How a nobody congressman dishonored a great Floridian

Florida jurist Joseph W. Hatchett had been much admired by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Had been. Until his name was defiled by a MAGA slander campaign.

Doesn’t matter that everyone in Washington understood that the smear job was purposefully misleading. The underhanded aspersions changed 87 Republican yes votes to no.

Something is wildly out of balance when a posthumous honor planned for the first Black justice on the Florida Supreme Court can be undone by a no-account, wingnut congressman from North Georgia.

No, not that North Georgia wingnut. The ever-deplorable Marjorie Taylor Greene represents an adjacent district. This wasn’t her doing, though one wonders what kind of mass neurosis caused hill-country Georgians to send two repugnant clowns to Congress in

2020.

True, U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde hasn’t yet enjoyed the national notoriety the QAnon congresswoman garnered with her otherworldly assertions. (Jewish space lasers ignited California wildfires; 9/11 was staged by the U.S. government; Hillary Clinton flayed the skin off children.) But he’s trying.

Clyde owns a firearm superstore near Athens, Ga., housed in a faux medieval castle featuring watch towers topped with crenellated battlements, presumably to fend off attacks from tax collectors. After a years’ long dispute over his tax bill, Clyde campaigned for congress promising to “dismantle the IRS.”

As you might have noticed as tax day approached, the IRS remains intact. Perhaps because Clyde, when he wasn’t plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has been busy exacerbating racial resentment. Elected by the whitest constituency (86.5%) among Georgia’s 14 congressional districts and one of the least educated, Clyde undoubtedly felt safe opposing two measures last year that recognized the Old South’s racist legacy.

He was one of only three members of congress to vote against the federal anti-lynching bill signed into law on March 29. Last year, he cast one of 14 nays against establishing June 19 as a federal holiday, commemorating the end of slavery.

To be fair, Clyde told the Atlanta Constitution his opposition to Juneteeth National Independence Day was not about race. He insisted that he “supported the holiday but didn’t like its title.”

Clyde’s most notorious remark was uttered in a congressional hearing last year when he characterized the January 6 insurrectionists as “normal visitors.” This was the same congressman photographed that day barricading the House chamber door against a fearsome rabble of “normal visitors.”

As for his actual legislative achievements, that would be zilch. But we live in a time when an unaccomplished, demonstratively dishonest, first-term congressman from the political fringe has the juice to disparage the likes of the late Joe Hackett.

Clyde was offended by nonpartisan legislation that would have named a federal courthouse in Tallahassee after Hackett, the first Black judge on any state supreme court in the South, the first Black to win a statewide election in Florida since Reconstruction and the former chief justice of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The bill had been approved by the Senate without a dissenting vote and was expected to pass the House with little opposition — proof that even in these divisive times, Republicans and Democrats can agree on something. But no. They can’t.

Before the vote in the House, where all 27 Florida members had originally signed on as sponsors (along with Marco Rubio and Rick Scott in the Senate), Clyde’s office circulated a 1999 news story about a federal appeals court decision in a Duval County school prayer case.

A Fifth Circuit three-judge panel, including Chief Justice Hatchett, decided that a school board policy allowing prayers at high school graduations was unconstitutional. It was an inevitable decision, given that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled against public school prayers or religious indoctrination in six cases since 1948.

The Supreme Court decisions left the panel no choice. Despite what Clyde has intimated, the Duval case can’t honestly be attributed to the chief justice’s personal beliefs.

Of course, Clyde knew that. As a Navy veteran, he surely carried out orders from up high that didn’t reflect his personal inclinations.

But school prayer is another of the cultural issues that excite the Republican base — perpetually angry folks with no interested in nuanced explanations.

So when Clyde planted the notion that primary opponents might accuse incumbent Republicans of honoring a godless, prayer-hating liberal, that was enough to cow

87 Republican representatives (including

10 from Florida) into voting no on a bill that required a two-thirds majority for approval.

Welcome to the cancel culture that governs Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Fear of getting primaried by a far-right crazy cancels political principles. A nobody congressman cancels a revered Florida jurist. And political cowards cancel the Joe Hackett Courthouse.