Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri is a gigantic jackass. He just got completely owned by Mitch McConnell who is having none of President Trump’s defense of the Confederacy. If you’ve been following along, you know that Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts succeeded in attaching an amendment to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act which provides funding for our military operation. She did this as a member of the Armed Services Committee, and it passed on a voice vote. In other words, it was unanimous.
The amendment requires the Pentagon to rename pretty much anything that honors a member of the Confederacy, including military bases and naval ships. Even before Warren introduced it, President Trump said this would be an abomination. It didn’t matter, obviously, since no Republicans on the committee were willing to cast a vote against it.
Since the amendment came in committee, it’s part of the base bill, so the only way to get rid of it is to pass an amendment on the full floor of the Senate that removes Warren’s language. This is what Senator Hawley wanted to do. Obviously, Hawley’s amendment would have failed, but McConnell would rather contract a nasty case of chlamydia than have a recorded vote on defending the heritage of slave-holding traitors.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed a cloture motion to end debate on the bill without a vote on Hawley’s amendment.
The amendment would have eliminated a requirement — agreed to on June 11 by the Senate Armed Services Committee — that the Defense Department remove the names of Confederate generals from 10 major military bases within three years…
…Hawley sought unanimous consent to get a vote on removing it, but a colleague objected.
“I’ve been told that we can’t even have a vote,” Hawley lamented afterward, in a floor speech. “No vote! We can’t even call the roll on this. No, we’ve just got to swallow it and move on as the woke cancel culture moves on, steamrolling our history and our traditions, and yes, our best traditions as Americans.”
Yes, the “best traditions as Americans,” including fighting for an elite upper crust of cruel Southerners to buy and sell human beings, break up families, rape with impunity, and compel forced labor at the end of a whip.
Not too long ago, McConnell would have introduced Hawley’s amendment himself, but times have changed and now he’s trying to like grim death to hold onto a vanishing Senate majority. People are in the streets bringing a hammer and torch to anything that seems even vaguely like a plantation owner.
Meanwhile, Trump insists he’ll veto the entire defense budget if it has Warren’s anti-Confederacy language. He may keep that promise or he may not, but Congress will obviously override his stupid veto power if he’s vicious enough to exercise it.
It tells us a whole lot about Trumpism and all those who support it when one of the hills on which they choose to plant their flag and fight to the death is defending the legacy of the Confederacy. Here in one part of our county we had a battle in 2017 over a Confederate monument to Robert E. Lee, which had been put in place on public land in 1927 by a now defunct local group,”The United Daughters of the Confederacy”. Its existence was largely unknown to most people in the county, even thought it sat just off a main thoroughfare through the town, which was called Dixie Highway. After Charlottesville, it was taken down, and stored away. Well, there was a very vocal minority of Trumpers and Confederate supporters who got all up in arms and protested with the “That’s my heritage, you’re removing my heritage” argument. They planted their Confederate flags around the monument’s original site and held vigils defending it. People protesting the monument showed up, too, and things got quite contentious. In 2018 the Fraternal Order of Eagles in that town took the monument from county storage and placed it at their facility, which is on private property, and it still stands there. The Eagles organizations in this county are conservative white male bastions, and are very pro-Trump, pro-white groups. So it was not a surprise to me that they embraced the monument and happily put it on their property.
Just last week, someone defaced the monument by painting the plaque with red spray paint and writing on the parking lot at the base of the monument “No Racist Statues”. There is a very good quality video of the guy doing it. A white man dressed in black with a black stocking over his head and face. My guess is everyone at the Eagles is blaming Antifa, which we all know is the big boogeyman for those who bend toward white supremacy. It just boggles my mind that in suburban areas of Ohio we still have people who are defending the Confederacy and flying Confederate flags. However, I am not surprised. Lived here all my life and there has always been a solid undercurrent of racism here, but it is often glossed over and hidden by the practice of those traditional mid-western niceties which are so prevalent in this part of the country. With the county slowly growing more diverse, little by little the fears of the white people are growing, which brings out more and more of the dark side which has always been present here.