Halway Blog - Politics - Anti-lynching Resolution is Contemptible

Anti-lynching Resolution is Contemptible

The anti-lynching "apology" from the US Senate accomplishes the difficult feat of simultaneously capturing the extremes of both nonsense and contemptibility.

The recent "apology" resolution from the US Senate (SR 39) accomplishes the difficult feat of simultaneously capturing the extremes of both nonsense and contemptibility. In a resolution sponsored by 79 senators, the Senate "...apologizes to the victims of lynching for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation."

The US Senate works for the citizens of the United States; it does not belong to the senators. It is not the job of senators to embarrass their employers. If our current senators find that past senators or senates were negligent, destructive or criminal, they may say so; I, for one, encourage them to say so, but not as a matter of Senate business. If our current senators have committed crimes, particularly lynching, they should not be in the Senate at all, much less sponsoring or supporting resolutions.

It's apparent that our senators are not apologizing for themselves. The last date specified in the resolution as an opportunity to respond to lynching was 1957, two years before the Senate's most senior member, ex-Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd, was elected to the Senate. The senators appear to be apologizing for the country. As a citizen who never lynched anybody, I strongly object to the implication that I and most of my fellow citizens owe anybody an apology for lynching.

The Senate has enough meaningful tasks that it has no need to waste time on such "form-over-substance" farces as SR 39. If individual senators want to apologize for something, they can address the following:
1. Insulting Bush's judicial nominees, including accusing many of "extremism" - Senator Schumer owes a special apology to Judge Charles Pickering for accusing him of being "soft on cross-burners."
2. Covering up the Social Security crisis - Some senators, e.g., Boxer and Kennedy, may not know any better, but most of the Senate must be aware that the Trust Funds have no money and that the funds are not "solvent until 2041."
3. Lying about the filibuster - The filibuster doesn't protect minorities, it doesn't protect debate, and seldom if ever was a filibuster launched for an honorable purpose.
4. Pork barreling in general, but especially for the feeding frenzy over the homeland security and defense appropriations - Senator Byrd could apologize for all the federal money he has funneled into construction projects in West Virginia.
5. Senator Byrd has probably apologized for being a Klansman, but his apology shouldn't be accepted until he removes himself from the Senate. West Virginia should apologize for electing Byrd.
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The New York Times weighed in on 19 Jun 2005 with a commentary, "The Senate Apologizes, Mostly"; by Sheryl Gay Stolberg. At that time, the NY Times said the the number of sponsors was up to all but eight. (I would suppose that to mean that ninety-two senators not only voted for the resolution, but also sponsored it.) In true NY Times fashion, Ms. Stolberg sneered that the remaining eight were "all Republicans," and included the gratuitous but now acceptable distortion that one of these was Trent Lott, "...who lost his post as Senate majority leader several years ago over racially insensitive remarks". She might better have remarked that one of the resolution's sponsors was ...Senator Byrd, who is still in the Senate, despite having once been a kleagle (recruiter) for the Ku Klux Klan." Ms. Stolberg then went on to name the eight who wouldn't support the resolution: Lamar Alexander of Tennessee; Thad Cochran of Mississippi; John Cornyn of Texas; Mike Enzi of Wyoming; Judd Gregg of New Hampshire; Trent Lott of Mississippi; John Sununu of New Hampshire; and Craig Thomas of Wyoming. To give Ms. Stolberg credit, she included remarks from the eight on their reasons for not supporting the resolution.

Anyone who doubts that this resolution was pure political show to impress ignorant voters and the lapdog mainstream press should address the presence of the ninety-two sponsors, where only one sponsor is required to introduce a bill or resolution. [1] The opponents were unlikely to call for a roll call vote, so the supporters became sponsors to get their own names into the record.

Ms. Stolberg called the resolution,"...a formal apology to lynching victims and their descendants." It was not. Apologies are not part of a senator's job, are not specified in any law or senate rule, and therefore have no "form" and cannot be "formal." If she was seeking an adjective to dignify this brainless and divisive waste of time, "official" would have been more accurate.

Ref:
S RES. 39; "Apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of those victims for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation"; United States Senate; June 13, 2005
http://thomas.loc.gov

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