Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (shown, D-Texas), who represents the liberal 18th Congressional District in central Houston, took a knee on the House floor on Monday. She claimed she was protesting the president’s calling for the firing of NFL players who refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem. She claimed she was in “solidarity” with them, and called the president’s comments “racist.”
Lee does that. A lot. To Lee, who is black, nearly everything that anyone does is racist, or can be twisted into making it sound racist. Lee has made a fool of herself ever since she was elected to the House in 1994 and immediately joined both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Here’s what the president said that provided Lee with the opportunity. He was speaking at a political rally on Friday: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’”
This was Lee’s response:
There is no basis in the First Amendment that says you cannot kneel on the national anthem or in front of the flag. That is racism. You cannot deny it, you cannot run from it.
I kneel in front of the flag and on this floor. I kneel in honor of the First Amendment. I kneel because the flag is a symbol for freedom. I kneel because I’m going to stand against racism. I kneel because I will stand with these young men, and I’ll stand with our soldiers. And I’ll stand with America, because I kneel.
The First Amendment guarantees Lee the right to express her opinion, but the First Amendment is also part of the Constitution to which Lee has taken the oath to support and defend every year since 1994 when she was first elected to Congress. That means the Lee has spoken this solemn oath 12 times:
I, Sheila Jackson Lee, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Twelve times Lee has taken this oath yet has voted against the Constitution for 24 years, as reflected in her Freedom Index score of 24 out of 100.
Then came Representative John Lewis (D-Ga.), another black radical with an almost identical voting record, who tweeted, “There is nothing wrong with kneeling down to stand up against injustice. It’s protected by the Constitution.” Lewis’ Freedom Index score is 26 out of 100.
An explanation of Representatives Lee’s and Lewis’s opposition to Trump’s comments came from the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, one Representative Cedric Richmond (D-La.). Richmond’s Freedom Index score is even worse than either Lee’s or Lewis’s, at 22 out of 100. Lee is taking a knee, and Lewis is supporting her kneebending, said Richmond, “to protest police officers who kill unarmed African Americans — men and women, adults and children, parents and grandparents — with impunity. They are taking knees to protest a justice system that says that being black is enough reason for a police officer to fear for his or her life.” Since 70 percent of NFL athletes are black, according to the always reliable Huffington Post, then it’s reasonable to assume, as does Richmond, that they, their families, and their friends have “experienced racial profiling by police that leaves too many unarmed African Americans injured or dead.”
The solution is already in hand, and being implemented across the land. As The New American has repeatedly reported, local police departments from Baltimore to New Orleans, from Miami to Cleveland, from Ferguson to Seattle, are being assimilated by the Department of Justice through consent decrees and turned into branches of the federal government.
Photo: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
