Republicans plan to reverse progress made by the 1965 Voting Rights Act with racial based gerrymandering

Mapping Mississippi White published in The New York Review of Books by Jeffrey Toobin

Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.

When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bennie Thompson was just seventeen years old—short of the voting age—so his parents reaped its benefits before he did. The family lived in Bolton, Mississippi, a town of about five hundred people twenty miles west of Jackson. Thompson’s mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, an auto mechanic, had never been able to register and vote.

The VRA essentially put states with histories of racial discrimination into federal receivership to force them to comply with the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. As a first step, the federal government sent workers to the South to register Black citizens like Thompson’s parents. To assure further compliance, Section 5 of the act required those states to get approval from the Justice Department or a court before making any changes to their electoral systems. The federal registrars “created an opportunity to get registered without intimidation,” Thompson told me recently as we wandered through Bolton, where he still lives. “And the result was people like Bennie Thompson.”

Thompson discovered politics in the mid-Sixties as a student at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school and a civil rights hotbed in Jackson. He graduated in 1968 and, thanks to the new voters enfranchised by the VRA, won local office in Bolton the following year. (Prior to 1965, roughly 28,500 Black citizens in Mississippi—6.7 percent of those eligible—were registered to vote; within two years of the act’s passage, that number had soared to 264,000—59.8 percent.) Over the next two decades Thompson won a series of races for county-level positions in Mississippi and then, in 1993, a special election to Congress. He’s been reelected sixteen times. Thompson and Mike Espy, his predecessor in the seat, are the only Black people to be elected to Congress in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Thompson has been the chair and ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, but he came to broad national attention when then speaker Nancy Pelosi named him the chair of the special congressional committee charged with investigating the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In a series of televised hearings in 2022, Thompson’s committee laid out how a violent insurrection nearly upended the transfer of presidential power. “I named a lot of our most intelligent and skilled members to that committee,” Pelosi told me.

And you know how Congress is. They all thought they should be the chairman. But after it was over, they all came to me and said that Bennie was so fair and showed so much integrity and skill that they agreed that he was the right one to be the chair.

Thompson has lived his entire political life in the shadow—and, for a long time, under the protection—of the VRA. Throughout that period, Congress and the courts have wrestled with a central question about its meaning, one with fundamental implications for Thompson’s political career. Does the VRA protect Black voters and officeholders only from intentional discrimination by government officials, or does it also guarantee Black candidates a fair chance of victory at the polls? To put the question in voting rights shorthand, is it an “intent” law or a “results” law?

Earlier this year the Supreme Court appeared to settle the question. In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6–3 majority in effect established that the VRA prohibited only intentional discrimination. Republican-dominated states throughout the country, including Mississippi, took the decision as an invitation to gerrymander the seats of Black officeholders so they would have virtually no chance of winning reelection. Just two weeks after Callais was decided, Tate Reeves, the Republican governor of Mississippi, announced his intention to redraw the lines of Thompson’s district. “Congressman Bennie G. Thompson’s reign of terror on MS-2 is over,” Reeves posted on social media. “It is not a matter of ‘IF…’ Just a matter of ‘WHEN!’” The governor’s inflammatory language is revealing, especially because Thompson has had a scandal-free career; the only “terror” about Thompson, it seems, is that he’s Black and in Congress. While Reeves and his Republican allies in the state legislature ultimately decided against a new round of gerrymandering before the 2026 midterms, they are united in their determination to redraw not only Thompson’s district, but also those of Black officeholders in state and local positions across the state.

If the governor does end Thompson’s congressional career, it will mark more than the conclusion of a single politician’s time in office. It will signal the end of a grand experiment: a joint undertaking of the federal government and the courts to rectify enduring injustices in the American electoral system. More than half a century ago, the nearly absolute power wielded by white politicians in the South created the need for the VRA. Now, as a result of Callais and other Supreme Court decisions, the heirs to those politicians are reclaiming that power.

Just to mention Mississippi, to cross the state line from Alabama and go there, it just created all types of problems in my own mind,” John Lewis once said, recalling his early days as a civil rights leader. “Alabama is bad; Alabama is hell. But to go to Mississippi at the time was worse than hell.”

In Mississippi in the 1960s, racist violence was a horrible constant. In 1963 Medgar Evers, the first field officer of the NAACP in the state, was shot dead in the driveway of his house in Jackson. The following year, when caravans of students and others came to register voters during the Freedom Summer, their buses were torched and the passengers beaten. Three of them—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were abducted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

This was the Mississippi where Bennie Thompson grew up. In the months after the VRA was passed, there were two cross burnings in Bolton. As he took me through its streets, Thompson showed me the United Methodist church he first went to as a child. “I’ve been in one physical church my whole life. Not just one religion, one physical church—which just happened to be right next door to the Head Start center that the Klan burned down,” he told me. “So that was kind of part of my introduction.”

The Supreme Court purported to end segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a decade later, Thompson was taught in what was still called the Bolton Colored School, which it was in fact if not in law. Most of Bolton’s white children eventually went to a private school called Central Hinds Academy just outside town. We took a drive to Central Hinds and happened on a football practice that featured, by my count, about two dozen white kids and one Black player. Thompson smiled and gestured at the lone figure: “He’s an athlete.”

A short distance from Bolton’s main drag, which has just a handful of storefronts, Thompson slowed down in front of a modest swimming pool. When he became mayor of Bolton in 1973, he learned that the town had donated $2,500 to the local nonprofit that had built the pool a few years earlier and then decreed that it was whites only. “My position was, the public money was donated, therefore, it’s a public pool,” he told me. “I closed the pool and said unless you make it a public pool, you can’t open.” In response, the nonprofit simply refunded the town’s $2,500: “They kept it all white.” (The pool is now in private hands.)

Meanwhile, the white politicians in charge of the Mississippi state government fought the VRA in every way they could. The local authorities could no longer stop Black citizens from registering, but the state had many other tools to preserve white rule. In 1966 the state legislature gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts so that Black voters in the Mississippi Delta region were split among three districts and were thus powerless to elect one of their own. (Then as now, Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state: about 40 percent then and about 37 percent now.) The state also rewrote the rules in many white-majority cities and towns so that officials were elected at-large rather than by neighborhood, which might have given Black candidates a chance. 

In eleven communities, Mississippi changed school superintendent positions from elected to appointed to prevent Black candidates from running and winning.

Some of those changes were challenged by the federal government. The early years of the VRA, when Thompson came of age, unfolded in a national political environment very different from today’s. The law enjoyed bipartisan support. Even though Richard Nixon embraced the “Southern Strategy,” playing to white racism in the South to win the presidency in 1968, he signed a reauthorization of the VRA in 1970; Gerald Ford did the same in 1975. During the administrations of these Republican presidents, the Justice Department used its authority under Section 5 of the VRA to veto some of the attempts by Mississippi and other states to thwart the intent of the law.

Still, progress for Black Mississippians often came slowly, including for Thompson. When the VRA was passed, Black residents were in the majority in two of the five supervisors’ districts in Hinds County, which includes Jackson. But county officials changed the election for supervisors to an at-large system. Black voters sued, and eventually, in 1977, the full Fifth Circuit declared that Hinds County violated the VRA. As Frank R. Parker, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, wrote in his book Black Votes Count (1990),

The board of supervisors was forced to adopt a new plan that contained two districts that were over 65 percent black. In the 1979 county elections—after eight years of litigation—two black county supervisors, Bennie G. Thompson and George Smith, were elected as the first black county supervisors in Hinds County since Reconstruction.

The Supreme Court offered an initial answer in City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980). According to the Court, it was not enough if Black voters failed to elect one of their own; they had to prove that the white majority intended to violate their voting rights. Civil rights supporters denounced the Mobile decision, asserting that in the modern era, white legislators knew better than to display racially discriminatory intent. Proving again the bipartisan support for voting rights at the time, Republicans and Democrats joined forces in 1982 to pass a twenty-five-year extension of the VRA that was revised to effectively overturn the Mobile decision. Conservative senators like Orrin Hatch and Robert Dole voted for the extension, and Ronald Reagan signed it into law. It established a “results” test: plaintiffs needed to show only that a state’s action produced discriminatory outcomes in order to win their cases.

Again, Thompson owed the next step in his career to the VRA. After the 1982 changes to the act, Black plaintiffs challenged the 1966 gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts. Now they had to prove only that the creation of the districts led to discriminatory results, which they did. The courts compelled the state at last to establish a majority-Black congressional district, and Mike Espy won the seat in 1986. In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed him secretary of agriculture. In the special election to fill the vacancy that year, Thompson won.

By this point, even though the makeup of the Supreme Court was almost the same, the justices had changed course on voting rights. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), they ratified—and strengthened—the results test established in the revision of the VRA by holding that states had to acknowledge when they had a history of “racially polarized voting.” In establishing district lines, they had to consider “whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” If white residents did vote that way, the states had to include enough Black voters to give a Black candidate a chance to win election. In other words, the Court recognized what Thompson told me about voters in Mississippi, and it thus ensured that districts like his would remain intact.

It’s now clear that the crucial event in the eventual demise of the VRA was President George W. Bush’s appointment in 2005, of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. In the early 1980s, after Roberts had completed his clerkship with then associate justice William H. Rehnquist, he took a number of junior positions in President Reagan’s White House and Justice Department. There, in a series of memos, Roberts expressed his opposition to what became the 1982, reauthorization of the VRA. In strong language for a young staffer, Roberts endorsed the Court’s decision in the Mobile case and voiced his passionate belief that the law should protect Black voters only from intentional discrimination, not from unfair results. For example, in a January 26, 1982, memo to Attorney General William French Smith, he wrote that adding a results test to the law would lead to a “quota system in electoral politics.”

Roberts lost that battle, but his appointment to the Supreme Court put him in a position to win the war, especially once he was joined by other conservative justices. To Roberts and the other conservatives, the VRA was another way the government sought to privilege Black citizens over others, much like affirmative action, which they also eventually outlawed. Combining a narrow reading of the rights of Black voters under the VRA with an expansive understanding of the rights of whites under the Constitution, the conservatives began chipping away at the act.

The first great blow came in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, in which Roberts’s opinion for the Court effectively overruled Sections 4 and 5. In both the original version of the VRA and in every subsequent reauthorization, Congress held investigatory hearings and, based on the results, established a formula for determining which states and localities had histories of discrimination and thus were subject to the act’s provisions. The theme of Roberts’s opinion, however, was that the nation had changed. He wrote that after the passage of the VRA, “voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.” The statutory formula did not, in his view, take these changes sufficiently into account, even though Congress had looked at the same facts and concluded otherwise. According to Roberts, the law violated “the tradition of equal sovereignty” among the states and was thus unconstitutional. Unless Congress changed the formula (which it was unlikely to do and never has), there would be no more jurisdictions subject to Section 5, which was now a dead letter.

Immediately after the Shelby County decision, several states formerly covered by Section 5, now freed from Justice Department oversight, changed their election laws to make it harder for Black people (and others) to vote. On the very day that the decision was announced, the Texas legislature announced that it would tighten the photo ID requirements for voting, which a court had earlier said burdened minorities. Mississippi and Alabama passed similar laws. North Carolina enacted a series of voter restriction measures, including a requirement of a government-issued ID, and a limitation on early voting. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, none of these changes had to be submitted to the Justice Department for preclearance. The southern states immediately showed that they had changed less than Roberts claimed they had.

In theory, Shelby County left open the kind of VRA lawsuits that made Thompson’s career possible. Under Section 2 of the law, individual plaintiffs, not just the federal government, could sue localities for violating the rights of Black voters. It was private Section 2 lawsuits during the Sixties and Seventies that forced Mississippi to reverse the gerrymandering that had ruled out Black candidates like Thompson for the Hinds County seats and his congressional district. But in the past few years the Supreme Court has shut down Section 2 lawsuits, too. And crucially the Court in 2019 allowed state legislatures to design districts that gave an advantage to a ruling party, holding in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” beyond the remit of federal courts. The decision gave Republican map drawers in the South the perfect way to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. They could eliminate the seats of Black officeholders on the grounds that they were targeting only Democrats.

The coup de grâce came earlier this year, when the Court decided Callais, which made Roberts’s memos from the early 1980s, the law of the land.

Samuel Alito’s opinion for the Court said that its purpose was to “update the Gingles framework and realign it with the text of §2 and constitutional principles,” but the effect of the ruling was to overrule Gingles and invalidate the results test entirely. Citing Rucho, Alito said that henceforth “litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.” But the truth was that he was inviting Republican state legislators to dress their racial gerrymandering in political garb, with likely fatal political consequences for Black officeholders like Thompson. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in her dissent, Callais was the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

In taking up the Supreme Court’s invitation in Callais, Governor Reeves and the Republican-dominated state legislature in Mississippi are proceeding in an orderly fashion. State legislative elections take place there in 2027, and the Republicans are moving first to gerrymander those seats to the advantage of Republican, and thus mostly white, candidates. According to an analysis of prospective maps by Fair Fight Action/Black Voters Matter, a liberal advocacy group, an aggressive post-Callais map by Republicans could eliminate twenty-nine—nearly half—of Mississippi’s Black-majority legislative districts. When that task is complete, Reeves and his colleagues will turn to congressional maps and the fate of Thompson’s district in 2028. Other longtime African American members of Congress, including Emanuel Cleaver in Missouri, James Clyburn in South Carolina, and Sanford Bishop in Georgia, are similarly at risk of losing their seats in 2028. In all, in the next two years, the Congressional Black Caucus, which began the current Congress with sixty-two members, could lose as many as nineteen because of the kind of redistricting now permitted by the Supreme Court.

In addition to his security responsibilities in Congress, Thompson also serves as a custodian of institutional memory of the civil rights movement. For the past twenty-seven years, he has hosted an annual Mississippi Policy Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, at which he introduces colleagues of all races and backgrounds to a part of the world they may not know and a history they may not remember. “I take folks and show them what cotton looks like growing in the field,” he told me. “I mean, some folks think cotton comes from Walmart.” The conference takes place in Tunica, which Robert Kennedy toured in 1967, when it was known as perhaps the poorest city in America. (The town’s fortunes have improved since the opening of a nearby casino.)

“I had never been to Mississippi before Bennie invited me to the conference,” Joe Neguse, a four-term congressman from Colorado, told me. Neguse, who is forty-two, belongs to a generation of Black politicians whose experiences differ greatly from Thompson’s. “It was one thing to read about what happened in Mississippi,” he said, “but it was another to go there and learn from Bennie and others who had to grapple with such obstacles.”

For now Thompson will campaign as usual in his so-far-unchanged district. He is cautiously optimistic about the future, too, pointing out to me that breaking up his district, which is roughly 64 percent Black, might involve some peril for the Republicans: “The $64,000 question for the Republican leadership in this state is, what are you going to do with the Black people? You gonna push them in the Mississippi River?”

To change Thompson’s district, the mapmakers would have to move its Black voters into the three other districts, which are all currently represented by white Republicans. That might give Democrats chances to win those seats: “So ultimately, you could create two purple districts and end up with two Democrats rather than one.” Republicans might not want to take that chance and thus might leave Thompson’s district more or less intact. (There’s also a chance that Thompson might not run again in 2028.)

Given the number of Black voters in Mississippi, it will not be easy for Republican state legislators to gerrymander every one of their districts into oblivion, but the party is clearly going to try. The tools to fight back are very different today from what they were in the first decades after the passage of the VRA. Even if the Justice Department were inclined to protect the gains of Black voters and officeholders (which it clearly is not under the Trump administration), the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Section 5 has made such an effort impossible. And the Court itself, which was at least sometimes an ally of the VRA, has turned into an implacable foe. As a result, there will soon be fewer Black elected officials, perhaps a lot fewer, than there have been in the recent past. Representative democracy will look, and be, less representative, which is the problem that gave rise to the VRA.

“The issue is not whether Bennie Thompson represents this district or not,” Thompson said. “It’s whether or not the people who live in this district have a shot at representing and electing the candidates of their choice.”

Whenever the subject of race and voting in Mississippi came up, Thompson always offered the same straightforward explanation: “If you look at the historical voting patterns, especially in the South, Black people vote for white and Black candidates, but for the most part, white voters still vote for white candidates.” To Thompson, enforcement of the VRA must take those facts into consideration or the law would have no meaning at all. If states are allowed to gerrymander legislative districts so that Black candidates have no chance of winning—regardless of what could be proved about the legislators’ racial intentions—then white domination of the political process would continue as before 1965. Still, in the early versions of the VRA, the text was ambiguous about whether it was an “intent” or a “results” law.

RFKjr is a "betrayal of all my father worked for", by his sister Maxwell Taylor Kennedy in an emotional tribute to her father

Wow, this opinion echo puplished in th Boston Globe must be considered for award winning journalism.✍️🏆

My brother RFK Jr. is betraying our father’s legacy.

"It’s a betrayal of all that my father worked for."

Robert F. Kennedy would have turned 100 this week — and he would have been appalled at the Trump administration’s cruelty.  By Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

The late Senator Robert F. Kennedy former Attorney General
(b. 1925- D. 1968)

Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, the ninth child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, is an attorney and an author.

My father, Robert F. Kennedy, would have turned 100 years old this week. 

And were he alive, he would certainly be taking stock of the country he loved and served. Of course, there is no way to know precisely what he would have thought. 

But, I do know what he cared about most deeply: the injustice of poverty in the richest nation in the world and our duty as citizens to make sure that no child goes to bed hungry.

And specifically know, that he would have been appalled by the cruelty the Trump administration has directed toward America’s neediest people..

During the Republican government shutdown, the administration put 42 million Americans at risk of losing food assistance through the SNAP program.

And while the recent budget deal has provided some relief, it won’t make up for the permanent changes Republican legislators made to SNAP with passage of the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” 🤢 this summer — tightening eligibility requirements and all but ensuring that millions will lose benefits.

It’s a betrayal of all that my father worked for.

And all those complicit in that betrayal have lowered themselves — not least my brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, who knows my father’s legacy as well as anyone.

The legacy:  My father grew up in one of the most privileged families in the United States. The Great Depression had no impact on his standard of living. His father and brothers graduated from Harvard, just like did he.

But, Robert and his brother he President John F. Kennedy saw poverty up close during John’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in West Virginia. 

And shortly after taking office, President Kennedy authorized a pilot food stamp program. It grew throughout his time in office, and President Lyndon B. Johnson ushered in a major expansion when he signed the Food Stamp Act as part of his War on Poverty in 1964.

That same year, my father was elected to the US Senate. And it was there that his fierce advocacy for the poor and the hungry began in earnest.

A key turning point came during Senate hearings on hunger in 1967. One of the witnesses was a young Black attorney named Marian Wright who testified that Black children in Mississippi were starving. Some were skeptical. But my father resolved to see for himself and headed south with three other senators.

In Jackson, Miss., the senators heard from civil rights leaders and conservative politicians, but the 27-year-old Wright was again the star. Against great odds, she had recently graduated from Yale Law School and dedicated her life to helping bring children out of poverty. My father piled into a late-model sedan with Wright and his aide Peter Edelman — Wright and Edelman would later marry — and motored into the Delta, one of the poorest and most isolated regions of the United States, where rich black soil grew some of the world’s finest cotton and where white supremacy still defined life a century after the Civil War.

Ellen Meacham in her book “Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi” detailed my father’s trip through the region and documented the terrible conditions for laborers in 1967. New pesticides meant that fewer hands were needed to chop weeds in May and June. Modern farm equipment meant that fewer hands were needed to plow. And most devastating of all, subsidies from the Department of Agriculture paid landowners to leave portions of their fields unplanted — eliminating even more jobs for laborers. Landowners prospered; their workers starved. Elderly people without cash to pay for heat froze to death that winter in the Delta.

The drive down Route 61 is one of the most striking transitions in America, from gently rolling pine country into the flat, ancient, and seemingly endless alluvial plain that people call simply the Delta. The road is straight as a razor — 30 miles at a stretch with no curves. Cotton fields panned to the horizon when my father took the trip, punctuated by cypress breaks and irrigation canals “shining,” in Paul Simon’s imperishable phrase, “like a national guitar.” It must have felt like moving into a different region — but it probably felt, too, like going back in time.

They stopped on Ethel Street in the town of Cleveland early that afternoon, at Annie White’s rented shack of hammered, unpainted boards with gaps that allowed in light, rain, and wind. The single sink near the back dripped tepid brown water — no hot, no cold. A hole in the floor served as the only toilet. The stench and the flies were inescapable. It was hot in summer, cold in winter, and wet when it rained. A wood stove was the only way to cook or provide warmth. Rent had recently doubled from $3 to $7 per month. State officials had twice turned down White when she’d applied for welfare.

White swept the dirt yard and gathered wildflowers to decorate indoors. She’d trained wild honeysuckle to climb the entry and help mask the odor from the open-pit toilet. For the baby’s diapers she used old cloth — difficult to clean. White’s parents and grandparents had picked cotton. As an infant, she’d sat atop the cotton sack as her mother picked, and pulled the sack to the next bush. Her mother died from a venomous snake bite in the fields. 

White, like many Black Americans growing up in the Delta, began chopping and picking cotton as a child and never attended school long enough to learn to read and write. Her children read borrowed books by oil-lamp light when they could afford the fuel.

The family rarely had more to eat than bread and molasses or beans, and often missed meals. My father was probably the first white man to set foot inside the house. In the back he found a toddler named David White, sitting silently on the dirty floor, staring at breadcrumbs.

David did not look up when my father made a clicking sound with his tongue that would have brought all of my siblings to attention, nor when he brushed the child’s cheek with his hand. Marian and Peter had entered the room and watched in silence. My father sat down beside David White. A tear slipped down his cheek. He made more attempts to connect with the boy. But David did not respond. He simply kept picking at the breadcrumbs on the floor and lifting them to his mouth. David and I were both about 20 months old that day, and it must have been shocking for my father to see a child so much like his own son, but doomed — literally starving.

When the trip began, Marian Wright didn’t trust Senator Kennedy. But watching this scene, she felt her distrust dissolve. She doubted she would have sat down on the floor in that stinking house, among the crumbs, and wondered whether she would have touched the child, with his little distended belly and open sores. She later said: “He could do almost anything after that, and I trusted him from that time on, just as a human being.”

I don’t know how it is that people change, sometimes overnight. But I believe my father was never the same after that trip. He flew back to D.C. with Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania that night, and arrived late for my mother’s birthday party at our family home, known as Hickory Hill. My older siblings remember the night because of the new and different way my father entered the house. Normally he was full of vigor, motion, and energy. But that night he was quiet, his face somber, careworn, serious, as if something had shifted inside him.

Gun violence makes all Americans less safe- Red Flag Laws Now!

In most of the world, going to the wrong house is not a deadly risk.
Echo opinion by Nickolas Kristof in The New York Times:

Delusional to Think Having a Gun in the Home Makes Us Safer

But in the United States it is, because we’re awash in an estimated 450 million guns and suffer from a mass delusion that a gun in the home makes us safer.

We’re caught in a spiral in which perceptions of rising crime lead more people to purchase firearms — about 60 million guns have been sold in the United States just since 2020 — and this in turn leads to more gun violence, which leads to more fear and gun purchases …. You get the idea.

So we have recent tragedies:

— In Kansas City, Mo., a Black 16-year-old was shot twice, in the forehead and an arm, when he went to the wrong house to pick up his younger brothers; he is recovering from a traumatic brain injury. The 84-year-old white man who, according to the prosecutor, shot him through a glass front door has been charged with first-degree assault; the man said he thought the boy was breaking into his home.

— In upstate New York, a 20-year-old woman was killed when she and several friends drove to the wrong address. As their car was turning around to leave, the homeowner allegedly fired his gun and struck her.

— In Texas, two cheerleaders were shot after one of them mistakenly got into the wrong car in a parking lot. One of the girls, age 18, was hit in the back and a leg and taken by helicopter to a hospital; she was initially reported to be in critical condition.

Elsewhere, brutes send their victims to the E.R.; in America, they send them to their graves.

Foreigners admire our popular culture, our technology, our lifestyle, but are bewildered by our refusal to rein in guns.

In the 1990s when I was Tokyo bureau chief of The Times, Japanese people regularly spoke to me about a 1992 incident in which a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student, Yoshihiro Hattori, was shot dead in Louisiana after knocking on the wrong door. The homeowner said he thought the boy was a burglar and ordered him to “freeze”; Hattori perhaps didn’t understand “freeze” or misheard the man as saying “please.” In any case, the boy moved, and the man shot him with a .44 magnum.

In Japan, where fewer people are murdered with guns in a typical year than sometimes in a single mass shooting in America, the government later prepared a booklet for Japanese people traveling to the United States with helpful English travel phrases like “freeze” and “hands in the air.”

“We are more civilized,” a Japanese professor told The Times after the incident, and she had a point.

We’re not going to ban guns or eliminate gun deaths in America. But I’ve argued in a longer essay that common-sense gun measures could plausibly reduce the toll of gun deaths by one-third or more.

We can adopt universal background checks, safe storage requirements, a minimum age of 21 for private gun sales and an enforced ban on possession of guns by people with a history of stalking or violent misdemeanors. 

All states should adopt California’s successful experiment with background checks for buying ammunition- and, 

having instituted a number of smart gun measures, California now has a gun death rate 38 percent below the national average.

As I write this, I happen to be in Mississippi, which has a much more rigorous process to adopt a dog than to acquire a gun. Should it really be easier to buy an AR-15-style rifle than to adopt a Chihuahua?

Above all, we must challenge the misperception that a gun in the home makes people safer. Yes, on rare occasions, a gun can avert a crime. But researchers have found repeatedly that a gun in the house makes people more likely to be murdered, not less. “People living in homes with firearms have higher risks for dying by homicide,” according to a 2022 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

People may choose to have firearms for hunting or target practice or to protect livestock from predators (I live on a farm with guns), but given the elevated risk, personal safety is not a good reason to acquire a gun.

We might encourage homeowners who feel unsafe to get bear spray instead of a gun. As a backpacker, I carry bear spray in grizzly country because it’s more effective than a handgun at stopping one of these bears if it charges; the same may be true of stopping a home invader, and certainly the consequences of a mistake aren’t deadly.
Because of our complacency, the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the United States is now gun violence, eclipsing vehicle crashes. In 2020, more than 4,300 young people died in America from firearms; the figure in the Netherlands for 2019 was two. At this rate, it will take a couple of millenniums for the Netherlands to lose as many kids to guns as we do annually.

We accept inconveniences when driving vehicles — seatbelts, infant seats, no one in the back of pickup trucks — because these can help us save lives. Why aren’t we similarly willing to accept safe storage or universal background checks for ammunition for the same reason?

I think of these young people shot simply because they went to the wrong place, and I think: If only we loved our children as much as we love our guns.

January 6th insurrection commission must follow the evidence

"January 6th, Capitol riots at the seat of American democracy embarrassed the United States before the rest of the civilized world – or certainly should have. The Architect of the Capitol reported at least $30 million in damages and increased security costs."

$30 million in damages!

Echo opinion by Sid Salter: Rep. Michael Guest showed courage in his vote about the commission to probe the Jan. 6th insurrection: A guest column published in the Clarion Ledger, a Mississippi newspaper.

Mississippi, a state that gave #FormerGuy Republican Trump 57.8% of the state’s 2016, vote for president and 57.6% in the 2020 presidential election, Republican 3rd District U.S. Rep. Michael Guest found the courage to join 35 other Republican members of Congress in voting for an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill.

That vote bucked Trump and GOP House Minority Leader Kevin (Maine Writer: aka "the dummy lives.!!!!) McCarthy. 

Not surprising, Guest's vote drew immediate criticism from the #TFG's Trumpzi faction in the national GOP (aka GQP) and criticism on social media in Mississippi.

Guest’s vote aligned him with the state’s only Democratic congressman, 2nd District U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Bolton – the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee who led negotiations on behalf of his party for establishment of the commission.

Frankly, it’s difficult to see how Guest – a former longtime state prosecutor – could have arrived at a different conclusion on this vote. The insurrectionist's Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol cost five people, including a Capitol policeman, their lives in that disgraceful display. Some 140 people were injured in the fracas.

Representative Michael Guest (R) Mississippi

“We need answers to questions surrounding the events of Jan. 6,” Guest said after the vote. “I believe the long conversations that have happened over the last few months have produced a commission that is fair and is structured to find actions that Congress can take to prevent another such attack.”

Republican (GQP) 1st District U.S. Rep. Trent Kelly of Tupelo voted against establishing the commission along with GOP 4th District U.S. Rep. Steven Palazzo of Gulfport.

The riots at the seat of American democracy embarrassed the United States before the rest of the civilized world – or certainly should have. The Architect of the Capitol reported at least $30 million in damages and increased security costs.

On January 6th, the purpose of all of that violence, chaos, and damage resulted from a misguided effort to interrupt or delay a routine vote to certify the nation’s electoral vote. By that perfunctory act of Congress, the Democratic party returned to power in the executive branch of the U.S. government in the form of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In 232, years of American presidential elections, no candidate in modern history has refused to except the results of the election and recognize the legitimacy of the winner as president. That includes the razor-thin margin of 1960 election between Democrat John Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon.

But #FormerGuy Trumpzi’s myth about the “stolen election” (unbelievably!) endures. That, despite the absence of evidence that held up in multiple courts across the country and the damning Nov. 12, 2020, statement of Trump’s own Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee – Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency:

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result. When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

In light of that and other unimpeachable evidence and in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mississippi’s senior U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Tupelo, courageously voted to certify the electoral vote, although his party lost the 2020 presidential election in both the popular vote and the electoral vote. Thompson likewise supported certification.

The rest of Mississippi’s congressional delegation chose another path. Republicans U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Kelly, Guest and Palazzo voted against certifying the electoral vote results even though all six of Mississippi’s electoral votes were awarded to Trump.  (Maine Writer: OMG this makes virtually no sense!)

To be clear, just as Wicker’s vote to certify the 2020, electoral vote was a vote that showed character, courage, and loyalty to the U.S. Constitution – Guest’s politically unpopular vote in favor of a bipartisan commission to probe the Jan. 6th Capitol riots was a courageous and statesmanlike vote that respects the rule of law.

Sid Salter of Starkville, Mississippi is a syndicated columnist. 

Donald Trump became socialist when he insisted on signing the stimulus checks

In my opinion, Donald Trump's signature on the massive government pandemic relief checks is evidence of his contribution to the socialism that he claims to oppose!

Donald Trump's signature looks to me like an EEG brain scan report.  For egotistic reasons, Trump insisted that he sign all the coronavirus stimulus checks. This government subsidy was a socialist response to the US government's shut of all but essential services, to prevent spread of the highly infectious coronavirus.

This opinion letter was published in the Mississippi newspaper, the Sun Herald.

American is a Judeo-Christian values nation - not socialist!

It is terribly important that voters understand the difference between socialism and social programs.

Socialism is a form of government in which what is manufactured, the distribution of those manufactured goods and the prices of those goods are all controlled by the government.

Vice-President Joe Biden is not a socialist. 

He believes in capitalism, as do I.

However, we also believe in social programs. 

As a nation rooted in Judeo-Christian values, we need compassionate social programs that take care of the needs of people who cannot care for themselves, for example, abandoned or abused children, the feeble elderly, the mentally ill or challenged, and those too ill or injured to work.

We also need smart social programs that benefit our society through police departments, fire departments, highway departments, health departments, and education. 

As to education, it enables people to participate in and contribute to our economy and our lives as best they can. Hence, within our economic limits we should make education available to people to whatever level they can take advantage of it. That will more than pay for itself in its benefits to society.

So, capitalism? Yes. But capitalism accompanied by tax supported social programs that are compassionate and smart.

Richard E. Creel, Biloxi Mississippi

Black Lives Matter must include justice for the Black martyrs: History observed echo

I was naive until I wasn’t.

This echo "witness to history" was published in the Michigan newspaper, The News Herald, in Southgate, Michigan, written by Ron Carver.

At just 18, the day after I graduated from high school, I drove from Boston to Atlanta to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Two weeks later, on June 21, 1964, we got word that three young civil rights workers — James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman* — had not returned from investigating a black church burning near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Thirty churches burned that summer.

I was working the night shift and spent the evening calling jails, hospitals, police and the FBI, searching for word of the young men. I called John Doar, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, who pleaded with local FBI agents to help search. The agents refused.

At midnight, I tearfully called the boys’ parents to report our failure in finding them.

Forty-four horrible days later, the civil rights workers were found buried in an earthen dam. Schwerner and Goodman, both white, were each killed with one bullet to their hearts.

Chaney, a black man, had been brutally beaten and shot multiple times. According to an autopsy report, Chaney’s, “jaw was shattered, the left shoulder and upper arm were reduced to a pulp; the right forearm was broken completely across at several points, and the skull bones were broken and pushed in toward the brain.”

That wasn’t all that turned up. In the course of dredging nearby rivers and swamps, Navy seamen dispatch by President Johnson also uncovered the bodies of 10 more black men — some tied up with wire and rope.

In 1964, lynching black people was no longer the open, public entertainment it had once been, but it was still common. Sadly, this remains the case today.


With the latest murders of unarmed black people — Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Breonna Taylor and David McAtee in Kentucky, George Floyd in Minnesota — we can no longer deny that racism spans our country from coast to coast, from Mississippi to Minneapolis.

It dates from the earliest years of our nation right up to the present. And from the late 19th century to today, cops have been given impunity, if not encouragement, to take out their aggression on black people — especially when they protest their mistreatment.

In the 1930s, the NAACP would hang its banner declaring, “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday,” on a flagpole reaching out over Fifth Avenue in New York City. We must revive that practice. But now, not far from a century later, we must do more. In particular, white Americans cannot leave it to others to seek justice alone.

We must demand more than investigations and firings. We must sentence those who commit these crimes to maximum-security prisons, not the country club style, minimum-security detention facilities where they can sit alongside politicians and white-collar criminals.

We must also end mass incarceration, the bail bond system, and the disenfranchisement of those who have served their time. And we must eradicate all the legal and social structures that continue to harm the souls and pocketbooks of the previously enslaved citizens of America, a country built on the backs of men and women brought to our shores in chains.

Back in 1964, if the jailer’s wife who answered my phone call had told me the truth — that Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were indeed in that jail — or if the FBI had done its job, those three young men could be alive today.

Back then, Mississippi racists complained that we sought more than an end to segregation; that we wanted to change their way of life. We did want that. And we still do. We must finally make white supremacy and racist aggression socially and legally unacceptable.

This work is past due.

Ron Carver, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, has been a social justice advocate since 1964. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

*An extensive search of the area was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), local and state authorities, and four hundred United States Navy sailors.[4] The three men's bodies were only discovered two months later thanks to a tip-off. During the investigation it emerged that members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff's Office and the Philadelphia Police Department were involved in the incident.

The murder of the activists sparked national outrage and an extensive federal investigation, filed as Mississippi Burning (MIBURN), which later became the title of a 1988 film loosely based on the events. In 1967, after the state government refused to prosecute, the United States federal government charged eighteen individuals with civil rights violations. Seven were convicted and received relatively minor sentences for their actions. Outrage over the activists' disappearances helped gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Employers must support immigration reform to secure a legal work force

Companies can get a clean slate. Some undocumented workers should, too: Hattiesburg-American, a Mississippi echo editorial opinion.

ICE raids sweep up 680 undocumented immigrants across Mississippi

U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst made it clear that his office is investigating the companies in Mississippi that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided last week. It has been called the largest single-state immigration round-up, ever.

While Hurst obviously will not talk about specifics of the investigation, he attempts to allay fears that these companies will get off with no scrutiny by pointing to his past record as an assistant U.S. attorney. Hurst was the first person to prosecute a company or organization in the state for hiring undocumented workers. He’s since prosecuted multiple companies.

His first prosecution, however, is an interesting case that ironically makes a strong argument for immigration reform that includes some sort of path-to-citizenship component.

In 2006, the Country Club of Jackson became the target of an investigation by the federal government into illegal hiring practices. Federal officials contacted the CCJ in May of that year and informed them that they were currently employing 43 undocumented workers. ICE visited the country club on three separate occasions, even training CCJ management on how to identify undocumented workers and screen job applicants. Each time the feds visited, some of the original 43 identified workers were still there.

David Michael Hurst Jr. is an American attorney who currently serves as the United States Attorney for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. 

Hurst says CCJ leaders told the feds that they could not fire the workers until later in the year when golfing started to die down for the year.

When enough was enough, ICE raided the CCJ, detained 18 undocumented workers and turned the case over to the U.S. attorney’s office. The workers were deported, and CCJ was prosecuted. However, the feds “settled” with CCJ by means of a deferred prosecution. Basically, CCJ was given a list of things it had to do by a certain time. If CCJ did those things, then they would not be prosecuted. CCJ successfully upheld their end of the deal, and it never faced penalties for their illegal actions — despite how brazen they had been about it.

The reason for the deferred prosecution agreement is not unreasonable. Hurst says he, then-U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton and the Department of Justice decided that since this was the first prosecution of a company in the state, they would use it as a warning to other companies. In subsequent prosecutions of businesses who knowingly employed undocumented workers, fines for the businesses and jail time for managers have been part of the punishment.

This same logic should be applied undocumented workers who are here today. If they meet a set of certain criteria (i.e. maintain employment, pay taxes, do not commit specific crimes, complete a naturalization course, etc.) over the course of a specific period of time, then they should be granted legal residence.

Undocumented workers are not coming to rural towns across America just hoping to find a job. They are coming to rural towns because they know the jobs are there. And they are not living in underground bunkers and traveling only under the cloak of night. They are members of these small communities — they live there, work there, shop there, go to church there, send their children to school there.

But the government turns a blind eye to them. Until they don’t. 

And they are rarely given a second chance. 

Even those fortunate enough to be released on humanitarian reasons still face deportation hearings and are monitored. There is no promise of a clean slate. In fact, there is no opportunity for one under current law. That needs to change.

Voter suppression happens as described by the Republican John Meredith

Echo opinion published in the Birmingham Alabama newspaper AL.com by John Meredith

Remembering what happened to his father.....

I learned what voter suppression is and the lengths some will go to keep others from voting. Whether suppression occurs at the end of a racist’s gun or by the stroke of a lawmaker’s pen, it is an act of cowardice. It is the last ditch effort of a party that no longer wins on its merits and must cheat to succeed.

John Meredith of Huntsville, is a former Capitol Hill lobbyist who was recognized as one of the country’s 100 most influential Black Republicans.

Ever since the landmark Supreme Court decision in 2013 that gutted Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it is the GOP that has used unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to justify the wholesale disenfranchisement of minority communities.

Students at historically black colleges throughout the south have found their right to vote under attack with the passage of laws either restricting the registration of student voters or forcing them to vote at off-campus locations.

In North Dakota, 5,000 Native Americans had their voting rights taken away when rules were changed requiring street addresses to vote when state government only provides them post offices boxes. There is no denying this act of voter suppression is entirely race-based. Unfortunately, in today’s post-truth society, if your vote stands in the way of a Republican victory it will be suppressed.

The worst single offender of voter suppression in America is Georgia gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp. 

Secretary of State since 2012, Kemp has taken voting rights from over 1.6 million Georgians during his time in office.

If Republican majorities begin to narrow in the years to come, even more nefarious and judicially sanctioned voter suppression efforts will be deployed against the American people. My Republican friends will contend I’m crazy to say anyone will have their right to vote unjustly taken.

I will then have to remind them that blacks terrorized under Jim Crowe unjustly lost their vote for nearly 100 years. To those who insist “that would never happen today,” I simply respond, “an entire race in North Dakota living on reservations controlled by the U.S. Government lost their right to vote this year.”

America is a vast and differing nation. The GOP once embraced that diversity. Today’s Republican Party is shrinking and becoming homogeneous. As this transformation occurs, it would be wise for those of us remaining in the party to stop acting as though anyone who disagrees with us is somehow unpatriotic, or worse, unworthy of the right to vote.

Trade Wars ~ negative impact on the economy

Published in the newspaper "Daily Mississippian"

Referred to as “the biggest trade war in economic history,” the trade war between China and the United States is shaping up to be as real as the critics are fearing. 

Donald Trump announced $50 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports in the beginning of July, with $34 billion already imposed and another $16 million expected in the coming weeks.

The administration threatened China on July 10 with $200 billion in additional tariffs in response to Chinese trade policies seen as a national security threat to the United States, according to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. The administration has said that maintaining the tariffs will pressure China to address trade complaints from the U.S., which include intellectual property theft.

On the campaign trail and now in office, Trump has put an emphasis on his ubiquitous slogan, “Make America Great Again.” What he is doing with this latest trade war is the exact opposite of making America great. In reality these tariffs between the two largest economies will have a lasting impression on his supporters and ultimately on rural America — otherwise known as “Trump Country.”

China’s biggest agricultural products in this deal are soybeans which are one of Mississippi’s top exported products and the largest U.S. agricultural export — this means that there will be dramatic changes in soybean shipments.

The United States Department of Agriculture reported that Mississippi exported a total of $109.7 million in soybeans in 2017 to China. According to Mississippi Today, days after Trump imposed the tariffs, soybean prices plummeted to a nine-year low as China sought to buy the crop from other countries. In fact, the country started to shift its purchases from U.S. farmers, and toward Brazilians. Other countries such as Thailand, Egypt and the Netherlands began increasing their purchases of U.S. soybeans.

Farmers will not be the only ones hurting from this deal as tensions between China and U.S. grow. The tariffs could also affect American manufacturers. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that 85 percent of Chinese imports hit by Trump’s initial tariffs are machinery made in the United States. Because of that, U.S. manufacturers, will have to pay additional prices for parts and equipment.

In brief, it’s a trying time for U.S. farmers, with effects reaching coast-to-coast, as China has already turned to other soybean-producing countries. Right now, the damage is little, but in the long run, the tariffs will be hurtful for both economies if they continue to escalate. Furthermore, with a cost increase in products already, additional taxes will hurt supply chains. If demand in crops drop, then jobs will be in jeopardy and this could potentially lead the country into a recession.

Ethel Mwedziwendira is a journalism and political science major from McKinney, Texas.

Climate change is not a subject to be a "denial issue"

September 11, 2017: Sometimes, I am a year behind reading my The New Yorker magazines. Considering the "climate" of our current political times, I consider this lead article, published in The Talk of the Town, in an opening segment, to be as timely as though the report was published only yesterday. 

Published on September 11, 2017, written by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker

On August 29, 2005, at six-ten in the morning, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, just east of New Orleans. Katrina had spent days wobbling over the Gulf of Mexico, and by the time it reached the coast it was classified as a strong Category 3 storm. As it pressed inland, its winds, which were clocked at up to a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, pushed water from the Gulf westward into Lake Pontchartrain, and north, up a mostly abandoned shipping canal. The levees that were supposed to protect New Orleans failed, and low-lying neighborhoods were inundated. That day in Louisiana, at least six hundred and fifty people died.

Katrina was widely described as a “wake-up call” for a country in denial about climate change. President George W. Bush and his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, during their first term, had withdrawn the United States from a global climate agreement and dismissed the findings of the government’s own climate scientists. Now, a few months into their second term, the nation was facing just the sort of disaster that the scientists had warned about. Even if global warming hadn’t caused Katrina, clearly it had intensified the damage: with higher sea levels come higher storm surges. And, with sea surface temperatures rising, there was more energy to fuel hurricanes, and more evaporation, which inevitably produces more rain. “How many killer hurricanes will it take before America gets serious about global warming?” the journalist Mark Hertsgaard asked at the time.

Last week, as Hurricane Harvey lingered over Houston, dumping so much water on the city that the National Weather Service struggled to find ways to describe the deluge, this question sloshed back to mind. Again, climate change can’t be said to have caused Harvey, but it unquestionably made the storm more destructive. When Harvey passed over the western part of the Gulf, the surface waters in the region were as much as seven degrees warmer than the long-term average. “The Atlantic was primed for an event like this,” Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told theGuardian.

Harvey was less lethal than Katrina; as of this writing, forty-six storm-related deaths have been confirmed. But in financial terms the storm’s costs are likely to be as high or even higher. One estimate put the price of repairing homes, roads, businesses, and the petrochemical plants that line the Houston Ship Channel at a hundred and ninety billion dollars. And that estimate was made before storm-damaged plants started to explode.

As misguided as the Bush Administration was about climate change, Donald Trump has taken willful ignorance to a whole new level. The President has called climate change an “expensive hoax” dreamed up by the Chinese. After much posturing, he announced in June that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. With less fanfare, he has rolled back Obama Administration regulations limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from both old and new power plants and from oil and gas wells. (Regarding the wells, a federal appeals court recently ruled against the White House, saying that it could not simply suspend the regulations.) Trump also revoked a 2013 executive order directing federal agencies to prepare for the impacts of warming and tossed out a plan, issued the same year, that outlined steps that the U.S. would take to combat climate change.

Then, just ten days before Harvey hit, the President rescinded a 2015 executive order requiring public-infrastructure projects in flood-prone areas to be designed with sea-level rise in mind. This move is likely to have particularly unfortunate consequences for Houston, a city with no zoning code, where thousands of buildings constructed on floodplains but lacking flood insurance are now filled with soggy debris. Last Monday, as rainfall totals in Houston were topping forty inches, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress that he was planning to eliminate his department’s special envoy for climate change.

Many members of Congress share Trump’s climate-change delusions, especially in the Texas delegation. Lamar Smith, a Republican who represents parts of San Antonio, chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Smith has spent the better part of his career harassing climate scientists, and in a recent op-ed for the Daily Signal, a Web site sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, he celebrated the effects of global warming, arguing that they were producing “beneficial changes to the earth’s geography.” At a town-hall meeting in April, Joe Barton, a Republican who represents parts of Fort Worth and is the vice-chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, repeated the old denier canard that clouds are the cause of climate change. And, in June, House Republicans introduced a bill to prevent federal agencies such as the Department of Energy from considering the societal costs of carbon pollution when fashioning regulations. Among the co-sponsors were three Texas representatives.

Over the next few months, Congress and the President will have to agree on a package of federal assistance for Houston. (With typical bluster, Trump, visiting Texas last week, declared that he wanted a recovery effort “better than ever before.”) 

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, when Congress voted on two measures to provide aid to New York and New Jersey, twenty-three out of Texas’s twenty-four Republican representatives voted against one of the bills, and eight voted against both. 

Most of the state’s G.O.P. lawmakers supported an amendment to the second bill that would have required spending cuts in other federal programs to offset the disaster aid. (Republicans obviously forgot to memorize the words to The Pledge of Allegiance.)

Politicians from New York and New Jersey have been quick to say that they will not mess with Texas the way that Texans messed with them. “I’ll vote 4 Harvey aid,” Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, tweeted during the storm. Lawmakers from the Northeast should vote for aid to Houston, but with conditions. In the place of spending cuts, they should demand that Texas lawmakers and the President face up to the facts. The earth is warming, fossil-fuel emissions are the major cause, and the results are going to be far from “beneficial.” The U.S. needs to radically reduce its carbon emissions and, at the same time, prepare for a future in which storms like Harvey, Sandy, and Katrina increasingly become the norm. ♦

Mississippi echo opinion ~ Republican tax cuts for the rich

A letter to the editor published in the Mississippi Daily Journal newspaper ~ echo:

Republicans abandoned principles with omnibus bill

It is time to remodel and upgrade the Republican Party to reflect current standards.

Since the party has abandoned the platform and promises of 2016, the first change should be to swap the elephant for a rhinoceros and the GOP logo to RINO (Republican In Name Only).

The $1.3 trillion omnibus appropriations bill just passed by Republican majorities in both the Senate and House violates nearly every principle and promise made to conservative Republicans while granting Democrats everything they asked for.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it best, “It’s a funny thing. We’re able to accomplish more in the minority than we were when we had the presidency or even were in the majority.”

They were able to fully fund Planned Parenthood and Obamacare*, double the number of immigrant workers to compete with citizens and students for jobs, and funded programs the Secretary of Education had been eliminating because they were unneeded and unnecessary.

This pork-laden bill that will only fund the government for the last 6 months of the fiscal year will add an estimated $1 trillion to the debt.

Republicans studied the way Democrats passed Obamacare because the Republican leadership used the “Pelosi rule” of “pass it and then we will find out what is in it” tactic to ram this 2,232 page bill through a vote before legislators had a chance to comprehend what they were voting on.

Rep. Trent Kelly should be complimented as the only member of our Mississippi legislative delegation who refused to compromise his conservative principles and voted no on the bill. All of the others abandoned their principles and voted to hand this wasteful victory to the Democrats.

This brings up the question of what to do in November. 

Do we stay with incumbent RINO’s who have confused leadership with rubber stamping Democrat demands, or do we start looking for some real conservatives to support.

The decision is not hard for me when I look at the $21 trillion in debt our legislators approved that our grandchildren will have to pay back.

Raymond Settle, Blue Mountain, Mississippi

*Taaaadaaa! :))