Never the Honest Answer from Republicans

As part of her ongoing campaign to survive long enough for trump to get jailed / barred from the ballot to be the Republican presidential candidate for 2024, Nikki Haley has been making the tour stops taking questions from people so she can sell herself as presidential timber.

Of course, this means she's exposing her political, cultural, and historical ignorance when she does so, such as making a massive gaffe when quizzed about a simple fact of American history (via Ashley Lopez at NPR):

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is facing significant backlash after failing to mention slavery as a driving force behind the Civil War during a campaign stop in New Hampshire.

At an event on Wednesday, a voter asked Haley: "what was the cause of the United States Civil War?"

She replied that the cause "was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do."

"I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are," Haley continued. "And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people."

Haley essentially regurgitated the "States Rights" defense that the former Confederacy flew as their excuse to the historians once the bloodshed stopped. At no point did she even explain what "rights of the people" were getting fought over. Even the person who asked the question replied "you didn't mention slavery."

So let's go over this, one more time about how the Civil War was unavoidable because slavery was the dividing issue between Free and Slave states.

The Confederacy happened because most of the pro-slavery southern states would not accept the election results - both the popular vote AND Electoral College - going decisively towards the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1860. Even with Abraham Lincoln promising only to "limit slavery's spread" and not abolish it outright, the slaveowner class knew it still meant the death of their "peculiar institution" because the industry needing slavery - Cotton - consumed all agricultural land and it needed to expand.

And when slave state after slave state seceded from the Union in that period between November 1860 through March 1861 (before Lincoln would be sworn in as the next President), nearly every declaration of secession included Slavery as the motivation.

Nikki Haley's own state of South Carolina - infamously the birthplace of secession (its incubator since the days of John C. Calhoun and talk of Nullification) - put slavery - and the growing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Acts - as center to their "Declaration of the Immediate Causes" and the core argument for their attempt to break the Constitution: 

...The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation...

If the conflict ever was over the idea of States Rights, it was over WHICH states who have more rights over the others. South Carolina - and the other slave-owning states - found themselves in opposition to the freedman states that didn't want slavery imposed on them. Rather than accept the democratic - or  republican if you're going by the Roman model - concept of the majority having a say when the Republicans won outright control of the federal government in 1860, the slave states got upset they weren't in charge like they were in the 1820s or even 1852 anymore, and decided they wanted to take their ball and go home.

Just to show how the other slave states were taking it, here's the declaration of secession from my birth state of Georgia. They mentioned slavery right off the bat, and more often than South Carolina's:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia...

I'd quote more but good lord do my Peach State peeps go on and on about this.

You can tell from the Georgia declaration more than the South Carolina one how the slave states were framing the argument: That they were the ones under attack, that the poor slave states were getting pressured to change a perfectly legal and constitutional institution as human slavery, and that it's the fault of the abolition northern states who refuse to accept the natural order of things.

That view got spelled out by the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who bluntly makes slavery the Cornerstone of what the rebelling states wanted:

...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

...The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails...

Spoken like true Far Right conservatives convinced of the righteousness of their side, which back in 1860 were the slave-owning Whites of the Southern Democratic faction. Today, the Far Right conservatives are the immigrant-bashing civil-rights-denying anti-woke anti-women Whites of the modern Republican Trumpian Party

These declarations were not only their excuses for giving up on the American Union, they were the foundations for the Lost Cause mythos that built up in the post-War Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras where the Southern states - even after slavery was abolished for good with the 13th Amendment - refused to accept the sins of slavery and tried to rewrite history to make themselves the victims of an aggressor North. In order for that Lost Cause to work - in order for the southerners and Klansmen and Confederate sympathizers to paint themselves as tragic heroes "betrayed" by abolitionists - the revisionists had to argue the fight was never about slavery.

So you get modern-day Confederate sympathizers - who are now all camped with a Conservative Republican Party that flipped from being the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Jeff Davis during the Southern Strategy of the 1960s-80s - who keep parroting that Lost Cause narrative as "vice signaling" to their fellow racists.

People should ask Nikki Haley about her assertation that the Civil War was about "the freedoms" for the people. Where was the "freedom" from an intrusive government when it came to the African-American slaves still in bondage when the Civil War started? Because according to the slave states like South Carolina and Georgia and Florida and Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas and Arkansas and Tennessee and North Carolina and Virginia, their idea of government was making sure the Blacks had no freedoms at all.

The American Civil War - the first one, which by some measures never really finished because it's fueling the coal-burn of the second one we're in - was about slavery, Republicans. Stop feeding yourselves the Lost Cause myth that your party founders abhorred back in the day, because those slaveholders they fought weren't the heroes of that war, and neither are you when you keep plotting to reset our nation back to 1850. You're lying to yourselves, and you keep getting caught in spite of your denials.

Gods help us. This is how 2024 is going to be.

The Whitewash of History, on DeSantis' Orders

Update: Thank you Batocchio for including this article on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Everyone visiting, please leave a comment below, or Tweet me at... at... oh, right. Twitter's dead.

This past week bore witness to the next stage of Ron DeSantis' open war against Woke (or Critical Race Theory, or Thou Shalt Not Shame our White Boys): The utter disassembly of American/Florida History when it comes to talking about race-based slavery in our nation's development. 

What DeSantis wants to impose - through his hand-picked Board of Education - grade school class studies teaching that "slavery helped the slaves develop work skills" as a "personal benefit" for gainful employment. You're not reading that wrong, that's how the regional and national media are reporting it (this link via CBS News):

Florida's 2023 Social Studies curriculum will include lessons on how "slaves developed skills" that could be used for "personal benefit," according to a copy of the state's academic standards reviewed by CBS News. 

The lessons in question fall under the social studies curriculum's African-American studies section, and be taught to students in sixth through eighth grade, according to the state standards. 

The lessons for that grade level will include teachings on understanding the "causes, courses and consequences of the slave trade in the colonies," and instruction on the differences and similarities between serfdom and slavery, the curriculum says. Students will also be asked to describe "the contact of European explorers with systematic slave trading in Africa" and look at the history and evolution of slave codes. 

The line about "personal benefit" is included as a "benchmark clarification" to a lesson that asks students to "examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves," such as agricultural work, domestic service, blacksmithing and household tasks like tailoring and painting. 

My first reaction hearing the news: THIS IS DESANTIS' AND THE FAR RIGHT REPUBLICANS IDEA OF PUTTING A POSITIVE SPIN ON HUMAN CHATTEL SLAVERY, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.  (yes it was all internal CAPS LOCK screaming)

My following reaction was a bit calmer and more of an earnest question: "Will these classes also detail the physical and emotional traumas that slavery inflicted on the men, women, and CHILDREN who were chained up, collared like animals, and whipped for the sadistic enjoyment of the masters?" 

Will the study materials include the photographs of the scars on their backs?

Say hello to the BENEFITS of slavery.
"Whipped Peter" - photo from the National Gallery

Here is DeSantis - here is the WHOLE OF THE MODERN REPUBLICAN PARTY, finally proving themselves the Party of John C. Calhoun and not the Party of Lincoln - trying to make it sound like slavery were career opportunities for the tens of the thousands of captured Africans dragged to America's shores, that all those long sweating days in the cotton fields and in the smith shops and in the rape cages were "work skills" they could put on their resumes when they go job hunting down the road.

Except in slavery there WAS no "down the road," no freedom to go find your own work, you were either worked to death on the plantation where they bought you from the auction blocks, or you were traded off to another plantation - oft-times without your family and loved ones - to pay off the debts of your overseers / masters and worked to death there.

The nation is littered with gravesites of tens of thousands of slaves who died in chains. Claiming all that work was a "BENEFIT" is an obscenity that should never be taught.

But that's what DeSantis and the other Far Right Republicans want to teach. They WANT future generations of White kids to grow up to the "comforting myth" that slavery was a benefit to the slaves, they WANT to convince Black kids that there was no difference between the horrors of antebellum chattel slavery and the current-day failures of fair treatment in education and workplaces.

This is the American Conservative gaslighting effort to set the stage, to twist the "debate" on slavery in their long-term goal to make it okay to bring back race-based slavery in some form. We've already seen - I have, as far back as 2010 - the Far Right push to undo their legacy of the 14th Amendment Citizenship clause so they can deny the rights of any class of people they want. How easy would it be for them to deny the constitutionality of the 13th Amendment and create the excuse of "slavery" as a "vocational skill program"?

This is a nightmare.

Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice is a fellow Floridian, and she's as angry about this whitewash as I am. She's livid that DeSantis and his GOP lackeys are trying to rewrite the horrors of Rosewood and Ocoee Massacres as "both siderisms": 

I think the Ocoee Massacre remains the most deadly election-related race massacre in U.S. history to this day. So how did black people perpetrate violence? At Ocoee, in self defense, a black man named July Perry shot and killed two members of the KKK lynch mob that had surrounded his house because a friend was thought to have taken refuge there after attempting to vote in Florida while black (Note: this was in 1920, the friend was a WWI veteran who had been told by a local judge he did qualify to vote even in that Jim Crow era). 

The mob eventually lynched Perry anyway, killed more than 30 other black people, burned their houses and businesses to the ground, and established Ocoee as an all-white “sundown town.” But it’s important to know that both sides acted violently and had violence perpetrated upon them (Note: Betty is being sarcastic, by the by).

In this instance, DeSantis has layered on plausible deniability by enlisting crackpot people of color to do the dirty work, including Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. and the department’s African American history task force. Trump had to hand out “Blacks for Trump” shirts to white people. DeSantis is building a diverse coalition of right-wing cranks to whitewash black history and enact a far-right agenda...

DeSantis is doing all of this to win over Far Right Republicans on the national level as he campaigns for 2024, desperate to outdo the overt racism that trump spews by passing laws and breaking protocols that sinks to the deepest needs of the "deplorable" MAGA base. In the process, he's going against entire centuries' worth of facts, against the truth of how damaging human chattel slavery was - and still is - to all of humanity across the board.

Slavery has no benefit. None. Slavery not only brutalized the Black Americans who suffered under the chain and whip, slavery also turned White Americans into brutes, broken monsters who got drunk and violent on the power they wielded over other lives. Even the non-owning Whites both North and South in the pre-Civil War era profited from the physical and emotional damage that slavery caused, and it still created the "White Privilege" class system that skews our legal system and social norms to this day.

For all the problems we have today, trying to forge a stronger system of justice and equality, the modern Republican Party is trying to revert our nation's long arc of history back to the 1850s. They WANT us to accept slavery, they WANT us to dehumanize the Black (and in the process the Latino and Asians who are "foreigners" to the eyes of the White Man, and then the Woman whose rights back in those days were just as non-existent) to where they have no rights at all.

Goddamn them, Goddamn DeSantis for shoving down our throats his political agenda of lies and deceit and race-driven fear.

Hey, Republicans: If Slavery was so great at teaching "work skills," why didn't they offer those "work skills" to the poor Whites who wanted to get ahead in their career paths? Hmm? Anyone of Anglo-Euro origins willing to put a collar on their neck and chains on their wrists to work 12 straight hours in the fields? Anyone?

For the LOVE OF GOD, Humanity, stop voting Republican.

Four For the Fourth 2020 Part III: Speaking of Frederick Douglass On This Day

Mentioned in Part II how the DC statehood movement would rename District of Columbia to Douglass Commonwealth, we need to look back at what Frederick Douglass the man said about the 4th of July.

"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July" is one of those documents that deserve teaching in schools, recited on holidays, remembered for its impact in spelling out how "freedom to all" didn't really apply to all and that a debt is still owed. The entire speech is available for reading at the Teaching American History website, but the prominent part, the one everyone quotes, is down towards the end of the speech:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour...

Douglass proceeded to spell out the injustices and inequities that the system of slavery continued since 1776. He denounced the then-recently passed Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which essentially opened hunting season on freed Blacks by southern bounty hunters. He condemned the religious hypocrisy - some of which perpetuates to this very day - that allowed so-called Christians to turn away from the cruelty of the slave trade, the beatings and rapes, and other abuses.

We keep seeing these abuses in the police brutality directed towards Black communities. We keep seeing the violations of voting rights as state after state reduces polling places in Black communities. We keep seeing the demonization and criminalization of Black communities by those in power seeking to retain such power in defiance of human liberty.

Today is supposed to be a Day of Independence for all people, for Americans and freedom-seeking men and women everywhere.

We're still not at a place we can guarantee that independence to our own.

That debt is still owed.

The Fugitive Women Acts of 2019

The more I look at these "heartbeat" anti-abortion bills - I already railed against Georgia's, Alabama just passed an anti-abortion bill that's worse, Ohio is close to getting there, Missouri's voting on their own, Kentucky's is messed up - the more I see a repeat of the harsh laws our states had passed back in the 1800s to punish Blacks not just the slaves but also the Freed Blacks who were born and raised free in northern states.

I'm thinking of the Fugitive Slave Acts that the Slave states passed to force the Free states to return "their property" of human beings.

When I saw the Georgia law applying penalties to any woman "leaving the state to receive an abortion" and noticed it gave room for the state to punish anyone who helped her, it reminded me of how the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act forced local police and even ordinary citizens - under penalty of high fines - to help bounty hunters capture anyone they deemed - without evidence - an escaped slave (even when entire communities could prove that Black person was born free).

These bills aren't designed to help or protect the fetus. These bills are designed to hurt and punish people.

The Alabama anti-abortion law got rid of the exemptions "in cases of rape/incest" meaning women will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies (and even be forced to share custody with the rapist!) and likely face severe health risks that could mean their death. Or else face life in prison. Any doctor helping to end that rape pregnancy can face longer jail time (life in prison) than the fucking rapist.

There's your slave chains tightening on women's necks.

There's your Far Right wingnuts imposing Sharia law.

There's the Republican Party ignoring every signpost warning them that banning all abortion will cause a backlash. They may argue that "everyone hates killing babies" but a vast majority of Americans accept and approve of the rape/incest/health of mother exemptions. Welcome to the paradox of abortion: Most Americans don't like the practice but they also realize there are situations where abortion is needed and should be available to the woman making that choice.

The anti-abortion fanatics may see those polls but they're still driven by their absolutist obsessions. They don't care what the majority think, only what they are willing to do to enslave the rest of us.

Just remember those Fugitive Slave Acts stirred a public outrage among Northern states that led to the rise of an abolitionist Republican Party - back when that party knew what it was doing, before the dark times of Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan and Newt - and to the Election of 1860 which found the Slave states outnumbered and outvoted... and we all know what that led to.

So Welcome to 2019, deep into the trumpian Darkest Timeline.

Welcome to the American Second Civil War. Whose side are you on?

RIP Republican Party 1856 - 2015

(Update: Hello to the Crooks and Liars readers!  Hope you enjoy reading my blog!  Check back in, I should have a Drinking Game rules for the September GOP Debate up this weekend...)

What we once called the Republican Party here in the United States is officially dead.

Oh, the dying has been going on for some time, and in public view for the world to see.  It's just nobody did anything to stop it, and indeed far too many people within the ranks of the party encouraged and hastened the demise.

The structure and body of the Republican Party still remains, of course: however, the soul and spirit that once animated this august body has now departed.  What we have left is a shambling ghoul, with enough brain power to endlessly loop the same one-liner bursts of outrage but unable to perform more recognizable human traits such as empathy, adaptability, and long-range planning.

The Republicans began in the mid-1850s to fill the vacuum of the dying Whig Party at the most tumultuous period in American history.  While the party took on many of the Whig traits - a federalized Union, pro-business merchant/industrial class which required increased education and improved transportation networks (aka massive construction projects) - it also rallied around a radical agenda opposed to chattel slavery.  This became the singular trait of the party as the threat of slavery - driven by the southern states led by the upper class Democratic Party slaveowners -  spread to all states including ones that had been Free states for generations.

The fights between the Democrats and the Republicans in the 1850s revolved around: whether slavery should spread into Western territories, whether Northern states should assist Southern states in detaining any Blacks that Southerners accused of being runaways, whether slavery should even exist as it violated various concepts of religious and social decency.  To the Democrats, led by rich Southern slaveowners who could not comprehend a world without cheap labor to fuel their cotton empires, the call to end slavery came across as a call to their destruction.  To the Republicans, led by religious and civil rights leaders who could not accept the evils of physical and spiritual abuse, the push to spread slavery was a horror akin to war.

Those opposing views - intractable, uncompromising - led to war, the bloodiest our nation had ever seen.  The results of that war solidified the Republicans as the political power of the nation well into the 20th Century and kept the Democrats as a secondary yet stabilizing political presence that held onto power at a regional level through populist efforts and reactionary (Jim Crow) fervor.  By 1900, we as a nation were stuck with a two-party system, which keeps the balance.

There's another thing to mention called the Iron Law of Oligarchy: that any organization in a democratic/republican form of government will evolve into a group that serves its "oligarchic tendencies" (that is, it serves the needs of the elites rather than the needs of the lower-rung members).  A variation on that Law is that any party or organization reaches a moment where that group must either compromise on its founding principles to survive as an organization, or else collapse upon itself.

In the American system of governance, compromise was built into the process in the first place: the entire system of checks and balances is supposed to ensure that the three branches work in harmony, and when the factions of party emerged the rules were tweaked and re-enforced to ensure the checks and balances would make the parties aim for bipartisanship.  It becomes an issue of which oligarchs hold sway over other oligarchs to maintain a balance, through which they keep the lower classes mollified with reasonable laws and policies.

Most of the times, this worked: whenever needed, a shift in the political paradigms allowed one party to gain favor and enact reforms.  The Progressive Era of the early 20th Century, for example, was when reformer factions in both parties were able to direct legislation that fixed most corrupt practices in business and politics and also led to serious reforms such as the women's vote.

But something changed.  A restructuring of the parties after the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s led to a realignment of party ideologies.  Where conservative and liberal values were split between Republican and Democratic as social, religious, and economic agendas - Republicans were economic conservative and social liberal, Democrats were social conservative and economic liberal - in 1968 the Republicans made the conscious decision to court all conservative thought into their own ranks.

It was called the Southern Strategy, because the Democrats had gone in on passing civil liberties laws that alienated their Southern factions left over from the Civil War.  Rather than let those Southern votes alienate themselves into a regional third-party element (the Dixiecrats of 1948), the Republicans realized they could count on those voters as a cohesive bloc that would secure state and legislative powers and even the occasional Presidential win.

As a result, the Republican Party became more conservative on ALL issues, and those issues began to intermingle to where economic policy blended into religious policy and overwhelmed social policy.  Where there were points of moderation, of seeking common ground between ideological poles, the Republicans shifted Hard Right on all gears and kept going Right.

The conservative media keeps calling the strategy a "myth" or a liberal lie - and like to point out that it used to be Democrats who relied on such a strategy during the New Deal era - but the evidence is pretty strong (Hi, Lee Atwater!) over the decades that the Republicans made the moves to court and hold such voters, and to pander to them to win elections.

The Republicans keep priding themselves on being "The Party of Lincoln" yet it's been the Republicans since the 1990s who have actively sought to suppress voting rights for Blacks.

The Republicans keep pushing their own goalposts, resetting the ideological purity for their party so far Right Wing that the party no longer respects the very concept of bipartisanship, no longer considers the need for checks and balances within government to promote compromise and acceptance of issue resolutions by the majority.

As a result, we're seeing the proof of that Iron Law of Oligarchy.  Where a party must choose between survival by compromise or else self-destruct by adhering to dogma.  Rather than survive by compromise as parties did before to continue onward, the Republicans are now choosing self-destruction much in the same way the Southern Democratic leadership did back in 1860 when they chose secession over dealing with a Lincoln-led Republican victory.

The Republicans are openly choosing to nuke from orbit any much-needed immigration reforms.  The drum-beats by Trump and now pretty much the whole Presidential primary field - which will dictate the entire party's platform going into 2016 - has been one of racist demagoguery of Hispanics.  The party is pretty much burning down every bridge to a voting bloc the party was desperate to win over after their losses in 2012 proved that ethnic group was needed for elections at the national level.

The Republicans are openly running against immigration reforms that a majority - or at least a plurality - of Americans want to make it easier for immigrants to come legally to the U.S. and apply for citizenship.  The only thing the Republicans take away from that polling is just the "enforcement" part of border security, which they want to implement by building Trump's Wall (and creating a black market on high ladders and tunnel diggers) as a costly boondoggle (and no, Mexico WILL NOT pay for your damn wall, Donald).

And now the Republicans are making a mockery of our Constitution by openly calling for repeals of the 14th Amendment and its citizenship clause.  They want to end "birthright citizenship" at the expense of alienating hundreds of thousands of existing citizens - four of whom are primary candidates! - and also threaten the very concept of citizenship for millions of Americans those conservatives would well seek to purge as "Un-American" if they ever got the chance.

And there's even spokespersons among the media conservatives openly calling for slavery (!) - effectively ignoring the 13th Amendment - imposed on illegals as though that would be a good thing.

What had been two of the signature achievements of the early Republican Party -back when the Republicans were those who championed civil rights - are now sitting targets for Republican ire and proposed destruction.

And I haven't even touched on how the Republicans are calling for an end to women's right to vote.

All because the Republican Party isn't the Republican Party anymore.

It's the Southern Slaveowner Party.  Back from the ashes of 1865 and hoping to tear the United States apart again.

This is what you are now, people.  You aren't the Party of Lincoln or Grant or Teddy Roosevelt.  You're the Party of John C. Calhoun.  You're openly calling for an end to voting rights for people not from your tribe, you're openly race-baiting anymore, you're openly calling for a return to slavery as a means of social and economic dominance.

The Republican Party is dead.  All that's running in its place now is an imposter force looking to con more voters.