Tag Archives: florida

On Florida

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Matt Isbell, a stellar Florida-based political data analyst, posted this on Twitter for the doubters:

On the bill to de-certify the Florida Democratic Party

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So, there’s a bill in the Florida rubber-stamp legislature, SB 1245, which would decertify any party that previously endorsed slavery. It was filed, obviously, by State Senator and former Florida Republican Party chair Blaise Ingoglia in response to liberal campaigns against Confederate statues. 

In such a situation, what would be the options for liberals who live in such a state which decertifies an entire political party?

  • The judicial route:
    • They could sue on 1st Amendment freedom of speech, freedom of association, and anti-ex-post-facto grounds. 
    • They could sue on the grounds that the law, as currently written, is too nebulous to be enforceable. 
  • They could establish a new political party under another name, as the bill suggests. Plenty of bureaucratic headache if that were to take place. 

The bill is poorly written, IMO. I mean, define this: “if the party’s platform has previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude.”

A more serious (but still ill-fated) attempt would have the following:

  • specify the dates when these platforms were published
  • Be limited to Florida’s jurisdiction
  • Provide the details for how an offending party *corporately* endorsed these platforms (not just individual candidates for office under that party’s brand)

It’s also telling that the bill only extends to “slavery or involuntary servitude”. It does not mention, for example, the violent voter suppression campaign (also known as “Redemption”) to drive Reconstruction-era Republicans from office and cement one-party rule. It does not mention the poll taxes passed by said party, nor the intense apartheid restrictions placed upon the daily lives of Black residents by said party. All of the above would apply to the Democratic Party, of course, but why does slavery alone receive this mention in the bill?

It also begs the question of whether state governments have the power to regulate the names of political parties. California came close to attempting to regulate whether parties can use the name “independent” before Gov. Newsom vetoed said bill in October 2019, arguing that it was unconstitutional. If he had signed the bill, the far-right American Independent Party of California could have sued in federal court on aforementioned 1st Amendment grounds, and would likely have won. Furthermore, as noted by Richard Winger of Ballot Access News, “The bill violates the First Amendment. Communist Party of Indiana v Whitcomb, a unanimous decision from the US Supreme Court in 1974, said states can’t keep parties off the ballot based on the ideas of those parties. So even if the Democratic Party still supported slavery, the bill would be struck down if it passed.”

To play devil’s advocate, there may be at least one back-door way for state governments to regulate or influence party names in a way that avoids constitutional scrutiny regarding speech and viewpoint discrimination. 

  • They could force annual recertification of political parties and repeatedly delay recertification without an official explanation, or even declare a sort of “at-will” decertification of political parties. 
  • They could also publicly distribute a set of officially-unenforceable “best practices” for party names which would pressure political parties to conform. 
  • Republicans could repeatedly jack up the filing fee, petition and party registration threshold by county (or worse) to block new parties from certification

OTOH, if the Federalist Society would rather overturn the Communist Party of Indiana case in order to strangle the First Amendment and support regional one-party rule, Republicans could use this newfound power to add further proscriptions against new political parties, such as “no party shall exist which holds views contrary to state law as written at this date”. They could also expand the definition of “slavery” to include anything that social conservatives hate and demonize, such as welfare and abortion (and they repeatedly “Godwin” themselves with this as it is). 

In a time when social conservatives are dumping their alliance with right-wing libertarians and their sensibilities in the name of power and control, liberal minorities in red states must be prepared for how far their state governments will go to undermine their ability to politically organize. 

weekend whiplash, five years ago

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I still remember five years ago, when I had driven up to what is now South Fulton to the State of Black Sci-Fi Convention. I got to meet Milton Davis, Darrell Johnson, Balogun Ojetade and several others, and was especially glad that we had someone (Darrell) writing LGBT-inclusive Black-oriented speculative fiction, for youth and YA even! And that Milton is from Columbus! Quite an experience, was wishing I could come back for Sunday but that was out of the question.

Got back home, got to sleep, woke up and saw the news of a mass shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando the night before.

One of the worst mornings I’ve had in my life. Whiplash.

Lack of Self-Respect Among Black Republicans

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He told the New Times that he had hopes of helping the Trump campaign avoid the mistakes that Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) made in his failed presidential run in 2012. Romney, said Jackson, waited until too late in his campaign to start outreach to nonwhite voters.

“I have been saying repeatedly that you cannot go into black community in the 9th hour of a campaign and ask them to vote for a GOP candidate,” he said. “The party has done a piss poor job of courting the black vote over 50 years. So you have to have more vested interest in time and in your financial effort for the whole campaign, not just in the last 100 days.”

Source: Head of Trump’s black outreach in Florida says ‘piss poor’ campaign doesn’t care about blacks – Raw Story

Thinking about it, I can understand an immigrant from Haiti like Rep. Mia Love of Utah becoming a GOP politician. Because she is an immigrant, she gains from the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps because we’re a nation of immigrants who sought a better life here” doctrine. I don’t find it strange that she follows through on that, first as mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah and later as a House rep from Utah. She doesn’t even need the Congressional Black Caucus because she rhetorically hates its very existence, despite joining it after joining Congress in 2015 (oops).

But what do African-Americans of antebellum slave descent gain from joining the GOP at this moment of political history? The prevailing consensus in the GOP is that our history is an inconvenience to be glossed over (even glamorized) and not “focused upon”; that our contributions are to be honored but not the trauma which produced those contributions; that our current plight, only 2 adult generations out from the end of Jim Crow, is a result of our “personal lifestyle choices” and not of systemic origin; that we should ditch the Mexicans in order to make more room for (everyone else but) us in the low-skill, high-labor jobs of agriculture, mining, manufacturing and even service industries (which may or may even not be “real jobs worthy of a living minimum wage”); that we should ditch LGBT people and Planned Parenthood clinics in order to make our divorce rate drop, men return to their wives, children have more children, and women stop being so liberated as to make informed choices for their bodies; and other insults to our intelligence.

None of that is appealing to me. None of this makes sense. Maybe if I got into a car accident, got a bad case of amnesia, adopted a new name and identity as a Nigerian immigrant from Lagos, integrated myself into the Nigerian American community like Rachel Dolezal did with African-Americans in Spokane, became religious, set up a business and then decided to go into politics as a moderate Republican Congressperson from Atlanta, this message would be a bit more appealing for me to campaign on and live by. A bit.

Then I would be lauded by those who don’t know any better as another rare Black politician who “never slaved on the Democratic plantation” and joined the party of Lincoln “bcuz freedom.” And Fox News, Breitbart and the National Review would love me for every word I publicly utter.

But that ain’t happening in this timeline of reality. I’d have to shut part of my brain off to join the present GOP even if I were a descendant of antebellum slaves who was anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-LGBT, anti-welfare or at least just pro-free-market. I’d have to shut off part of my brain to vote for the real estate developer or anyone who endorses him. And most Black Republican descended from antebellum slaves, except for Rep. Mia Love, don’t even sound original to me in their adoption of GOP talking points, especially when those talking points emanate from some angle of gratuitous anti-Blackness and class bigotry. Maybe they’re honest, but not original or nuanced.

We’re looking for empowerment for our families’ and neighbors’ lives that we didn’t have when “things were simpler” and “Black businesses were better” under Jim Crow. The GOP’s austerity and anti-civil rights policies simply don’t provide empowerment for most African-Americans, and they seem to be harming the Euro-American community across the country, too (see Kansas under Brownback, Indiana under Pence, Wisconsin under Walker, Michigan under Snyder and North Carolina under McCrory). The latter may get tired of it soon enough, if they can jump off the nativist train first.

MLK’s description of the 1964 Republican campaign of Barry Goldwater applies just as much to this year and the subsequent landslide that is about to happen against the GOP nominee.

Again.