Good and Bad from Republicans | Center for Equal Opportunity

“We should not have a multicultural society.” So says Jeb Bush, and of course he’s right. Kudos to him for saying so, and let’s hope the other candidates quickly agree.

We don’t all have to eat the same foods, and we should be a welcoming nation, but there is some common glue needed to keep our multiracial, multiethnic society together. Here’s my top-ten list of what we should expect from those who want to become Americans (and those who are already Americans, for that matter). The list was first published in a National Review Online column, and it is fleshed out here in this congressional testimony.

1. Don’t disparage anyone else’s race or ethnicity.
2. Respect women.
3. Learn to speak English.
4. Be polite.
5. Don’t break the law.
6. Don’t have children out of wedlock.
7. Don’t demand anything because of your race or ethnicity.
8. Don’t view working and studying hard as “acting white.”
9. Don’t hold historical grudges.
10. Be proud of being an American.

Likewise, I want to share with you an excellent post on an exchange of letters between former President Eisenhower and then-gubernatorial-candidate Ronald Reagan on the subject of hyphenated Americans and identity politics. The post concludes:
It would be wonderful to hear either a Republican presidential candidate at the Reagan Library [site of the most recent debate], or a Democratic presidential candidate at another event, present the arguments of Eisenhower and Reagan, or paraphrase the language of George Washington in his Farewell Address when he told his fellow countrymen that — before any other political identity — they should consider themselves first and foremost as Americans.

In this regard, Ben Carson has some intelligent things to say about affirmative action. Donald Trump, not so much (as noted earlier in a previous email). Here, by the way, is an earlier discussion of what candidates ought to say when this subject comes up. The bottom line, of course, is that Americans should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

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Speaking of politicians: The civil-rights Left is very excited that Senator Lisa Murkowski has become the first Republican to support the Voting Rights Advancement Act, the second bill that has been introduced to resurrect Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which was effectively struck down by the Supreme Court two years ago.

When the bill was first being introduced, I noted that it was even more extreme than an earlier bill, which was going nowhere. Indeed, according to the maps in this Nation article when the bill was first proposed, a number of states that weren’t covered under Section 5 before will be covered now — and only one that was covered before that won’t be now. And guess which one state that would be? Well, what do you know, the answer is Senator Murkowski’s home state, Alaska. (The provisions in this particular bill also give Sen. Murkowski a good way to pander to the Native Alaskan population.)

In any event, no new legislation is needed. The Supreme Court struck down only one provision in the Voting Rights Act — which was indeed unconstitutional, and which was never a permanent part of the Act anyway — and there are plenty of other voting-rights laws available to ensure that the right to vote is not violated. What’s more, the bills that have been drafted are bad legislation. For example, they contain much that has nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s decision, and they themselves violate the Constitution by prohibiting practices that are not actually racially discriminatory but only have racially disproportionate effects.

As noted, the bill that Senator Murkowski has endorsed is even more extreme that an earlier bill that was introduced and had gone nowhere. The new bill would not, for example, exempt voter ID, and it would cover more jurisdictions than the earlier bill — indeed, more jurisdictions than the original Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. So we are to believe that there are more racist jurisdictions in 2015 than there were in 1965 — comprising half the country’s population.

It’s hard to believe that the bill’s sponsors expect it to be taken seriously. More likely it is a bone being tossed to the more extreme parts of their base, who thought the earlier bill — though bad in the extreme — was not bad enough. Too bad that Senator Murkowski has signed on to it.

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Speaking of extreme: Ta-Nehisi Coates has another very long essay in The Atlantic, this one titled, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” He doesn’t really dispute that strong family structure is important; he just says that it’s not important enough to counteract all the institutionalized racism that African Americans face (like housing segregation, the focus of his reparations essay).

As for crime, he views any crime-fighting that has a disparate impact on the basis of race as presumptively racist, and he concludes with a strong hint that reparations may therefore be in order (the new essay’s last link is to his earlier long essay on that topic). But there are plenty of non-racist reasons for being against crime, and, Coates’s cherry-picking to the contrary notwithstanding, there is plenty of evidence that those opposing crime have generally done so for those non-racist reasons. Finally, reparations would not be a logical response to any racism in our criminal-justice system, since (1) most African Americans have not been in the criminal-justice system, and (2) most who have been cannot blame racism.

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