As Speaker, Kevin McCarthy May Let GOP Extremists Run the House
If you’re wondering what the House of Representatives will be like if Republicans wind up controlling it next year, the fate of a routine resolution honoring a trailblazing Florida judge tells you everything you need to know. As the New York Times reported, nobody initially had an issue with naming a federal courthouse in Tallahassee after Justice Joseph W. Hatchett, the first Black State Supreme Court member south of the Mason-Dixon line, who died last year. Then an extremist freshman House member from Georgia objected and everything went to hell immediately.
The member in question was not Marjorie Taylor Greene but her buddy Andrew Clyde. While Clyde is far less well known than his fellow Georgia representative, he has made headlines for racking up fines to protest House COVID-19 mask rules and suing the House to abolish the metal detectors designed to keep shooting irons off the House floor (he is a gun dealer by trade). Clyde has the sort of voting record on racial-justice issues that might lead less ideological members to seek some cover. Per the Times:
He also opposed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime and explicitly outlawed an act that was symbolic of the country’s history of racial violence. Mr. Clyde also voted against recognizing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
In this latest incident, a Clyde staffer figured out that, in 1999, as part of a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, Justice Hatchett had ruled that a student-organized prayer at a public-high-school graduation violated the long-standing U.S. Supreme Court ban on school-sponsored religious activities. This offended Clyde, even though (a) this is a tiny part of Hatchett’s long and distinguished record on state and federal benches and (b) Hatchett wasn’t setting school-prayer policy but interpreting a binding Supreme Court precedent.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/as-speaker-kevin-mccarthy-may-let-gop-extremists-run-the-house/ar-AAWbeGM
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