This week in statehouse action: racist is as racist does edition
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Campaign Action Mama always told me life was like a box of Confederate sympathizers. (No, of course she didn’t. My mother’s advice was generally excellent, judiciously dispensed, and never cliché-based.) The horrific violence perpetrated by white suprThis week in statehouse action: racist is as racist does edition
Campaign Action Mama always told me life was like a box of Confederate sympathizers. (No, of course she didn’t. My mother’s advice was generally excellent, judiciously dispensed, and never cliché-based.) The horrific violence perpetrated by white supremacists in Charlottesville last weekend is still fresh in our minds, and we’ll be dealing with its aftermath for a long time. But one of the consequences of that abhorrent display of neo-Nazi hate involves confronting the many monuments to treasonous losers of a war fought to defend slavery. Some 1,500 statues and other memorials intended to honor soldiers and leaders of the Confederacy are scattered all across the country—some in states that didn’t even exist during the Civil War. A movement to remove these reminders of a failed insurrection to defend an indefensible institution has progressed slowly in recent years (about 60 have come down or been renamed so far), but now it seems to be accelerating. Stone Love: Just look at North Carolina, where Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has already declared his intent to remove all monuments to the Confederacy on state property—a noble goal, to be sure, but he’s got one thing standing in his way. It’s the thing that always stands in his way: the GOP-controlled state legislature. In 2015, statehouse Republicans passed (and then-Gov. Pat McCrory signed) a law prohibiting the removal of such monuments. Republican lawmakers sent the bill to McCrory’s desk just 10 days after South Carolina’s governor signed a bill to remove the Confederate battle flag from the capitol—and barely more than a month after Confederate flag-waving, self-professed Hitler-loving racist murdered nine black churchgoers in cold blood. Until the measure is repealed, North Carolina’s Republican legislative supermajorities control whether Confederate monuments will go or stay. Three guesses as to which way they’ll vote, and the first two don’t count. Read more