On Censure Resolutions

I know a thing or two about censure resolutions. For those of you who missed it in June, I was the author of the resolution by the Lexington County GOP censuring Senator Jake Knotts for the “@*#&$%! raghead” remark (though, in truth, I’m just as angry about the “@*#&$%! pro-lifers” remark Knotts made at another Senator just off the Senate floor earlier this year…).

Last night, the Greenville GOP voted 61-2 to censure Senator Lindsey Graham over a litany of ills concluding with being not enough of a Republican. You’ve heard them before, and if you’re like me, you agree that Senator Graham was wrong on most, if not all counts: Judges Haynes (no), Sotomayor and Kagan (yes), amnesty for illegals, closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, supporting TARP, cap and trade, comments about Glenn Beck, comments about earmarks, etc.

The question is do these resolutions work, and do they matter?

Clearly I think there’s a place for them, or I wouldn’t have written the Knotts censure. Were I a member of the Greenville GOP, I would likely have voted yes last night.

But it strikes me that these resolutions eventually become whistling into a tornado.

Senator Knotts reaction was one of complete contempt. If the resolution was intended to force him out of office (it wasn’t), it failed miserably. If anything, Senator Knotts is more dug in than ever. Likewise, the reaction out of the Graham camp will likely mirror his performance at the Greenville GOP convention last spring – I won, I’m your Senator for four more years, get over it.

All that said, local County Parties have a right to express their displeasure with their elected officials, especially when those officials depart from the values they expressed when getting themselves elected. Senator Graham spoke to the Lexington GOP Convention in 2007 and talked about making sure President Bush got his pro-life judges. By the end of that summer he had put the knife to the Haynes nomination over the Guantanamo issue. For those of us who are conservatives who care about judges, that knife was lodged in our backs, too. Good on Greenville for holding his feet to the fire.

There’s one more thing that makes Greenville’s censure interesting, different, and bold. The Greenville GOP added one last clause that puts some teeth into the resolution that others may wind up copying. They barred the Senator from addressing Greenville County GOP meetings in the future. That’s about as strong as a County Party can affect within the boundaries of the law. We can’t throw people out of the Party (the law defining Party membership is too vague), but we can bar folks from meetings.

What the censures will eventually turn into (it seems to me) is fodder for primary campaigns against Knotts and Graham, assuming both men decide to run for reelection as Republicans. Graham has two more years to develop his response (and for the hoopla to die down) than Knotts does, but that’s also two more years for opposition to develop a gameplan. Either way, both men can probably expect mailpieces/TV ads blaring “Rebuked by the GOP” or something similar.

Whether those efforts succeed may rise and fall on whether or not we can finally change to a voter registration by party/closed primary system that protects the First Amendment Freedom of Association rights of party members. In a closed primary, Knotts or Graham would almost surely fail. In a system that allows Democratics to vote in Republican primaries, Knotts and Graham at least have a chance to survive politically. Time will tell.

Reprint: On Conservatism and Race

This didn't make the blog last year, but it should have, and so it will. This was originally posted as a Facebook note on July 14, 2009, in the wake of the disastrous election of Audra Shay as YRNF Chair. A year later, living as I do in Senator Jake Knotts district, it seems just as fresh today.
*****

OK, so I hate having to write this at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, but it is what it is. For a kid who grew up in a house with a Biblical worldview (and thus without so much as a hint of racism), this issue is nearly alien to me. Yet I am confronted with it, and find I need to write it out.

Within the past two months, we have witnessed a meltdown within the Republican Party on the issue of race. I have multiple friends and acquaintances who have made unfortunate Facebook comments that have found their way into the media. Always there was some underlying excuse – look at the political climate, or there was some other subcontext for the comments, whether the left’s hateful treatment of Sarah Palin, the Obama Administration’s policies on spending and taxes, those on the evolution side of the creation debate, or Walmart’s decision to unionize. Whatever excuses are made, the underlying racial nature of the comments made remains inexcusable.

Folks, if we are going to reclaim the mantle of leadership in this nation, there is no room for this sort of behavior. “Conservative” does not refer to bringing some sort of single-ethnicity rule, or the exclusion of those who look different from us; rather, it refers to “conserving” the intent of our Founding Fathers when they wrote:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

All are created equal – by Almighty God, and given rights that we today still work to secure. Governments should, Conservatives believe, exist to protect those rights and our citizen’s lives – and do little else. Liberty flourishes when government power is constrained. Economies flourish when governments tax little and spend little and Liberty is allowed to grow. Free peoples prosper; enslaved peoples do not.

And yet I read this morning about the “permanence of racism in the American experience.” I’ve seen racism come from both sides of the American ideological divide, from the left-wing attacks on Michelle Malkin's Asian ethnicity, to the anti-Semitism found on the fringes of the right and left, to the unhinged remarks of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, to what J.C. Watts condemned as the “race-baiting poverty pimps,” to what President Bush termed the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” to the Facebook comments so many of us have had to deal with in the last three months.

My friends, let this not remain. If we are to continue to build a civil society on the principles our Founders laid out – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, rights from God, to all, protected by government – we must stop the ethnic divisiveness and hatred that plagues so much of the rest of our world.

The Apostle Paul makes plain in his epistles that the Christ-follower must have no place for racism or ethnic hatred. Those who in the past have abused Scripture to excuse racism miss the plain words of his letters to Galatia or Ephesus: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female: you are all one in Christ Jesus… One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and in you all.” Not divisiveness, unity. If indeed “Christ is in us, the hope of glory,” we have no room for divisions on such trivial matters as the place of our birth or the tone of our skin.

I hope that we Republicans will remember this and learn from the mistakes of the first half of this year. We cannot capture the attentions of the public, nor convince the public that we are deserving of a return to national leadership, if we cannot also get past the racism of yesteryear that has rightly and strongly been rejected by the vast majority of the American public. Our message of limited government, liberty, and personal responsibility cannot be heard if it is drowned out by controversy over who should be allowed to enjoy those blessings of liberty.

I hope you will join me in this endeavor; I hope that you will take these words to heart and to work in your own community; I hope that you will share this with others.

And I hope that God will richly bless each and every one of you as you seek to follow His heart and do His will.

Out of State Groups in District 23 backing... Knotts?

Very interesting post card hitting in Senate 23 today - the NRA's ILA (also known as the Incumbent Legislator Award) is endorsing Senator Jake Knotts from the safety of their offices in Fairfax, Virginia. The card (seen here) was mailed out from "Suburban, MD".

Four items of note for irony or newsworthiness with this piece.

First, this comes on the heels of his last campaign mailer, which included dead people (Louis Shealy), convicted felons (Charlie Sharpe), and a whole array of people who have since told the Knotts campaign they never gave their permission. That probably warrants it's own story, but I know the local newsies are working on it, so I'll leave it at that for now.

Second, Senator Knotts cannot open his mouth or send a mail piece without screaming about "out-of-state special interests", "Wall Street Billionaires", "Walmart-style Schools" and the like. One wonders if he'll denounce the out-of-state intrusion on his behalf. (/sarc)

Third, the out of state group in question kinda got his name wrong on the headline. If you look close at the image's second line (I zoomed in on the back half) you'll notice they asked the voters of District 23 to "Vote for Judy Boyle". Now, as everyone in Lexington County surely knows, Judy Boyle is running for District 9 in the Idaho House. That happens to be only 2472 miles away from downtown Lexington, according to Yahoo Maps. Here's to hoping Jakie's voters write her in on June 10...

Finally, the mailer specifically references Knotts' support for concealed weapons reciprocity. This is interesting, since Knotts spent all of his debate time on Monday night (a debate Shealy won handily, according to the audience who cast straw poll ballots) bashing reciprocity for CWP holders, and likened reciprocity supporters to the "ACLU". No, I don't know what he was blathering about, but it's still entertaining to figure out how he was against it Monday, but for it Thursday afternoon. (this is the inverse of last week, when he claimed to be for mandatory "e-Verify" on Monday night before voting against it on Thursday afternoon).

It will be interesting to see if Jakie keeps trying to play the "out of state" card now that these are running around the district, and it will be interesting to see what else Knotts flip-flops about over the next 3 weeks.