Return of the White Moderates
Can MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" give us a lens through which to analyze our current political moment?
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and welcome to the sixth edition of Waco Can’t Wait, a progressive newsletter focusing on McLennan County, Texas, and Federal politics. I hope you are all having a restful and contemplative MLK Day. I invite you to reflect and embrace Dr. Kings message of liberation, social & economic justice, and racial equality. You will see many politicians invoke his legacy, while actively fighting against what he stood for. I encourage you to read his speeches, essays, and other writings that weave together a bold, virtuous vision of a better world.
On this long weekend, I had the privilege to revisit King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” While incarcerated in Birmingham for his participation in a non-violent demonstration, King decided to respond to the warnings of white religious leaders in the South. They believed that the efforts of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were “unwise and untimely.” These leaders, that King describes as “white moderates,” voiced their support for his ultimate mission, but take issue with his methods. They saw the status quo as preferable to direct-action. Sound familiar?
We face a similar conflict in our own time. In 2021, 19 states passed restrictive voting laws, and some legislatures will likely consider more bills in the new year. Democrats have proposed a package of democracy reform bills that are incredibly popular, including the Freedom to Vote Act that has 70% support among likely voters, and 54% support among Republicans. Each provision of the bill is broadly popular, the lowest being universal vote by mail with 60%.
Despite the broad popularity of these policies, Congressional Democrats continue to face resistance from Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. They both continue to invoke the legacy of the filibuster, touting its protections against the tyranny of majority, invoking James Madison’s praise for the senate, and insisting that weakening this rule could create more problems than it solves. I believe that these two senators are indistinguishable from the white moderates of 1963, and that their actions will only serve to endanger the very democracy they are seeking to protect. But before we dive into such a comparison, let’s take a look at the news!
Week in review (a collection of news from Waco, Texas, and beyond)
Waco:
A housing study conducted by M&L Associates concluded that Waco’s housing shortage is disproportionately hitting our low-income earners. Between 2010 and 2019, Waco added 4,028 new housing units, with only 540 of those units being in apartment buildings. During that same time period, short-term rentals/vacation homes grew from 231 to 617.
At the same time, Waco had a vacancy rate of 11%, or 2,946 unoccupied homes, in 2019. Many of these homes are uninhabitable. The study also pointed out that higher-income earners are putting pressure on what would otherwise be low-income housing stock by purchasing those homes.
The study also made recommendations of how to address the housing shortage, including:
changing the zoning code to incentivize denser development;
creating a housing trust to fund affordable housing initiatives; and/or
creating a community land trust to buy up vacant land for affordable housing developments.
The city’s Housing Department has already suggested that it would expand the down payment and rehabilitation programs, but the city needs to seriously consider policies that would increase the supply of affordable housing. Luckily, the City of Waco is finalizing a proposed agreement to develop the old Floyd Casey stadium into 300 units of housing. That said, it remains to be seen how many of these units will qualify as “affordable” housing.
Waco Mayor Dillon Meek has announced he will run for reelection in 2022. Meek’s announcement comes on the heels of multiple accomplishments during his first term, including the new $185 million basketball arena, infrastructure improvements throughout the city, and a strong economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Filing for Waco City Council positions open up this coming Wednesday and close February 18th.
Texas:
After hours of tense hostage negotiations, four Jewish congregants from the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas have been set free and are unharmed. The congregants were being held hostage by British-citizen Malik Faisal Akram, who was demanding the release of a Pakistani woman convicted of trying to kill U.S. Army officers in Afghanistan. This is one of many anti-Semitic attacks we have seen in recent years, and it is important that we continue to support the Jewish-American community during these troubling times.
The Texas Democratic Party announced on Monday that they would be sending out hundreds of thousands of vote by mail (VBM) applications to Democratic voters aged 65 or older. During the 2020 election, VBM became a necessity for many Texans trying to avoid exposure to the coronavirus. These kind of statewide programs, coupled with voter education, are crucial because of the changes to voting laws. One of these new rules, that voters need to provide either the last four digits of their social security number or a drivers license number for a VBM application, is causing some serious problems. The Travis County Clerk’s office reported that they’ve already rejected about 50% of applications for the March 1, 2022 primary election.
While most voters (90%) have both their driver’s license number and their social security number listed in their voter file, “1.9 million voters—about 11 percent of the total—have only one of the two numbers on file with the state.” If these voters cannot remember which of these they originally put down, there is a 50-50 chance that they pick the wrong one and have their VBM application rejected.
If you are looking for a good explainer for how the totality of the voting process will be different in 2022, check out this great Twitter thread from Emily Eby:
Governor Greg Abbott was absent at a Republican Gubernatorial Primary Debate hosted by the True Texas Project, a far-right conservative activist group that has been highly critical of Greg Abbott for being insufficiently conservative. No, really.
Don Huffines, Chad Prather, and Allen West were all in attendance, and they used the opportunity to attack Greg Abbott’s record. Former State Senator Don Huffines brought up Abbott’s Operation Lone Star at the U.S.-Mexico Border, a political stunt that has resulted in four suicides by soldiers associated with the operation and guardsmen serving at the border not getting paid. All of the candidates were generally unanimous in the rest of Abbott’s shortcomings:
“not totally banning abortion; not ending gender-affirming care for minors; not cracking down on district attorneys who don’t pursue certain low-level drug charges; not putting a stop to “immoral” and godless property taxes; not combating the federal government (in unspecified, but surely holistic, ways); and not completely locking down the border while ignoring international asylum law. “
All of these candidates individually do not have a strong chance at defeating Abbott in the March primaries, but it appears that their unspoken goal is to force Abbott into a runoff by peeling off enough conservative Republican primary voters. With lower turnout and a more conservative electorate, a runoff would be the perfect opportunity for one of them to go one-on-one against an otherwise formidable candidate.
While we are on the subject of crazy things Republicans are saying, check out this meme tweeted by the Texas Republican Party:
While I’m sure I could go into all of the reasons why this is an absurd false equivalence, I think the reaction to this post was more important than the message itself. About thirty minutes after the Texas GOP tweeted this image, they wrote “wow, this made the pronouns in bio people big mad,” and then an hour later tweeted “masks are dumb.” The next day, they were posting about how they were trending #4 on Twitter across the United States.
Why is all of this important? Because Republicans do not care about what they are saying or whether what they are saying makes sense. Their new strategy is to say the most outlandish thing possible, provoke reactions from Democrats, and then utilize that outrage energy to raise money or gain new followers. This strategy is perfectly epitomized by Congressman Madison Cawthorn, who wrote to his GOP colleagues that he built his entire congressional staff around communications rather than legislation. Democrats and Progressives need to be able to recognize this tactic when it is right in front of us, and choose not to respond.
Elsewhere:
Donald Trump granted NPR’s Steve Inskeep a strange nine-minute interview, which marks a rare departure from Trump’s tendency to only speak with right wing outlets. Inskeep took full advantage of this interview, questioning Trump on January 6th, the Big Lie, and vaccine mandates. Inskeep pressed Trump multiple times to explain how the election was stolen when Trump-appointed judges, Republican-backed audits, and most Republican politicians have concluded that Biden won the election. Trump did not seem to have a good answer, other than repeating that people should “take a look at what’s going on” and that the various reports say something other than what is there in black and white.
Ezra Klein, one of my favorite political reporters/public intellectuals, wrote a great piece in the NYT encouraging us to shift our attention from the “political hobbyism” of national politics and shift our attention towards local races that have a large amount of control over the administration of elections. Klein points to real political work being an “intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage.”
Klein mentions states like Wisconsin, where Ben Winkler with the Wisconsin Democratic Party is working hard to recruit mayoral candidates in small towns who will ultimately appoint the election administrator. Now that national voting rights legislation seems to be permanently stalled before 2022, Democrats need to focus on races that will directly affect the local administration of our elections.
In Texas, those positions include county judges, county commissioners, tax assessor-collector, and county clerks. In McLennan County, our lone Democratic incumbent on the Commissioners’ Court is Pat Chisolm-Miller, and she is up for reelection in 2022. If you care deeply about protecting voting rights in our county, consider making a campaign contribution to and volunteering for Commissioner Miller’s reelection campaign!
Where do defenders of the filibuster sit in relation to other historic defenders of the status quo?
As I write this piece from the comfort of my home, sitting on my couch with my wife and schnauzer nearby, I’m struck by the conditions in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his response to those would caution him from doing the very thing that put him in jail. Surrounded by three concrete walls, with nothing but pen, paper, and his own thoughts, he easily could have conceded to the concerns raised by his supposed allies. Instead, he chose to stand firm in his convictions, and he wrote:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action.’”
These are those supposed allies who recognize the oppressive nature of a regime, its unjust laws, and its treatment of marginalized groups, but believe that inaction is preferable to the tension produced by action. This rings too true in the middle of a national debate over a coordinated attack on voting rights by Republicans, where two Democratic senators believe that protecting minority party rights in the Senate is more important than the protection of voting rights for actual minorities across the country.
At the risk of this piece growing too great in length, I’d like to pull a couple of quotes that stuck out to me in King’s letter and use them to push back against the recent statements from Manchin and Sinema in defense of the filibuster:
“You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstration into being.”
In Manchin’s most recent statement reiterating his defense of the filibuster, he made no mention of what is driving the push for filibuster reform: the state level and national threats to our democratic republic. Sinema went a little further in recognizing that there are state legislatures making it harder to vote, but she failed to properly place blame with the people who are proposing and passing these laws: Republicans.
It is irresponsible to consider what most Democrats are asking for without considering the larger context. You would have to be fooling yourself to believe that polarization in 2022 is in any way symmetrical. There is one party that is pro-democracy, and there is one party that is anti-democracy. These two are living in a fantasy land if they think that national Republicans are allies in this fight against anti-democratic norms. Republicans are the direct beneficiaries of this national movement, and I’m not holding my breath for any kind of sea change.
If you fully acknowledge the efforts to dismantle our democratic institutions and recognize the absolute necessity to legislate against it, then you would see the necessity to act in response. King made a similar assessment when he saw the injustice in Birmingham, and decided that negotiation was simply not enough to bring about change.
“In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action.”
Sinema and Manchin both insist that bipartisanship is not impossible, that minority input is absolutely necessary to create lasting policy, and that Senate Democrats have failed to full engage Senate Republicans on voting rights legislation. Never mind that Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that voting rights is not a federal issue and that “there’s no point in having … a debate in the U.S. Senate about something we ought not to do.”
Democrats in Congress could not even get Republicans to support a bipartisan January 6th commission to investigate the attack on the U.S. capitol, and when they did hold Senate hearings on democratic reforms, even the most moderate Republicans were unified in their opposition to any voting rights legislation. They recognize that any increase in the right to vote hurts their chances at getting reelected.
King pointed out that “history is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.” This is not a debate over which bridge we should build and with what materials. This is a debate over who gets to be a part of any legislative discussion, and Republicans are happy to continue denying that right to millions of Americans. Manchin and Sinema would happily defend their right to do so.
“An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote.”
In Sinema’s statement, she mentions that “today, we serve in an equally divided Senate. And today marks the longest time in history that the Senate has been equally divided. The House of Representatives is nearly equally divided as well. Our mandate? It seems evident to me – work together and get stuff done for America.” I call malarkey.
Since 1998, Republicans have not represented a majority of Americans in the United States Senate. As it stands, with 50 seats in the Senate, Republicans only represent 43.5% of the country. D.C. and Puerto Rico also lack political representation in the Senate, and both of those seats would most certainly vote for Democrats.
In the House, Democrats are disadvantaged by egregious gerrymanders in states like Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina. Even in a world where all of these seats were fairly drawn with respect to proportionality and communities of color, there would still be voting policies that disproportionately affect minorities, college students, the working class, and people with disabilities.
It is hard to say how many seats we would have after the fairness fairy waives her magic wand, but everything I just said should factor into whether we should be obligated to engage with a minority party in a discussion on voting rights. While we confer political rights upon a group of people refusing to act in good-faith, we continue to deny those same political rights to people who have never had it in the first place.
“I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as ‘rabble-rousers’ and ‘outside agitators’ those of us who are working through the channels of nonviolent direct action and refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare.”
Manchin and Sinema both seem to be equally concerned about what it would look like to be closer to an actual democracy. They strongly believe that making it easier to pass legislation will lead to radical changes in policies from cycle to cycle as regimes change, and that this level of disfunction would only worsen our existing political divisions. I could not disagree more, and here are three reasons why:
Every other democracy in the world with fewer veto points1 than America seems to get along just fine with letting one party make all of the legislative decisions and then letting the voters decide how they did. Other representative democracies simply let one party rule, that party is able to pass its legislative priorities, and then the voters decide whether or not they like those policies every other year. What a concept!
We already have radical changes in policies via executive orders and administrative rule changes from the Office of the President, and those are in large part because the legislature is no longer a viable path to accomplish a Presidential agenda. These policies fly under the radar and do not receive the same level of attention as a newly passed bill would. These orders and rules are then subject to the whims of an increasingly partisan Supreme Court. This means that 330 million people are affected by policies dictated by the executive and sanctioned by nine people in black robes. I feel so much safer.
Finally, to King’s point, refusing to act in this measured and focused manner could lead to more radical or violent outcomes that nobody wants. If Manchin and Sinema think a small carve out for voting rights is bad, then wait until the whole thing gets tossed out next time Democrats get more than 50 senators. Those new senators will likely be more to the left than Manchin and Sinema, and will depart radically when it comes to senate rules and policy preferences. By refusing to make accommodations now and building procedures that will last, they only doom the principles they hold so dearly.
I say all of this not to add to the pile on, but to draw a clear comparison to people who are historically obstacles to progress. A lot of ink has been spilled over these two senators, and I do not want any of y’all to let them live rent free in your head. To take a suggestion from Ezra Klein, I think we should turn away from the political hobbyism of will they or won’t they, and focus our efforts on the following tasks:
Make a contribution to the Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, or Pennsylvania Democratic Parties so that they can support their eventual Democratic senate nominees in 2022, all of whom support abolishing the filibuster;
Consider donating to or volunteering for Kyrsten Sinema’s primary challenger during the 2024 election cycle; and
Find a local or state legislative race that you are excited about, and then give them your time, your dollars, and your shoe leather.
We do not have the privilege of inaction. As Dr. King said, we must orient ourselves towards action and remember that “the goal of America is freedom.” If there are people who refuse to work towards freedom and liberation, then we should take them at their word and politely show them the door.
Veto points are points at which any one person or institution could stop a bill from becoming law or stop the implementation of a law. This obviously includes the presidential veto, but it also includes each chamber of the legislature, the supreme court, and to a lesser extent the leaders of each chamber and the chairmans of the respective committees.