Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor
CHARLESTON,
S.C. — 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.”
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.
“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.”
The
anger and outrage that Mr. McConnell’s position has touched off among
African-Americans could have implications for the presidential election.
Leading African-American Democrats are trying to use it to motivate
rank-and-file blacks to vote in November, the first presidential
election in a decade in which Mr. Obama will not be on the ballot and in
which Democrats fear black participation could drop.
“Anger
becomes action when it’s directly tied to a moment, and the moment now
is the election on Nov. 8,” said Stacey Abrams, a Democratic state
representative from Georgia and the House minority leader there, adding
that Mr. Scalia’s death meant that this presidential campaign could no
longer be construed as a mere “thought exercise.”
For
Hillary Clinton, who is increasingly relying on nonwhite voters to
ensure her success against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the court
issue could be especially crucial. Should she defeat Mr. Sanders, who
has electrified many liberals, she will need a motivating issue to bring
Mr. Obama’s loyalists to the polls. She moved swiftly Tuesday to tap
into the anger of blacks over the opposition of Senate Republicans to
Mr. Obama’s naming a replacement for Justice Scalia.
Doing so, Mrs. Clinton added, is in keeping with a longstanding pattern of mistreatment.
“They
demonize President Obama and encourage the ugliest impulses of the
paranoid fringe,” she said. “This kind of hatred and bigotry has no
place in our politics or our country.”
Supreme Court Nominees Considered in Election Years Are Usually Confirmed
Since 1900, the Senate has voted on eight Supreme Court
nominees during an election year. Six were confirmed.
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
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.”
Even
as Mr. Obama’s popularity has risen and fallen, his base of support
among black voters has been unshakable. A Gallup tracking poll this
month showed that some 85 percent of African-Americans approved of the
president’s performance compared with only 36 percent of whites. And
many African-Americans strongly identify personally with Mr. Obama, and
have watched his tenure with pride.
Mr.
Butterfield said that he believed that the effort to undermine, and
even delegitimize, Mr. Obama began soon after he was sworn in, and that
Congressional Republicans had blocked Mr. Obama’s agenda wherever they
could. Even more stinging were the suggestions from some on the right
that Mr. Obama, a Christian, is actually a Muslim and that he was not
born in the United States.
In
interviews, members of the Congressional Black Caucus also bitterly
recounted indignities, such as demands — most pointedly from the current
Republican front-runner in the polls, Donald J. Trump, in 2011 — that
Mr. Obama prove he was born in Hawaii, and not in Kenya, as some critics
claimed. Others recalled the calls to impeach Mr. Obama over his use of
executive authority.
“You
hear the thing about: ‘He’s not a citizen. He oversteps his bounds.
He’s divisive.’ One thing after another,” said Representative Marcia L.
Fudge, Democrat of Ohio. “This has been going on since the day he was
elected in 2008.”
Republicans
have had more success than Democrats in recent decades galvanizing
their voters over who should control the courts. But Jennifer McClellan,
a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and the Democratic National
Committee, said the dispute over how to replace Justice Scalia could
now become “an issue for the average citizen.”
Ms.
Abrams agreed, saying the Supreme Court and its powerful influence on
people’s lives is especially resonant with blacks. “Congress is denying
our president his rights as a president, but, more than that, they’re
denying the legacy of his presidency,” she said. “That will animate
Democratic voters across the board but especially African-Americans, who
realize more than many voters how great an impact the Supreme Court can
have on freedom.”
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