San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The new nationalist holiday
Independence Day commemorates a declaration of ideals that the country thereby created has struggled to live up to for 245 years. Last month’s congressional recognition of Juneteenth National Independence Day, marking the last freeing of slaves as the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Day, took a symbolic step toward reckoning with the lasting discrepancies between ideals and reality.
But Juneteenth isn’t our only present exercise in national holiday creation. Instead of expanding and elaborating on our collective understanding of the nation and its freedoms, another emerging holiday explicitly rejects the democratic aspirations of the Fourth of July in favor of the violent, divided and deluded portents of the Sixth of January.
Fourteen of the House’s 211 Republicans — among them Northern California’s own Tom McClintock and Doug LaMalfa — voted against Juneteenth recognition. The day before, 21 voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the police officers who protected them from the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, the worst breach thereof since our last war with the British.
A month earlier, 175 Republicans — led by Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, the House minority leader, and including all but one of his fellow California Republicans — voted against a bipartisan commission to investigate that deadly assault. Modeled on the independent body that investigated the 9/11 attacks and negotiated by the Homeland Security Committee’s top Republican and Democrat, the proposal was finally killed by Senate Republicans. Most fell in line after Donald Trump publicly ordered McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to oppose the investigation.
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats voted to form a select committee to investigate the insurrection instead. Only two Republicans joined them.
In contrast to the proposed commission, the committee will be controlled by Democrats, but the nearly unanimous Republican opposition has little to do with process. The GOP leadership can’t consent to a serious examination of a riot incited by Trump any more than the Continental Congress might have subpoenaed Thomas Jefferson to demand an explanation of his declaration. Rep. Liz Cheney, who voted for the committee and was subsequently seated on it, did so after being excommunicated from the Republican leadership for refusing to follow McCarthy and McConnell in abandoning criticism of the riot and its ringleader.
On Thursday, the day after the committee was formed — and shortly before the unsealing of a tax fraud indictment against the Trump Organization and one of its top executives — Trump issued a fourword statement: “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” Babbitt was the Southern California woman fatally shot by a Capitol police officer defending members of Congress from her and other rioters as they breached a lobby adjoining the House Chamber. Trump’s propaganda haiku positioned her as the martyred hero of his nationalist holiday.
Thursday was also the day, as it happens, that six justices of the Supreme Court, half of them chosen by Trump, further eroded federal voting rights protections in the course of endorsing an Arizona law requiring certain ballots to be thrown out. The ruling came amid a surge of voting restrictions in Republicanled states attempting to achieve the rioters’ ends by legislative means.
The high court’s message to those states? Have at it. Opponents of Juneteenth commemoration disingenuously argued that it was meant to “replace the Fourth of July.” But the true threat to the spirit of the Fourth emanates from those condoning, enabling and celebrating the destructive forces of the Sixth.