Tag: GOP racism

Lindsey Graham is very upset that immigrant families are being reunited

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The South Carolina senator repeatedly spouted lies about immigration in a recent interview.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC) in a media appearance on Monday unleashed a torrent of false and misleading claims about immigration and family reunifications.

The South Carolina senator went on Fox News to push a series of xenophobic talking points popular at the moment with Republican lawmakers who claim there is a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, with large numbers of immigrants entering the country.

“I’ve never seen so many incentives for illegal immigration as I see today,” he claimed. “If you’re 16 and younger, we’re gonna make sure you never leave the country. If you have a family member here illegally, we’re gonna pay to reunite the family illegally. That incentivizes more illegal immigration.” Continue reading.

Maddow explains exactly why John Cornyn is fighting new DOJ nominee — and it has nothing to do with qualifications

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MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow speculated Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is leading the charge against a key Justice Department nominee because she humiliated him.

Wednesday, Maddow recalled the extensive corruption of Texas cop Tom Coleman who arrested four dozen people claiming that he did an undercover operation and busted them for cocaine. An overwhelming number of those arrested were Black. There was no evidence, no recording of the alleged drug sales, no proof whatsoever. Still, the court believed his testimony over that of the individuals charged. Most were convicted and some were given sentences over 100 years. 

The officer, in that case, was an N-word-spouting racist honored with a police award as Lawman of the Year from then-Attorney General John Cornyn. Continue reading.

House Republicans’ claim about ‘known or suspected terrorists’ at the border

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As midterm elections were approaching in 2018, President Donald Trump and members of his administration falsely claimed that thousands of “known or suspected” terrorists were being caught at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The real number ranges from around three to a dozen per year, according to news reports, official statistics and a whistleblower complaint from a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security.

McCarthy and Katko, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, traveled to El Paso this week and apparently got updated statistics from U.S. border officials, covering the period from October to the present. We were skeptical at first, but the claim seems grounded in fact. Let’s take a look. Continue reading.

‘What the hell?’ MSNBC’s Morning Joe unloads on Ron Johnson for defending Trump’s ‘terrorists’

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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough unloaded on “bigot” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who admittedhe was unafraid of white insurrectionists but would have feared Black Lives Matter protesters.

The Wisconsin Republican later feigned surprise over the strongly negative reaction to his comments, but the “Morning Joe” host called out the racism and inaccuracy in Johnson’s claims — and his subsequent denials.

“An ‘innocuous comment,'” Scarborough said, quoting the senator’s denial. “An innocuous comment where he said, I’m going to get in trouble for saying this.’ He knew exactly what he was doing. Let me tell you, Ron, the left doesn’t want you to be silenced, because the more you say bigoted things like the other day, the more you actually help the left and the more you hurt Republicans. So, yes, Ron, they don’t want you to be silenced, and of course, you aren’t silenced, because you actually wrote an op-ed in one of the largest newspapers on the planet, one of the most important newspapers on the planet. We keep hearing this, ‘I will not be silenced,’ as people write op-eds in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and go on national news networks and get more access to the American people than anybody else. It’s just a stupid, stupid argument.” Continue reading.

Ron Johnson keeps digging

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The Wisconsin senator tried Monday to explain his comments about being more scared had Black Lives Matter followers stormed the Capitol. But the revisionism didn’t stop there.

Last week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) yet again caused controversy by saying what he really thought about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Having previously downplayed the severity of it and raised a debunked conspiracy theory that it might not have been perpetrated by supporters of former president Donald Trump, Johnson said he never truly felt threatened. His reason: Because, in his words, “those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” He said he would have felt more threatened if Black Lives Matter or antifa were behind the riot.

On Monday, Johnson kept digging.

In an appearance on a local Wisconsin radio show, Johnson fought back against allegations of racism for invoking BLM and saying he would have been more scared if that movement had been behind it. Continue reading.

Trump, House Republicans embrace candidate who has made racist statements, drawing attention to party’s tolerance of bigotry

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President Trump and Republican leaders’ embrace of a House candidate who has made racist statements and espoused the QAnon conspiracy theory is again highlighting the party’s willingness to tolerate extreme and bigoted positions.

Trump on Wednesday tweeted that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her Georgia primary Tuesday evening, was a “future Republican Star,” who was “strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” The office of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who ignored multiple pleas from his members to wade into the primary to stop Greene — has said that he will seat her on congressional committees.

The decision has left many House Republicans privately griping about irresponsible leadership, even as they do little publicly to challenge the party’s position or to state their opposition to Greene’s joining their conference if she is elected in November, as is expected, in a reliably Republican district. Continue reading.

Tom Cotton: Schools that teach real history of slavery shouldn’t get funding

But the Republican senator has previously argued the government shouldn’t interfere with state and local decisions on education.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wants to withhold federal funding from school systems that the New York Times’ acclaimed project on the history of slavery in America. This comes despite Cotton’s longstanding position that the federal government should not micromanage state and local decisions when it comes to education.

On Thursday, he introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, a bill aimed at stripping funding from schools that use the Times’ “1619 Project” in their curriculum.

In a press release, Cotton said his bill would bar any use of federal funds to teach about the project in “K-12 schools or school districts” and punish them by making them “ineligible for federal professional-development grants.” Continue reading.

GOP Senate candidate calls Confederate monuments ‘symbols of hope,’ says ‘we learn from our mistakes’

The Hill logoGOP New Hampshire Senate candidate retired Gen. Don Bolduc said during a campaign-style gathering earlier this month that he believed statues of Confederate soldiers are “symbols of hope” and “moving forward.”

“We forgave. We created this thing called Reconstruction. We moved forward. We honor those that fought against us as opposed to dishonoring them. We gave them life back, opportunity back in order for them to change, in order to unify our country. These decisions were made for a reason. Statues were put up for a reason,” Bolduc can be seen saying in video of the event.

The comments come amid a national debate over removing Confederate statues, spurred by recent protests over racial injustice. The House is slated to vote next week on legislation to remove from the Capitol statues of people who served in the Confederacy or who worked to uphold slavery, and lawmakers from both parties have expressed an openness to renaming Army bases that were named after Confederate officers. Continue reading.

‘Respect the people that feed America’: GOP senator slammed for suggesting Hispanics don’t wear masks or social distance

Washington Post logoAs cases of the novel coronavirus surged nationwide this week, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) suggested that North Carolina’s Hispanic population may be harder hit by the potentially deadly virus because they are not practicing social distancing or wearing masks as frequently as other groups.

“I’m not a scientist and I’m not a statistician, but one of the concerns that we’ve had more recently is that the Hispanic population now constitutes about 44 percent of the positive cases,” Tillis, who is up for reelection in the fall, said during a Tuesday telephone town hall. “And we do have some concerns that in the Hispanic population we’ve seen less consistent adherence to social distancing and wearing a mask.”

Tillis’s remarks, which gained traction Thursday after a short audio recording of the event circulated online, were condemned as “racist” by critics who argued that the virus disproportionately impacts Hispanics because many are essential workers. By Thursday night, at least two Latino Democratic lawmakers had publicly called out Tillis for his comments, noting that there is still a resistance to mask-wearing among conservatives. Continue reading.

House Republicans call Black Lives Matter protests ‘organized crime’

The House GOP wants to target the Black Lives Matter movement using anti-racketeering laws created to prosecute the Mafia.

Congressional Republicans from the House Freedom Caucus on Thursday held an event to attack the protest movement that has risen up against racism and police violence following the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his throat for more than 8 minutes while Floyd pleaded that he could not breathe.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), chair of the caucus, called on federal prosecutors to utilize the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act against protesters. RICO was passed to in the 1970s, originally to target the Mafia.

“Our U.S. attorneys need to be prosecuting cases,” said Biggs. “We can look at RICO, the racketeering laws apply to many in this case. ” Continue reading.