The Resistance: Stand Against Racism

Moral Mondays brought down despicable North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, and Rev. William Barber founded and still leads Moral Mondays.

Rev. Barber at Think Progress:

If Donald Trump ever planned, as he continually promised, to act “presidential,” this should have been the week. Yet even as grandstands went up along the inaugural parade route, Trump took to Twitter like a Kardashian to attack Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). Targeting the only surviving March on Washington speaker on the MLK holiday weekend, Trump made clear once more how little he knows about the America he has been elected to serve and the historical moment in which he takes office. By attacking the “Conscience of the Congress,” Trump has served notice to all people of conscience that the time to prepare for moral resistance is now.

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This is hardly the first time we have faced racism and a disdain for the poor from the White House. But it is our time now to stand against it. Rep. Lewis’s moral resistance is a rallying cry for all people of conscience. With nonviolent love, we will resist every attack and attempt to implement policy violence. Now is the time. Here is the place. We are the people, and we will be heard.

The Resistance: Record the Atrocities

Digby:

This is a useful exercise. Amy Siskind is keeping a list of the weekly Trump atrocities on Facebook. Here's just this week.

This is by far the worse:

28. After Congress was briefed by Intelligence chiefs, Rep John Lewis said, "I don't see Trump as a legitimate president."
29. Next morning, Trump tweeted a disparaging attack on Lewis, on MLK weekend, saying he was all talk.

That would be this John Lewis:



Digby again:

Obviously Trump has no clue who John Lewis is or he's the last person he would say is "all talk." In fact, Trump saying that about anyone is insane, but to say it about a man who was beaten half to death fighting for civil rights is obscene. 

But our new president doesn't know that because he really doesn't know much of anything. He is an imbecile.

I think he does know who John Lewis is and leaped at the opportunity to smack down an uppity ni**er.

After Gun Wounds One Child in House, Gun Kills Another Child in Same House

Because letting a four-year-old get and fire a gun is no reason to be forced to lock your guns up, much less forced to give up your guns along with your seriously endangered children.

Like the three-year-old who got and fired a gun that killed him.

No, those parents are pure patriots who need their guns to be in reach at all times to fight tyranny. Children be damned.

From the AP:

Authorities have released the identity of a 3-year-old boy who died after suffering a gunshot wound inside a Louisville home.

Jefferson County Deputy Coroner Rita Taylor said the boy was Anthony Blake Wells. Taylor said in an email that the boy died at 4:25 a.m. Monday at Kosair Children's Hospital of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Louisville Metro Police Department spokeswoman Alicia Smiley told media the shooting occurred shortly before 11 p.m. Sunday in a residence in the Algonquin neighborhood.

Smiley says other people were home at the time of the shooting but no one else was hurt.

The address where the shooting occurred is the same street where police said a 4-year-old girl accidentally wounded herself with firearm a month ago.

If that is not felony child endangerment at the very least, and reckless homicide in a sensible country, I don't know what is.

Rep. John Lewis speaks:

Now We Get To Work

Well of course they did.

So, we don't get to depend on the Justice Department to protect our voting rights any more.

Because the race to suppress every Democratic voter has already begun.

That means we have to protect our own damn rights.

And that means we can't take state legislative elections for granted any more. Now every single seat counts. Every single vote counts.

We have to make sure that voting rights absolutists run for every single legislative seat and win every single legislative seat.

We have to talk face-to-face to every single Democratic voter out there and say point-blank: there is nothing stopping republicans from taking away your voting rights.  They will block everyone who is not a straight, white, xian male over the age of 40 from voting, and there is not a goddamn thing anybody can do about it.

They are YOUR voting rights: Defend them!

They were given to you by people who literally fought and died for them.

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Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) urged Congress to enact legislation that would protect the freedom to vote on Tuesday, just hours after the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act that stopped discriminatory voting laws from going into effect in areas of the country with histories of disenfranchisement.

In a 5 to 4 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court ruled that Section 4, which establishes the formula that determines which jurisdictions are subject to federal “preclearance” of changes in election laws, is unconstitutional. Congress will now have to decide which areas of the country still deserve additional federal scrutiny.

 “These men that voted to strip the Voting Rights Act of its power, they never stood in unmovable lines,” Lewis told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “They never had to pass a so-called literacy test. It took us almost 100 years to get where we are today. So will it take another 100 years to fix it, to change it?” he asked.

Congress voted to renew the Voting Rights Act in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006, each time with increasingly larger margins. Twenty Republican senators who are still serving in Congress supported re-authorization in 2006 and only 33 members in the House voted against it.

“It is going to be very difficult,” to pass legislation in this Congress, Lewis admitted, “but people said the same thing in 1965.”

 “I think what happened today with the Supreme Court will motivate hundreds and thousands of people, African American, latino, white, Asian American, Native Americans, men, women, students, to come out. The vote is precious.”

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“I didn’t think that on that day when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, that I would live to see five members of the United States Supreme Court undoing what President Johnson did with those pens,” Lewis added. “We must not forget our past. We must not forget our history. If we forget it, we will repeat it.”

Defend your right to vote. Even if you have to riot in the streets.

The One Credible Voice on Voting Rights

If you want to understand what's really at stake in the Supreme Court's pending reversal of the Voting Rights Act, read John Lewis' autobiography Walking With the Wind.

Remember the pictures in your textbooks? The ones of unarmed, unresisting Americans being beaten nearly to death by white cops in Birmingham for the crime of trying to vote? The short black man in the tan coat bloody and unconscious on the ground? That's John Lewis. He literally almost died for voting rights. More than once.

For the short version, here's Congressman Lewis explaining reality to Antonin Scalia, who should spend the next year on his knees begging Lewis' forgiveness.

Scott Lemieux at LGM:

And, to conclude, genuine hero John Lewis:

Rep. John Lewis attacked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Wednesday, calling comments he made during a Supreme Court argument on the Voting Rights Act “an affront to all of what the civil rights movement stood for.”

Scalia, a member of the court’s conservative wing, was intensely skeptical of the Act during Wednesday’s hearing, labeling its continued existence a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

“It was unreal, unbelievable, almost shocking, for a member of the court to use certain language. I can see politicians and even members of Congress — but it is just appalling to me,” Lewis said on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation.”

“It is an affront to all of what the civil rights movement stood for, what people died for, what people bled for, and those of us who marched across that bridge 48 years ago, we didn’t march for some racial entitlement,” he continued. “We wanted to open up the political process, and let all of the people come in, and it didn’t matter whether they were black or white, Latino, Asian-American or Native American.”

 Watch the video here.

Your Vote is Sacred

I refuse to deny the citizenship, the American-ness, of anyone in this country. I may hate, despise and loathe with every fiber of my being everything you stand for, but you are an American just as I am.

But I am tempted to cast into the pit those who hold their precious citizenship so lightly they cannot be bothered to perform the one and only duty upon which our survival as a country depends.

You who do not vote - no, you are not my fellow Americans.

Charles Pierce at Esquire:

The same dynamic prevails when Congressman John Lewis of Georgia talks to you about voting rights. Nobody knows more than he does about their value because nobody knows more than he does about what they've cost. He was beaten nearly to death in the struggle for them. John Lewis tells you something about voting rights and you say, yes, sir, and you shut the fk up.

John Lewis gave a speech on Thursday night, in the first hour of the convention, that almost nobody saw, which is too bad, because it summed up the great unmentioned subtext of this year's election — namely, that, between the new torrents of money that are overwhelming the system, and the rise again of voter-suppression legalisms in the various states, which are in many cases products of those same new torrents of money, the election is coming perilously close to becoming a puppet show. The Republicans didn't mention that, because they have taken in so much of the new money, and because Republican governors and legislators in the various states are behind the new voter-suppression laws, and everybody knows that. The Democrats are caught in a bind, because they have to play in the new universe of campaign finance, too, and because they're trying to keep up with a symphony of well-financed propaganda that seeks to make voter-suppression into a good-government initiative. John Lewis is not fooled. John Lewis has seen this before. And John Lewis told the convention what he's seeing rising in the country out of his own past.

Brothers and sisters, do you want to go back? Or do you want to keep America moving forward? My dear friends, your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful, nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union. Not too long ago, people stood in unmovable lines. They had to pass a so-called literacy test, pay a poll tax. On one occasion, a man was asked to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. On another occasion, one was asked to count the jelly beans in a jar-all to keep them from casting their ballots.  Today it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting. They are changing the rules, cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote. The Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House even bragged that his state's new voter ID law is "gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state." That's not right. That's not fair. That's not just. And similar efforts have been made in Texas, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina. I've seen this before. I've lived this before. Too many people struggled, suffered and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

And that is simply the way it is, and, if you don't like the truth there, you're welcome to get your brains nearly beaten out of you on the Edmund Pettus Bridge so you would begin to have the most basic qualifications to argue with John Lewis about it.

Watch: