Crazy Like A Foxx … Virginia Foxx Again Makes A Foolish And Insulting Statement

Leave it to Norh Carolina Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx to make yet another foolish and insulting statement in what almost is becoming old hat for her. In a debate about a project that mostly was unrelated, Foxx used the opportunity (and the platform it provided) to attack Democrats and prop up Republicans using the Civil Rights Movement as her weapon of choice. Foxx claimed,  “Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the ’60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle. They love to engage in revisionist history.” But, as she yielded her time, Congressman Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat from California, rose and issued a strong response against Rep. Foxx.

CARDOZA: Today, what I’m hearing on the floor really takes the cake. The gentlelady from North Carolina, in her statement just now, indicated that the Republican GOP had passed the Civil Rights Act legislation with almost no help from the Democrats. I can’t believe my ears. It was the Kennedy and Johnson administration where we passed that Great Society legislation. It was over the objections of people like Jesse Helms from the gentlewoman’s state that we passed that civil rights legislation. John Lewis…

FOXX: Would, would the gentleman yield?

CARDOZA: No, I will not yield. John Lewis, a member of this House, was beaten on the Edmund Pettus bridge to get that civil rights legislation passed. Tell John Lewis that he wasn’t part of getting that legislation passed.

Helms was a United States senator from 1973 through 2003. While he was not around in the 1960s, Helms was clearly no friends to blacks or to those who fought, bled and died during the Civil Rights Movement.

Foxx rises later and says that Helms was not elected until 1972 and “was not in the Congress when the Civil Rights legislation was passed in the 60s.”

She is technically correct, but her victory is a weak one. It’s kind of like being proud of outrebounding your opponent, in basketball, by five when you lost the game by 25 points.

Helms blasted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (source: Wikipedia):

Helms opposed many progressive policies regarding race, such as busing, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.^{[257][258][259]} Helms called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ‘the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress’,^[12] and sponsored legislation to either extend it to the entire country or scrap it altogether.^[173] Helms reminded voters that he tried, with a 16-day filibuster, to stop the Senate from approving a federal holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr,^[21] although he had fewer reservations about establishing a North Carolina state holiday for King.^[260] He has been accused of being a segregationist by liberals and political scholars including USA Today‘s DeWayne Wickham who wrote that Helms ‘subtly carried the torch of white supremacy‘ from Ben Tillman.^{[261][262][263][264]}

In 1996 the Department of Justice admonished Helms’s 1990 campaign for mailing 125,000 postcards to households in predominantly African-American precincts warning them (incorrectly) that they could go to jail if they had not updated their addresses on the electoral register since moving.^[265] Helms opposed ‘every piece of civil rights and affirmative action legislation’ and blocked ‘Black judges from being considered for the federal bench’.^[260] In 1982, he voted against the extension of the Voting Rights Act.^[260] Helms opposed busing, supported the ‘racist apartheid regime of South Africa’, and ‘for years blocked attempts by President Bill Clinton to appoint a Black judge on the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’.^[260] Only when Helms’s own judicial choices were threatened with blocking did attorney Roger Gregory of Richmond, Virginia get confirmed.^[260] Helms tried to block the nomination of Carol Moseley Braun, the first African-American female senator, as ambassador to New Zealand.^[260]

Her defense of Jesse Helms is more pathetic than the original point that put her in the hole in the first place.

Clarence Thomas Reminds Us Of The Pain Of Losing Thurgood Marshall

The more I think about it, it’s sad to think that someone who has done so little for civil rights (Clarence Thomas) replaced someone so great (Thurgood Marshall) who did so much for civil rights. It’s almost unforgivable that George H.W. Bush, in 1991, nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court to replace one of the important figures in black history, Thurgood Marshall.

Here is a lengthy excerpt from Wikipedia:

Marshall won his very first U.S. Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940), at the age of 32. That same year, he was appointed Chief Counsel for the NAACP. He argued many other cases before the Supreme Court, most of them successfully, including Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944); Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950); and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950). His most famous case as a lawyer was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” public education was unconstitutional because it could never be truly equal. In total, Marshall won 29 out of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court.

During the 1950s, Thurgood Marshall developed a friendly relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1956, for example, he privately praised Hoover’s campaign to discredit T.R.M. Howard, a maverick civil rights leader from Mississippi. During a national speaking tour, Howard had criticized the FBI’s failure to seriously investigate cases such as the 1955 killers of George W. Lee and Emmett Till. An FBI informant reported that Marshall had “no use for Howard and nothing would please him more than to see Howard completely crushed.” Ironically, two years earlier Howard had arranged for Marshall to deliver a well-received speech at a rally of his Regional Council of Negro Leadership in Mound Bayou, Mississippi only days before the Brown decision. ^[4]

President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. A group of Democratic Party Senators led by Mississippi’s James Eastland held up his confirmation, so he served for the first several months under a recess appointment. Marshall remained on that court until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Solicitor General.

On June 13, 1967, President Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice Tom C. Clark, saying that this was “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.” Marshall was confirmed as an Associate Justice by a Senate vote of 69-11 on August 31, 1967.^[5] He was the 96th person to hold the position, and the first African-American.

Meanwhile, Thomas fought against civil rights and continues to fight against civil rights.

From The Daily Voice:

In an 8-1 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Justice Clarence Thomas cast the lone vote against a key provision of the Voting Rights Act on Monday (June 22).

The Court, in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder (PDF link) declined to overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act that has often been challenged by conservative critics as unnecessary. Instead it avoided the “difficult” question about the constitutionality of the law. But the Court did allow a tiny Texas municipality to be exempted from a requirement to provide advance notice before making changes to its election procedures.

In his dissent, Thomas seemed to argue that the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary because the explicit racial segregation of the Jim Crow era is gone.

”The violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains,” Thomas wrote. He admitted that in 1965, “Congress had every reason to conclude that States with a history of disenfranchising voters based on race would continue to do all they could to evade the constitutional ban on voting discrimination.” But, Thomas added, “The extensive pattern of discrimination that led the Court to previously uphold Section 5 . . . no longer exists…And the days of ‘grandfather clauses, property qualifications, ‘good character’ tests, and the requirement that registrants ‘understand’ or ‘interpret’ certain matter,’ are gone.”

Some things change, but other things remain the same.

It hurts to think this man replaced the great Thurgood Marshall.

Field Negro Takes On Clarence Thomas

I would encourage readers to check out one of my favorite blogs on the Web, Field Negro. In one blog I just took an opportunity to read, Field takes on Clarence Thomas for yet another inexplicable slap in the face to black people.

Here is an excerpt:

Some sister must have really done Clarence wrong back in the day, because that Negro seriously hates his people. I bet he vowed to get the entire Negro race back for those black folks who dissed him in his early life.

Honestly, how could Uncle Clarence be the only one of the Supremes to vote against not scrapping a certain provision of the Voting Rights Act? (He even went against his closet lover, Antonin Scalia, on this one) A provision which pretty much insured that certain states would not be messing with the civil rights of minority voters? Has this Negro taken leave of his senses? Does he just do this kind of shit to get attention? Folks, believe me, in spite of what some folks in certain states would have you believe, that provision is still needed today. Those pesky little literacy tests could come back faster than you can say Jig Clarence, Jig.

Field Negro:
http://field-negro.blogspot.com/2009/06/most-dangerous-negro-in-merry-ca.html