This piece originally appeared on the Huffington Post.
From the right-wing obsession with President Obama’s birth certificate to a GOP Representative interrupting one of his speeches by yelling “you lie,” our nation’s firstAfrican American president has endured an unprecedented level of disrespect throughout his time in office. The current blockade against considering President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court is the latest example of this trend, and it stems from the same racist efforts to paint his presidency as illegitimate.
The Republican anti-Obama crusade began on day one, with GOP leaders meeting on the evening of his inauguration to strategize about how to block the president’s agenda at every turn. That campaign has only grown uglier since then, with many Republicans taking every opportunity to demean President Obama, paint him as a suspicious outsider, and accuse him of overstepping his authority. It is a flawed strategy and a failed campaign that has run its course.
It was disrespectful when Texas Representative Randy Weber, for example, called the president a “socialistic dictator” and asked whether he is “intent on bringing America down.” It was a show of disdain for 2016 GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to tell Pat Robertson that “deep inside of” President Obama “there is a sense in which he doesn’t want America to be [a] superpower.” It was with absolute contempt that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, who has long questioned President Obama’s birthplace, suggested that his birth certificate might say “he is a Muslim” and floated the idea that maybe the president “doesn’t want to get rid of the problem” of terrorism. It was an absence of professional courtesy when former presidential candidate Rick Santorum failed to correct or disagree with an audience member who called President Obama an “avowed Muslim” with “no legal right to be calling himself president.” While President Obama is not a Muslim, I am certain there is no place in the position description that says a Muslim American, if elected, could not serve in this country’s highest office.
I cannot recall any other president facing this kind of treatment. The current obstruction campaign blocking the president’s Supreme Court nominee may not feature the same brand of name-calling and wild accusations as previous anti-Obama campaigns. However, let’s not be naïve at their attempt to use language that may appear more palatable; the grounding is still in the same racist assumptions that his presidency, elected not only once but twice, is somehow not valid.It causes me to wonder what they truly think of democracy and Americans who exercise their right to vote.
A Senate majority has never refused to consider a president’s nominee to the Supreme Court. It is an unprecedented rebuke of the president’s constitutionally-guaranteed authority to nominate justices. Refusing to meet with, hold hearings on, or give a simple up-or-down vote to Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s exceptionally qualified nominee, is an insult to Judge Garland, the president,and the American people. But the truth is that Republican leadership was already bent on categorically rejecting any nominee he put forward no matter how qualified they were. North Carolina Representative G.K. Butterfield, who leads the Congressional Black Caucus, was right when he told the New York Times that “if this was any other president who was not African-American, it would not have been handled this way.”
The Constitution makes clear that it is President Obama’s right, and his duty, to make a nomination, and that it is the Senate’s job to provide advice and consent. That GOP senators are ignoring their constitutional responsibilities and refusing to consider President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court isn’t just politics as usual. It’s one of the most outrageous examples yet of the Republican Party treating the president, a man of color, an American of African ancestry, a Black man, like he didn’t really earn that job. Not only did he earn it, but he is doing it quite well – and that is why this obstructionist Senate should follow his lead and stop the obstruction, stop the racially motivated disrespect, and do their job.