In the wake of the vigorous calls to finally repudiate the Southern “Stars and Bars” Battle Flag after a Confederate flag-waving racist brutally murdered nine African-Americans in order to spark a race war, some members of the House of Representatives believed that it was important for our lawmakers to take a stand on the propriety of its public display in the House:

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., introduced a privileged resolution banning the Confederate flag from the House and House office buildings, unless it is displayed at a member’s office. The goal of his resolution is to remove the Mississippi state flag from the Capitol, which displays the Confederate battle flag in its upper left corner.

“I’m convinced that an effort to remove this flag from the hallowed halls of the House of Representatives is the right thing to do,” Thompson said on the floor.

Unfortunately, his fellow Republicans, including the GOP members of the Missouri delegation, preferred to equivocate:

Due to the nature of Thompson’s resolution, the House would have been forced to vote on the divisive issue, but on Thursday GOP leadership moved to send the resolution to committee, avoiding a floor vote for now.

The House voted along party lines, 240-184, to refer the resolution to the House Administration Committee. Rep. Curt Clawson, R-Fla., was the only Republican to vote not to send the resolution to committee.

While this strategy on the part of Republicans may have seemed like a clever way to avoid committing on a politically fraught issue, the stark nature of the division in the voting – Republicans against Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus – nevertheless provided, as Roll Call suggested the vote might, the defacto “first opportunity in recent history to get members of Congress to record their stances on Confederate imagery’s place on government property.”

With this vote, Missouri’s Republican House delegation made it clear that they, along with the rest of their GOP tribe, just want the whole issue to go away. On the one hand, it seems that the Confederate Flag is losing whatever respectability it ever had and to defend it might invite public shaming. On the other, to repudiate it openly would be to offend many of the diehards who whole-heartedly support the real meaning of the flag – and I don’t mean the mint julep that also figures in the so-called “Southern heritage” that defenders of the flag blather on about. These are the folks, after all, who make up the hardcore Republican base. Nothing like getting bitten on the backside by your own hitherto reliable Southern strategy.

This impression is backed up by the deep silence to date from the Republican Missouri delegation on the question of the Confederate flag. Visit our GOPers Web pages. You’ll find no mention of the vote, no mention of the flag controversy. Google their names in conjunction with confederate flag. Nada.

Maybe its early yet, but I’m willing to bet that the Missouri GOP reps won’t say a thing unless some interviewer puts them on the spot – and then we’ll hear about “states rights” – Mississippi gets to decide about its flag, not Congress, right? – or more of the specious drivel about the flag meaning different things to different people, and we must respect all points of view, correct? And then, of course, there’s always history. Like history’s going to go away if we don’t enshrine its bad actors (and actions) in our public places. Like it isn’t especially important that we call out those who seek to whitewash those bad actors.

The flag’s meaning has always been clear. And it’s always been shameful. It’s about the 12.5 million Africans kidnapped out of Africa and sent to the United States (minus the nearly 2 million who died or were murdered en route). It’s about their descendants born into forced servitude. It’s about an entire economy that depended on this horror to survive and the fat-cat perpetrators of that system who started a treasonous, deadly war to preserve a way of life that depended on economic hegemony over an entire race. Lest you doubt:

In Germany, the censorship of Nazi symbols is still a matter of debate — with many wrestling over the dual necessity of preserving liberal freedoms while also recognizing the evils of the Third Reich. Far-right and even neo-Nazi groups exist and organize in the country, but raising the Nazi swastika is a red line that no one can cross.

Instead, at times, some European fringe groups have come up with another symbol to represent their hateful creed: the Confederate flag.

Sooner or later, our Missouri Republicans will have to take a stand. Will it be with the white backlash inspired by the election of the first black president? Or will they recognize the backlash inspired by the excesses of racists emboldened by their very own recent rhetoric? It’s a no-win situation; in the words of the song:

Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash

Just what do you think I got to lose

I`m gonna leave you

With the backlash blues

You`re the one will have the blues

Not me, just wait and see

         From Blacklash Blues (Nina Simone)

No one can say my woman in congress, Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2), isn’t attentive to her constituents. She sends out a regular email newsletter, Ann’s Weekly Roundup, for those who care enough to sign up. This week Rep. Wagner was at pains to disabuse us of any suspicion that she and her GOP colleagues in the House have anything to do with that “do-nothing” congress we’ve heard about:

The American people want solutions.  I have defined myself through my own actions as someone who gets the job done.  Since being sworn-in to be your representative – I have passed four bills, in bipartisan fashion, out of the House of Representatives, which is a major accomplishment.

There is a lot of talk about this do-nothing Congress, but that catch phrase doesn’t ring true with my solutions.  To learn more about my bills, and the 350 other pieces of legislation that are stuck in Senator Harry Reid’s do-nothing senate, please click here.

Let’s take Rep. Wagner’s legislative achievements first. Out of the ten bills she introduced during 2013-14, her most prominent achievements have been efforts to rename post offices, four of them to be exact, in her district. Then there’s the Webster University Centennial commemoration. Of course, all congressmen and women have to make these symbolic gestures to the folks back home and spending time on such trivial pursuits is a universal part of political life. Nobody whould ever hold them against Wagner as long as she manages to effectively represent our interests otherwise.

It’s this last point that makes it so dispiriting when one takes a close look at the “solutions” Rep. Wagner thinks the American people want when she goes about getting the “job done.” Notice she doesn’t tell us in her newsletter just what jobs it was she personally took on. Best I can tell, the lions share of her serious work in congress is shilling for financial and other big corporate interests.

Consider three of the remaining bills Wagner introduced. As we noted in an earlier post, HR 2374 is a shameless effort to return financial regulation to the pre-2008 days that resulted in the Bush recession; it aspired to weaken Dodd-Frank “in such a way that it curtails the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Labor (DOL) to make rules that protect investors.” Her HR1626 is aimed at reducing financial transparency requirements, seeking to amend “the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to prohibit the Securities and Exchange Commission from requiring the disclosure by an issuer of any political expenditure.” Then there’s HR5300 which would weaken the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate coal-fired electricity generation.

On one hand, you could conclude that these kinds of corporate favors  masquerading as responsible lawmaking make “do-nothing” seem kind of nice in comparison. On the other hand, though, since Wagner has known from the get go that these bills would never make it alive out of the Senate, they smack of “do-nothing” in the waste of time sense of the word. If she really wanted to get a worthwhile “job done,” instead of pandering to the moneyed interests she tries so hard to represent, she might have gotten her hands dirty and worked on some of the urgent problems the nation faces, helping craft the knd of compromise that might have had a chance of success. She could have used her leadership position to bring some of the crazies around to a more reasonable frame of mind rather than capitulating totally to the GOP looney-tunes wing, which, when one reviews Wagner’s votes and public statements, seems to be the course she chose.  From the costly (to tax-payers) government shut-down to the Ryan Budget, Ann was there, doing her part.

Almost all the House bills that Wagner alludes to when she talks about “350 other pieces of legislation that are stuck in Senator Harry Reid’s do-nothing senate,” represent just this type of time-wasting posturing. If you click on the link that Wagner provided, you’ll see efforts to repeal Obamacare, to weaken Obamacare, to destroy governmental regulatory power, and numerous other flagrant big business giveaways. There’s also HCR 96, Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity Budget, that attempts to privatize and weaken Social Security and Medicare. Bet Wagner et al. are really proud of that – and I’m not being sarcastic.

After looking at this list of stalled GOP legislation, I can only thank God for Harry Reid. I also think it demonstrates that the “do-nothing” label belongs squarely on the shoulders of the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives, which now includes Rep. Wagner herself. Only fools and charlatans would pretend that any of these bills were realistic efforts to govern in a divided Washington. They serve only to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Wagner and her GOP pals have done little or nothing during their time in Washington besides pander to a base that has the sanest GOPers panicked and the craziest all adrenalized and raring to go. Wagner needs to wake up and realize that it’s a little late to try to escape the taint she’s acquired by her enthusiastic participation in the obstructionism and pandering that has characteried the GOP-dominated House.  

Todd Akinon is either completely ignorant or a bald-faced liar (although I wouldn’t rule out both being the case.) Here he is on the floor of the House:

For those of you too impatient to load the video, or would rather avoid seeing Akin speak at all costs:

I rise to call attention to a tragedy of our own making.

In May of this year, a U.S. soldier, Alex Jimenez, along with several of his friends, were captured by al Qaeda. As our intelligence officers wanted to tap into wires to try to find his whereabouts, they were hobbled and had to wait ten hours for lawyers to get through the FISA court, to allow them to get the critical information they needed. That information lost, this soldier and his compatriots have never been found, although the bodies of one or two have been found.

You won’t be surprised to find out that it’s complete BS. Think Progress debunked the story yesterday; the delay was caused by the Bush Administration’s own bungling interagency process and a missing Alberto Gonzales. The FISA court had nothing to do with it, which makes sense. The FISA law actually empowers the government to wiretap in advance of getting a warrant (up to 72 hours), so how could the court delay the wiretap in the first place?

So have you called your representative yet to make sure that individual warrants are preserved?