Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., explains her ‘no’ vote on the Charlie Kirk resolution on the floor of the U.S. House. | Image via C-SPAN
How would the Democratic House leadership of today have voted if they’d been around back in 1963 and were put on the spot with a resolution honoring Alabama Gov. George Wallace of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” infamy?
Or how about a resolution lauding the example of Bull Connor, the white supremacist Birmingham police commissioner who unleashed his attack dogs on civil rights demonstrators in Alabama?
Would they have given their support to a resolution calling Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox a role model—the man who branded Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., an “enemy of the people,” called Black people inferior to whites, and said integration was a communist plot?
If the results of the House vote on a resolution honoring the late MAGA martyr Charlie Kirk on Friday are any indication, far too many of them might have lent their support to these hypothetical racist resolutions.
When the Republicans put forward their highly partisan statement last week re-casting Kirk as someone who “worked tirelessly to promote unity” and as a person who showed “steadfast dedication to the Constitution and civil discourse,” some 95 Democrats in the House chose to collaborate in this rewriting of history.
38 more were apparently too afraid to show where they stand, opting instead to vote “present.”
While it may seem impolite to speak ill of the dead, the things Kirk advocated and professed to believe in would have left him feeling right at home among the likes of characters like Wallace, Connor, and Maddox. They were all kindred spirits, as the saying goes.
Any progressive or Democratic leader who’s been paying attention lately knows exactly what Kirk stood for, but only 58 Democratic members of Congress had the backbone to stand up and buck the right-wing’s coordinated whitewashing effort.
Among those who said “no” was New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
If the resolution had been a straightforward affair of condemning political violence and murder, it probably would have garnered a unanimous vote of support. Ocasio-Cortez herself said, “We can disagree with Charlie and come together as a country to denounce the horror of killing.”
But, as AOC pointed out in her floor speech, the Republicans had no intention of bringing people together to get behind such a statement. Instead, they opted for division, putting forward a resolution which, she said, “brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry today.”
While many Democrats have been essentially silent as the GOP perpetuates the myth that the recently assassinated youth leader and big-money Republican fundraiser was “respectful” and “promoted civil discourse across college campuses,” AOC had the courage of her convictions to speak the truth:
“We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted Black Americans the right to vote was a ‘mistake,’ who after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi claimed that ‘some amazing patriot out there’ should bail out his assailant, and accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges—it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.’
“His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans—far from ‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority in this resolution.”
Facts are facts, and the congresswoman from the Bronx spoke plenty of them.
Joining her in opposing the resolution were most members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). One of them, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, who’s also a civil rights attorney, asked why so few white lawmakers could be found in the ranks of the “no” voters.
“One of the things that I want to point out that’s not been laid out that honestly hurt my heart is when I saw the no votes—there were only two caucasians,” she said on CNN on Sunday. “For the most part, the only people that voted no were people of color.
“The rhetoric that Charlie Kirk continuously put out there was rhetoric that specifically targeted people of color,” she continued. “It is unfortunate that even our colleagues could not see how harmful his rhetoric was—specifically to us!”
Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., another “no” vote, declared, “Empathy is not a celebration, and I will not call Charlie Kirk a hero…. I represent Detroit, the Blackest major city in the country. Given Kirk’s history of disparaging remarks towards Black Americans, I could not vote yes.”
Just as direct were the words of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who told Republicans, “You cannot get mad when people hold the mirror and say, ‘Here is who he really was.’”
It should go without saying, but since we’re in a period when the conservative media will claim otherwise, all of these leaders condemned Kirk’s murder, with Crockett saying, “Whether it’s heated or not, the fact is, Charlie Kirk should still be here.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted in favor of the resolution after a meeting with House Democrats. Questioned about his decision by Rev. Al Sharpton, Jeffries downplayed the significance of the matter as simply “a two-page resolution that doesn’t even have the force of law.”
True enough, it doesn’t have the force of law. But as Sharpton noted, the resolution does carry the force of legitimacy. It legitimizes and sanitizes Kirk’s extremist, white supremacist, and misogynist legacy. Agreeing to the resolution means agreeing to cementing Kirk’s racist ideas at the center of American life.
History will keep a record of how lawmakers voted, of course, but it’s not just historians who have to be concerned with what the Democratic leadership has been up to lately…or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say, what they haven’t been up to.
The vote by 95 of them—including the most senior leaders—to hitch themselves to the Kirk resolution is indicative, in the eyes of some, of just how out of touch (or completely absent) the top leadership of the Democratic Party in Washington has been as of late.
Speaking with People’s World about the resolution, Communist Party USA Co-Chair Joe Sims said, “That vote was just plain wrong. And we cannot be silent.” He said that the movements have got to keep our eyes on the prize of defeating the MAGA right in the midterms, but that vote didn’t help. In fact, it hurt.”
Sims said if he was a Democrat, he’d be letting the leadership know his opinion. “In fact,” he said, “all people of good faith should do so.” Racism, sexism, and homophobia “cannot be accommodated, no matter what the excuse,” Sims concluded. “We’ve got to keep the pressure on.”
With the rights of millions of federal employees under attack, non-citizens disappearing behind the gates of ICE camps, and National Guard troops marching into urban areas from coast to coast, the people and their mass movements are increasingly standing up to the MAGA agenda and resisting America’s descent toward fascism. You can see it in the growing protests organized in thousands of cities and in the lawsuits being filed in the courts by unions and civil rights groups all around the country.
The people are showing there’s an alternative to simply sitting back and waiting for Trump to destroy everything in the hopes that the Democratic Party will be left to pick up the pieces while saying, “We told you so.”
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive colleagues are taking that lead and showing what it means to be a real opposition in Congress. More Democrats should follow their example, and the people’s movements need to make it easier for them to do so by continuing to demonstrate that, contrary to the president’s claims, the majority of this country is not in the MAGA column.
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