Time for Republicans to rename their annual dinners
It’s that time of year when Democrats and Republicans at their respective rubber chicken dinners gather to heap praise on the standard-bearers of the party, past and present. The party faithful can expect to hear how to save the republic as exemplified by the life’s work of their founding fathers. Speakers will connect the lives and careers of party stalwarts of the past with the challenges facing our nation today. They will show how the partisans of the day will carry the banner of the party, all the while extolling the virtues of those legends of yesteryear.
Unfortunately, time does not stand still, and new takes on history expose oversights no one bothered to read in the footnotes years ago. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the names our two political parties use to brand their celebratory dinners, names based on historical assumptions that simply don’t gibe with the realities of political party strategies and values in the 21st century.
As the culture adjusts to new information that historians divulge about our presidents, it’s a challenge for the parties to stick to their time-honored headliners. For example, the Democrats in many states have celebrated the legacy of their party at Jefferson-Jackson dinners, which has presented a problem for a party that flies the flags of diversity, inclusion and equality at a dinner named after two slave-owning presidents. In recent years, the Democratic Party in some states jettisoned their dinner namesakes of Jefferson and Jackson to remain true to the ideals of equality and diversity. The Iowa Democratic Party dropped the Jefferson-Jackson label in 2015, and other state Democratic parties have followed suit.
On the Republican side of the aisle, it gets even messier. The Republican platform of 2016 actually refers to itself as the “Party of Abraham Lincoln.” It commits “to foster solutions to America’s difficult challenges when it comes to race relations today. We continue to encourage equality for all citizens and access to the American Dream.”
If the Democrats can shed the names of slaveholder presidents who are no longer emblematic of the values we stand for today, then how can the Republican Party hold a “Lincoln” Day dinner in honor of the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation when its public officials are engaged in voter suppression strategies in a number of states that effectively deny people of color the right to vote, not in the 19th century, but in the 21st century? Purges of registered voter lists are underway in a number of states, including Wisconsin and Georgia, where as many as 500,000 voters could be removed as registered voters without proper notice. The reason for their purge — they had not voted in two or three recent elections.
Three key states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — delivered the slimmest of popular vote margins to Trump, giving him the electoral votes he needed to win, even though Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes. It should come as no surprise that these states are ground zero for the 2020 election where Trump Republicans will employ some of their strategies to disenfranchise voters who they fear will reverse the 2016 result. A Trump election adviser speaking to a group of Republicans in Wisconsin recently was caught on a leaked audio claiming that it’s always been GOP strategy to suppress votes, and he urged party officials to start playing offense.
In 2016, longtime Republican consultant Carter Wrenn responded to the charge that Republicans kicking people off the voting rolls was voter fraud. He denied it was voter fraud and said it was simply to prevent African Americans, most of whom vote Democratic, from voting, period. In other words, we don’t have to win the hearts and minds of voters, we simply have to turn them away on Election Day.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, since 2010, 25 states have enacted new voting restrictions, including strict photo ID requirements, early voting cutbacks, and registration restrictions. Although many of these restrictions are aimed at African Americans, Republicans in Texas, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin also aimed voting restrictions at college students.
Trump Republicans intend to win the 2020 election no matter what it takes, including depriving Americans of their right to vote. As the GOP gathers once again for annual Lincoln Day dinners, it’s time to take a cue from their Democrat counterparts and own up to the hypocrisy of naming a dinner after a president who stood squarely against the direction the party has taken in recent years. Orange County Republicans seem to be on their way to figuring this out by naming their dinner The Trump Defender Gala and 2019 Annual Lincoln Day Dinner.
But why sully Lincoln’s legacy? If the 2020 election depends on Republicans denying the descendants of those Lincoln freed the right to vote, then free Lincoln and African Americans of the insult of using his name to identify a party so removed from his deeds and actions. The Trump Day Dinner sums it all up and makes it clear who stands for what.