with falsehood or lying, but more accurately it is indifference to the truth. A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence, it is. Meanwhile, a gaffe, it has been said, is when a politician tells the truth — or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A gaffe is what happens when the spin breaks down.”
This past Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, said something truthful about what goes on in his head. At a news conference explaining his party’s opposition to legislation that would have create national standards for voting rights and rolled back new restrictions that Democrats say are targeted at suppressing the votes of minorities, McConnell trotted out an argument he has been making for months, but with a revealing twist.
“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he said. “In a recent survey, 94 percent of Americans thought it was easy to vote,” he continued. “This is not a problem. Turnout is up. Biggest turnout since 1900. It’s simply they’re being sold a bill of goods to support a Democratic effort to federalize elections.”
“African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”
https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1484133615361351682
On Twitter, the hashtag #MitchPlease has taken off in response, with many Black people posting pictures of themselves and their families, insisting on their Americanness.
Let’s leave aside whether it’s true that high turnout means we don’t have disparities in voter participation or places where local authorities have made it harder for minorities to vote. (The same survey, from the Pew Center, that McConnell is citing, also found that 22% of Black in-person voters reported having to wait in long lines of a half hour or more compared to just 175 of whites.)
McConnell’s blatant separation of African-Americans as a group different from Americans is not the first time he’s let the cloak slip on his actual thinking. As I wrote here recently, years ago he admitted, in a speech at the Republican National Committee’s annual meeting, that he actually doesn’t think high voter participation is good. “I’m not particularly disturbed by lower voter turnout….I’d rather have the people who care decide who wins.” If it were up to McConnell, Congress would federalize elections by requiring everyone to show a photo ID before they vote, something the ACLU criticized harshly as a new kind of poll tax.
Last year, McConnell defended the Senate’s filibuster rule, claiming it had “no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.” Historian Sarah Binder demolished that claim, pointing out that of the first 40 filibusters, from 1837–1917, at least ten targeted racial issues. Today New York Times columnist Charles Blow called up an indicative example from 1890, when legislation that would have led to federal supervision of voting in the South to protect equal voting rights was blocked by a 33-day filibuster in the Senate.
McConnell was also the leading signer of a letter to the U.S. Department of Education from 38 Republican senators objecting to a proposed update to its American History and Civics Education programs. The update seeks to include more teaching about “the importance of the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society,” and argues that it is “critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students,” but McConnell objected. He and his co-signers argued, “Our nation’s youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps. Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push radical agendas that tear us apart.”
Well, Senator McConnell, how exactly does referring to African Americans as distinct from Americans “bring us together”?