Senate Republican plans to delay President Barack Obama getting another justice on the Supreme Court could be driven by only one thing -- racism! Well at least that’s what the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin implied, when they collected a bunch of quotes from angry Obama supporters for a front-page February 18 story headlined: “Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor.”
Never mind the principled concerns from conservatives about the Court handing down lefty decisions on cases for generations to come. For the New York Times, this was another opportunity to portray the GOP as driven by their hatred of the first black president. The accusations of racism began in the lede paragraph:
“As he left Martha Lou’s Kitchen, a soul food institution here on Wednesday, Edward Gadsden expressed irritation about the Republican determination to block President Obama from selecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court. ‘They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there,’ Mr. Gadsden, who is African-American, said of Mr. Obama, before pointing at his forearm to explain what he said was driving the Republican opposition: ‘The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.’”
The article then relayed how the “words” of Senate Republicans, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, had “struck a familiar and painful chord” with African-Americans.
“When Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after Mr. Scalia’s death on Saturday that the next president, rather than Mr. Obama, should select a successor, the senator’s words struck a familiar and painful chord with many black voters.
After years of watching political opponents question the president’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout ‘You lie!’ at him from the House floor, some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. And they call it increasingly infuriating after Mr. Obama has spent seven years in the White House and won two resounding election victories.”
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“‘Our president, the president of the United States, has been disrespected from Day 1,’” Carol Richardson, 61, said on Wednesday as she colored a customer’s hair at Ultra Beauty Salon in Hollywood, S.C., a mostly black town near Charleston. ‘The words that have been said, the things the Republicans have done they’d have never have done to another president. Let’s talk like it is, it’s because of his skin color.’”Reflecting on the Supreme Court vacancy, Bakari Sellers, a former state representative from Denmark, S.C., likened the Senate treatment of the president to the 18th century constitutional compromise that counted black men as equivalent to three-fifths of a person. ‘I guess many of them are using this in the strictest construction that Barack Obama’s serving three-fifths of a term or he’s three-fifths of a human being, so he doesn’t get to make this choice,’ Mr. Sellers said. ‘It’s infuriating.’”
Deep in the piece, Haberman and Martin attempted to tell the Republican side of the story.
“Republicans are especially sensitive about the notion that they are diminishing Mr. Obama because of his race, and spokesmen for several Republican senators, including Mr. McConnell and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, declined to comment or would not make the senators available for comment.
The suggestion that racism is playing a role angers Mr. McConnell’s friends, who point out that his formative political experience was working for a Republican senator who supported civil rights, that he helped override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of sanctions against the apartheid government in South Africa and that he is married to an Asian-American woman.”
But the team of Haberman and Martin then quickly returned to charges of racism:
“But in the aftermath of Mr. McConnell’s statement on Saturday, a growing chorus of black voices is complaining that such a refusal to even consider a Supreme Court nominee would never occur with a white president. ‘It’s more than a political motive — it has a smell of racism,’ said Representative G. K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. ‘I can tick instance after instance over the last seven years where Republicans have purposely tried to diminish the president’s authority,’ Mr. Butterfield said. ‘This is just really extreme, and leads me to the conclusion that if this was any other president who was not African-American, it would not have been handled this way.’”
