President Donald Trump has proposed a deal on immigration to Congress that will include offering a path to citizenship (amnesty) for almost two million “Dreamers,” individuals who came to America illegally while children. In exchange, he is asking for $25 billion to build a border wall with Mexico, and an end to chain migration and the diversity lottery program.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), shown with President Trump, dismissed Trump’s proposal by playing the race card on Friday, saying it was just part of the president’s “campaign to make America white again.”
In a statement, Pelosi said, “The administration’s anti-immigrant framework is an act of staggering cowardice which attempts to hold the Dreamers hostage to a hateful anti-immigrant scheme. The 50 percent cut to legal immigration in the framework and the recent announcements to end Temporary Protected Status for Central Americans and Haitians are both part of the same cruel agenda,” adding that it was part of Trump’s “unmistakable campaign to make America white again.”
Pelosi vowed, “The Dreamers will not be ransomed for a hateful agenda that betrays our sacred American values.”
That particularly harsh rhetoric was even rejected by a fellow Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. “We don’t need that type of rhetoric on either side, from Nancy, Paul Ryan or anybody else,” Manchin told CNN’s State of the Union program. Manchin’s gratuitously throwing Speaker Ryan into the comment was probably intended to provide cover from a Democratic backlash, rather than responding to anything that Ryan had said, because Ryan has not made any comments similar to Pelosi’s.
But Pelosi has made similar remarks in the past, about other Republicans, in an attempt to tar them as racist. For example, she even said 2012 Republican hopeful Mitt Romney not only was making appeals to “white voters,” he was also something of a sexist.
When Romney was booed at the 2012 NAACP convention, Pelosi accused Romney of wanting to get booed because it would help him “curry favor with white voters.”
Then, Pelosi later told the Democratic National Convention, “The hard-won rights of women are on the ballot,” with the prospect of a Romney presidency. She also told Jon Stewart of The Daily Show that women had a lot to “lose,” should Romney win the election.
Pelosi is not alone among Democrats in whipping out the race card against Republicans. It is an old technique, dating back to the 1960s. In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair. Democrat critics noted that he was only seven miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town associated with infamous race murders in 1964 and accused Reagan of attempting to send coded messages to white voters.
In an effort to defeat then-Texas Governor George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential race, the NAACP even ran an ad tying Bush to the murder of James Byrd, a black man, all because Bush opposed “hate crimes” legislation in the Lone Star State. It does not seem to matter whether a Republican is Trump, Reagan, Bush, or Romney, the race card is always a convenient weapon of choice in the Democratic Party arsenal.
But in 2010, then-Speaker of the House Pelosi eulogized Senator Robert C. Byrd, a fellow Democrat, at his funeral. While neither Trump, nor Reagan, Romney, or Bush had ever been a member of the racist Ku Klux Klan, Byrd had not only been a member, but was a “Kleagle,” or recruiter for the organization. Pelosi was effusive in her praise of Byrd, saying, “Throughout his historic career in the House and Senate, he never stopped working to improve the lives of the people of West Virginia. While some simply bore witness to history, Senator Byrd shaped it and strove to build a brighter future for us all.”
Well, maybe not all.
Not only did Byrd filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (and not because he was philosophically opposed to federal government involvement in such activities because it was unconstitutional), he earlier opposed the effort of President Harry Truman to desegregate the Armed Forces. Writing to Senator Theodore Bilbo (D-Miss.) in December 1944, when there was talk of integrating the military, Byrd said, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
Pelosi was joined in praising Byrd by many other Democrats, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said, “From my first day in the Senate, I sought out his guidance, and he was always generous with this time and his wisdom.”
Not to be outdone, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, gushed praise upon Byrd, even defending Byrd’s Klan membership, calling him a “good person.” He dismissed Byrd’s time as an officer in the Klan as a “fleeting association,” noting that Byrd was just “trying to get elected.”
This gives us some insight into the mindset of Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi — sometimes you just do things “to get elected” (such as join the KKK). Perhaps that explains the demagogic remark by Pelosi that Trump is trying to “make America white again.” She doesn’t really mean it, but she is just saying it to win political points.
Sometimes to win, one has to falsely accuse a political opponent of racism, while other times, to “get elected,” one joins the KKK!
Photo of Nancy Pelosi with Donald Trump: Department of Defense
