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This apology bill didn't have 100 cosponsors, and it damn well should have. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, who introduced the bill, has alot of info over at her website. New York Times has a decent but short story, including a statement by John Kerry:| "It's a statement in itself that there aren't 100 co-sponsors," Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said. "It's a statement in itself that there's not an up-or-down vote. |
Damn right. Kos has some details, and you can see the cosponsors here.
The resolution is the first time that members of Congress, who have apologized to Japanese-Americans for their internment in World War II and to Hawaiians for the overthrow of their kingdom, have apologized to African-Americans for any reason, proponents of the measure said.
The final tally shows 6 who it looks like didn't cosponsor the bill:
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)
Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)
Trent Lott (R-Miss.)
Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)
John Cornyn (R-Tx.)
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tx.)
Those signing the bill were joined by James Cameron, a 91-year-old man believed to be the only known survivor of an attempted lynching.
Who wouldn't cosponsor this bill? The vote was a voice vote, thereby allowing those who don't support the apology to get away with it. I'm glad to say that both North Carolina's Senators cosponsored the bill. John over at AmericaBlog is covering this pretty closely.
I do have a question, though, and maybe I'm not following the typical anti-racism, anti-gay bashing line here, but it's an important question nonetheless. Why an anti-lynching law in the first place? Murder is illegal, and it was illegal even then, and you'd think hanging a black man would constitute murder, wouldn't you? I guess the difference is that until civil rights laws were passed and upheld, killing a black man for touching a white woman, using a white toilet, or just having the wrong color skin was somehow excusable because blacks "weren't human."
The reason I ask this question is that it strikes me as the ancestor of today's attempts to pass hate crime laws, which I kind of take issue with. It seems to me, for instance, that killing is killing and assault is assault. Why does the motivation matter past the labellings of the crime as first degree, second degree, manslaughter, etc? If someone drags a man down the street attached to his car by a rope for being gay, how is that any different for doing the same to a man because he made you angry for another reason? David Neiwert has compared anti-lynching and hate crime laws before as he does in this recent story, and I see why you'd want to keep people from committing hate crimes. However, it seems that the idea of punishing more harshly for the motivation ends up making one murder seem worse than another, even if both were premeditated just as much and done with as much malice.
Hate isn't a crime, so why is committing a crime for hateful reasons any worse than committing the crime for money or other reasons?
If someone kills my father, a straight, white, affluent, middle-aged male, he'll be punished less harshly than someone who kills a young black man or homosexual? I find that unfair and, though I understand the thought process to an extent, strangely Orwellian. Maybe I'm not understanding the full scope, but it's possible that those who didn't support this anti-lynching bill today did so for these reasons. We know that in the days when lynching was popular, many of the people who were against anti-lynching laws were racist. Some of them, further back, owned slaves or had parents who owned slaves. Some of them were just hate mongers; this isn't debatable. However, I'd like to think, though maybe I'm being naive, that today the motivations are more political or philosophical than based on actual hatred of certain racial groups.
That's not an excuse, but at least it would provide some insight. I do think it's highly important that anyone who didn't support this bill is held to account and asked why they didn't, but since it was a voice vote, we may never know who actually didn't support it.
UPDATE @ 2:30 PM: This is the current list of Senators who did not cosponsor the apology bill:
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Robert Bennett (R-UT)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Michael Crapo (R-ID)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Trent Lott (R-MS)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
John Sununu (R-NH)
Craig Thomas (R-WY)
George Voinovich (R-OH)
Kent Conrad (D-ND) has now cosponsored, making all of the anti-apologists Republicans.
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