Tennessee, God Damn!

Get the Point!

Today's Hobbservations are in remembrance of the late Nina Simone and her classic, Mississippi Goddam…

Nobody asked me, but...

***Yesterday, realpolitik in the Deep South turned to the surreal as the Republican dominated Tennessee legislature voted to expel two of the three Democratic members from their body who led a peaceful protest about gun control into the legislative halls last week—only days removed from the deadly Covenant School shootings that left seven dead in Nashville, the state's capital. 

The Hobbservation Point stands with you, Brothers Jones and Pearson!

Shunning any semblance of race neutrality, Tennessee Republicans voted to remove Memphis Rep. Justin Pearson, who is Black, along with Nashville Rep. Justin Jones, also Black, yesterday evening. The third Democrat who helped lead last week's protest march was Rep. Gloria Johnson, a white woman who was NOT expelled from office. When asked the discrepancy in her treatment, Johnson replied, “it might have to do with the color of my skin...”

Yeah, we, “The Blacks,” know…

Now, consider for a moment that the Democratic representatives did nothing illegal being that the Capitol is a public facility that's open to, well, the general public. 

Consider that neither of the now called "Tennessee Two" came into the legislative chambers and whipped a Republican with a cane, as South Carolina U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks beat U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner within an inch of his life on the eve of the Civil War because Sumner disagreed with the secession talk that was en vogue at the time. 

Popular editorial cartoon of U.S Rep. Preston Brooks (D-SC) caning U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Ma) circa 1856.

Consider that of all of the remedies available to Tennessee Republicans for perceived disruptions to the legislative process, be it admonishment, censure, or a fine, that their choosing to expel Pearson and Johnson for a minor disruption is akin to a judge sentencing a defendant accused of stealing a five dollar gallon of milk to life without parole. 

As I wrote on Facebook as I watched in disgust as it all unfolded last night, across the South, democracy is at stake—and white supremacy is on the rise in the halls of political power.

Please remember that Democrats outnumber Republicans in just about every state of the Union, but if organizers on the left don't start to wake up and realize that these bigots on the right are playing for keeps, the road to stopping Jim Crow 2.0 will be littered with potholes that could leave a driving nightmare for many generations to follow. 

***Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee for President of the United States, once infamously quipped, "extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice!”

While much of Goldwater's politics at the time that he uttered those words were centered upon endowing states with the right to prevent integration and limit voting rights to Blacks, both of which were signed into law in 1964-65 by the man who defeated him in the general election, President Lyndon Johnson, Goldwater's preferred form of extremism was ideological in nature—not idiotic in nature in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and affiliated white trash who were beating and killing Blacks and their white allies all across the South. 

Former Arizona Senator and Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater

But it is important to remember that white supremacy has ALWAYS had a philosophical branch, and a pugilistic branch—and far too often, those two branches were not mutually exclusive.  

Thus, I remind that while many editorial boards and writers in the South waxed philosophically about the "peculiar institution" of slavery in the run up to the Civil War, lest we forget that the ancestors of the very folks who ousted the Tennessee Two yesterday in Nashville formed their own militias, seceded from the Union, and openly rebelled for four years in a Civil War that cost nearly 700,000 lives from 1861 to 1865—all because they wanted Southern states to have the right to keep my, Jones, and Pearson's Black ancestors enslaved. 

Casualties from the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle in the bloodiest war in U.S. history…

As I often remind, please do NOT underestimate the allure of white supremacy and the extreme lengths that those whites who fear an America that's browner, blacker, queerer, and less dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism will go to "Make America Great Again" from their homogenous, histrionic, and hypocritical points of vantage. 

***If you believe for one second that the preceding paragraphs are actually histrionics on Ol' Hobbs's part, and that the present age is not on the verge of violent civil unrest, consider that right here in my own section of Dixie, the sovereign state of Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, one who strikes poses that are eerily reminiscent to his Italian paisano and total Fascist Benito Mussolini, has been granted $100 million dollars by the Florida Legislature to raise a Florida militia.

While we all know that each state governor in America has a measure of authority over the National Guards within their jurisdiction, those guardsmen are funded and equipped by the U.S. Department of Defense. Meaning, the State National Guards are still under the ultimate authority of the President of the United States.

DeSantis, a former Naval officer, has called for a militia that's funded and equipped by the State of Florida, one that would be under his or some subsequent governor's exclusive command. 

Hobbs the historian is here to remind that while 22 states have some small force that can be called “militias,” a militia of the scope that DeSantis desires has been seen before…in the South...during the run up to the Civil War that began in 1861.

For those who have forgotten, one of the major reasons that the South began to lose that war after initial military successes was because the Confederate States were against forming a strong central government, and the various state mobilized militias in the South often were unwilling to cooperate with the demands of Confederate President Jefferson Davis or his top military commanders, like Generals Robert E. Lee, Joe Johnson, and Joe Hooker, among others. Ditto for private Confederate regiments that were funded by wealthy Southerners who, like the fictional Lord Peter Baelish reminded Ned Stark in the first season of Game of Thrones, were loyal "to the ones that pay them."

Indeed, be wary, my friends, be very wary of the modern day Fascists on the right like DeSantis who see no vices in their extremist ways…

***In the over 200 times that I listened to Florida judges read final jury instructions in criminal cases, I always paused to reflect when in the final paragraph, they reminded jurors that, "for over 200 years, we have agreed to abide by the Constitution." My reflection always centered upon the philosophical question, "what happens when we, the people, no longer 'agree' to follow the Constitution?"

That question has percolated in my mind alot of late, particularly with respect to two historic news events that will reverberate for many years to come. 

The first event was the felony arrest and arraignment of former President Donald Trump in Manhattan District Court on Tuesday.

While Mr. Trump is shrouded with the presumption of innocence at this time, the fact that he expended energy this week attacking the prosecuting attorney, Mr. Alvin Bragg, the presiding judge, Juan Merchan; their wives, their children, the FBI, and other law enforcement officers who investigated his alleged crimes—all the while calling for the FBI and police to be defunded, shows that not only is Trump self-centered, but that he is actively pushing for the dismantling of the justice system all because he is like a petulant child who is kicking and screaming "IT'S NOT FAIR."

The second event is news that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his lawyer/lobbyist wife, Ginni Thomas, have received multiple MILLIONS of dollars in under the table funds and benefits, such as a 2019 yacht trip in Indonesia that cost over $500,000 that were gifts from Republican mega donor Harlan Crow. 

Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, skinning and grinning circa 2019…

Justice Thomas, who earns slightly under $300,000 per year, has become rich as King Croesus not due to his hard work or thrift, but because Mr. Crow was willing to pay whatever it takes to own his very own Supreme Court jurist. And yes, I said own, as in "Massa," because Thomas has always had a vile and disgusting penchant of suggesting that he is a "free thinker" who is not beholden to the Democratic political plantation. 

But more than that, while what Thomas has done is illegal and unethical in that he has failed to report those “earnings,” but with the House of Representatives firmly in Republican clutches, the likelihood that impeachment proceedings will begin are slim and even if they are, the likelihood of removal in the Senate are none because the requisite super majority votes simply are not there at this time.

I will never forget learning in middle school that when Republican President Richard Nixon was facing impeachment for ordering the burglary at Democratic Party headquarters located in the Watergate Hotel in 1972, that it wasn't the Democrats that convinced him to resign—but his fellow Republicans who went to him and said that they, too, would vote to impeach and remove him from office if he didn't fall on his sword; and so he did!

Richard Nixon gestures to the crowd as he leaves the White House following his resignation in August of 1974…

But that America is not this America, as far too many on both sides of the political spectrum are far too partisan to hold leaders accountable.

I, for one, am not beholden to such mental hijinks because if there was evidence that Joe Biden had done what Trump's accused of having done in Manhattan, or, if my sources are correct, a separate indictment that will be produced in the coming weeks for his election interferences up in Georgia back in 2020, I would be calling for Mr. Biden's arrest and removal from office. I would make that call because I am just foolish enough to believe that the law is to be applied equally to all Americans, which is the reason that even back in 2016, I drew the ire of some of my fellow Democrats when I outlined how Hillary Clinton broke the law while serving as Secretary of State. 

And while political debates are great, I close today's blog by reminding that political matters are so fraught with peril at this time that I truly believe that events are about to get violently worse before they get better. I hope that I'm wrong, but my instincts tell me that I am not…