Louisiana Voice

Marjorie Taylor-Greene appeared on One America News on Tuesday and accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of using Capitol police as “political pawns” and “sending them into our offices” — referring to a complaint from her colleague Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.). The Capitol Police has rejected Nehls’s claim that a security check of his open office was an illegal investigation, calling it protocol when an unattended office has a door left open.

Greene referenced “Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens that want to come talk to their representatives.”

Pelosi has yet to comment publicly on the incident, but the apparent mix-up of “gazpacho” and “Gestapo” quickly went viral online — sparking memes and reactions shared by politicians and other prominent figures.

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The Washington Post had an interesting op-ed column on Wednesday. Because The Post has a pay wall, some of you will not be able to access it, so I will summarize.

Basically, it says that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was correct to criticize the Repugnantcan National Committee’s (RNC) censure Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyoming) and Adam Kinzinger (Illinois) for participating on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Contradicting the RNC’s description of the investigation as a “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” McConnell called the attack on the Capitol what it was: a “violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.”

Other Repugnantcans have voiced their displeasure with the resolution and RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. One of those who voiced his disgust was McDaniel’s uncle, Sen. Mitt Romney, who called the censure “stupid,” helping to underscore, The Post said, the “intellectual dishonesty, moral blindness, and dangerous anti-democratic sentiments that now define the GOP.”

But The Post went a bit further by posing eight soul-searching questions the Repugnantcan Party should address in the face of its “continued defense of violence to overthrow and election.”

The questions are as follows:

• How can a party go on record as condoning a violent uprising and still pretend to defend the U.S. Constitution?
• How can the party take direction from former president Donald Trump, the instigator of the violent insurrection? How can it continue to support his ambitions to run for president in 2024?
• If the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, was a violent insurrection, as McConnell acknowledged, was the acquittal of Trump in his second impeachment trial unwise?
• If Trump did instigate a violent insurrection, how is he fit to hold office pursuant to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from serving in public office?
• Should Trump be criminally prosecuted for instigating a violent insurrection?
• How can Republicans criticize the Jan. 6 select committee if it is investigating a violent insurrection? Isn’t this a necessary task?
• Do members of Congress who agree with Trump and the RNC that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a display of “legitimate political discourse” forfeit the right to hold public office?
• Should any official who lent aid to the insurrectionists be disqualified under Section 3?

For Louisiana voters, there is an even bigger question looming as we head into the 2022 midterm elections:

Should five of Louisiana’s seven members of Congress be reelected after they voted on Jan. 6 to overturn the 2020 presidential election?

That’s an important question that should not be taken lightly. These five men – four representatives and a senator – turned their backs on the democratic process on which this country was founded. They spurned the very basis on which our country was founded: free and honest elections.

And make no mistake, the 2020 election has been examined and investigated from every conceivable angle and (count ‘em) 64 separate courts have tossed challenges to the election offered up by Trump and Rudy Giuliani. Many of the judges involved in the dismissals were appointed by Trump or other Repugnantcan presidents.

Not only does the Repugnantcan party need to address those eight questions put forward by The Post, but Louisiana voters need to do some deep soul-searching of their own to determine if they really want to send those five back to Washington next fall.

In case you’re wondering who those five are, they are Reps. Garret Graves, Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise and Sen. John “Foghorn Leghorn” Kennedy.

It’s not certain at this point if the Democrats will even offer a challenger to the representatives or if they will have Repugnantcan opponents but Kennedy that consummate embarrassment to this state, has two Democratic opponents.

We at least have a choice in the Senate race and Louisianans should choose carefully. Do we really want someone who would vote to overturn a legitimate election and turn the keys of the nation back over to an egotistical, self-destructive lunatic?

I’d rather drink weedkiller.

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Yesterday’s announcement by Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley that there were no plans for teachers in Louisiana’s public schools to “indoctrinate” students by teaching them about this country’s history of slavery or Jim Crow or the civil rights struggle of the 1960s falls right in line with a LouisianaVoice story of last July 24.

In that story, I quoted State Rep. RAY GAROFALO (R-Chalmette) who said, “There is no reason to make students feel guilty. We should teach the good things about this country.”

To paraphrase the late comic Brother Dave Gardner, “Dear hearts, that ain’t education, that’s propaganda”

I wrote in that July post that Garofalo would forbid the teaching of the Trail of Tears, or that women in this country weren’t allowed to vote until the 20^th century, or that enslaved blacks were considered 3/5 of a person. That last provision, by the way, was embedded in the US Constitution in Article I, Section 2 despite the Declaration of Independence insistence that “all men are created equal.”

That’s the same Constitution, by the way, that Rep. Lauren Boebert seems to think does not EVOLVE.

But back to the issue of what can and cannot be taught in Louisiana’s educational system and how Louisiana ranks in education achievement.

Out of 51 systems – 50 states and the District of Columbia – Louisiana ranks 50^th in quality of education, ahead of only New Mexico, according to a WALLETHUB survey released last July.

WalletHub’s ranking of educated states had up just a nudge at 48^th, ahead of only Mississippi and West Virginia among the 50 states.

Louisiana was 47^th in the percentage of population with a bachelor’s degree (the next three were Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia), and 47^th again in the percentage of graduate or professional degree holders (ahead of Arkansas, West Virginia, and North Dakota). Louisiana ranks 48th for Educational Attainment and 44th for Quality of Education.

The metrics for WalletHub’s rankings included adults 25 and over with a high school diploma; with at least some college; with a bachelor’s degree, and with a graduate or professional degree.

Louisiana has a dropout rate of 21.9 percent despite a per-student expenditure of $11,038. The state’s student to teacher ratio is 14.8:1 And while Massachusetts, the highest-ranked state, has a student to teacher ratio of 13.32:1, which is comparable to Louisiana, that state spends $15,593 per student and has a dropout rate of 11.7, 10 points lower than Louisiana’s.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks Louisiana 48^th overall of the 51 systems, including the District of Columbia. The only states with lower rankings, in order, are South Carolina, Mississippi and New Mexico.

That survey has Louisiana ranked 48^th in academic performance, 47^th in bachelor degree rates and in high school graduation rates.

So, bottom line, it’s fine for Louisiana to wallow at the bottom of the pile in education attainment so long as we don’t tell students about slavery, genocide of Native Americans, the denial of the right to vote for women and blacks, and probably the Holocaust.

Hell, we may as well burn a few books along the way.

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Ever had problems with the IRS? If so, you don’t have to be told how unfair and unreasonable they can be with their assessments and threats of liens and seizures. One person was hit with interest and penalties totaling thousands of dollars when his tax payment was a penny short. The agency is ruthless when it comes to extracting its pound of flesh.

That’s why I wrote It’s All TheIRS. While the central plot and the novel’s main characters are fiction, the stories of IRS abuses that I cite are not. They are very real and many of them destroyed businesses, lives, and families and even led to suicides in some cases.

It’s All TheIRS is the story of a man who gets hit with a wrongful assessment of $600,000 and decides to fight back. Resisting the IRS is not to be undertaken lightly. The average citizen might have a few thousand dollars to combat the bottomless resources of the US Treasury and Justice departments. It’s a stacked deck and that’s the reason why the IRS comes after the typically defenseless middle-class taxpayer as opposed to the corporate behemoths like IBM, Exxon/Mobil or Amazon.

You can order your signed copy by clicking on the DONATE button in the column to the right of this post and paying $25 by credit card or you can send a $25 check to Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727.

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I’ve been on the watch for the pre-filing of bills for the upcoming legislative session that would attempt to make it illegal for teachers in Louisiana’s public schools to teach about this country’s history of slavery or of the genocide of the Native Americans.

Cade Brumley saved legislators the trouble today.

The State Superintendent of Education said there was nothing in his plans for the state’s social studies standards that would “indoctrinate” students on the nation’s radial history.

I can draw one of only two possible conclusions from that: he is either in bed with the radical Repugnantcan Party or he is scared of them and afraid of losing his job.

Either way, it was a cowardly position to take. The Civil War is the darkest chapter of our history and the cause of that war, denials in some quarters notwithstanding, was the issue of slavery.

We can close our eyes to the shameful practice of enslaving other human beings and we can ignore the fact that we at one time we considered enslaved black people as only 3/5 OF A HUMAN but we cannot erase the fact that it happened.

We cannot change the fact that an estimated 5 million to 15 million Native Americans were killed in the name of westward expansion, the so-called Manifest Destiny.

President Andrew Jackson instituted the policy of Indian removal and his successor, Martin Van Buren ordered the roundup and imprisonment of Cherokees in a similar manner in which the Nazis rounded up the Jews in the Warsaw Ghettos a century later. Some 16,000 Cherokee were marched from Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama to Oklahoma. Along the way about 3,000, nearly 20 percent of the total number, died, giving birth to the TRAIL OF TEARS.

Will there be no mention of how Japanese-Americans were rounded up and forced to live in internment camps during WWII?

That won’t be taught because, as they say, the winners write the history books. But it ain’t history, it’s propaganda.

Now since Brumley is so set against the so-called critical race theory concept, public school kids probably won’t learn about the Holocaust, either, though I’d wager the Battle of the Alamo will continue to be taught.

But never mind all that. Like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis says, we don’t want white folks to feel uncomfortable about being white – let’s just make black folks and brown folks uncomfortable about their skin tones. Jesus! DeSantis is hellbent on becoming Donald Trump 2.0 and now our spineless education superintendent is pandering to that same milquetoast mindset.

What have we become in this country, this state? Are we so feeble-minded that we are afraid to expose our foibles? Are we so shallow that we must constantly look over our shoulder to see what Big Brother is thinking of our actions? Why are we so intimidated by the likes of Ted “Cancun” Cruz, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Gym Jordan, Ron Johnson, Donald Trump, DeSantis, et al? Why wo we continue to elect people like John Kennedy, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson, and Clay Higgins?

It’s a damn shame when we cannot face ourselves in the mirror of history.

“I have been clear about this for some time that CRT would not be included in our standards,” Brumley sniffed. “[W]e would be cognizant that nothing in the standards could open the door for any form of indoctrination,”

What the hell is he talking about? Indoctrination? Seriously? This is history, man, and you cannot change history. It happened and ignoring it will not change that.

You want to really piss off African Americans? Pretend they don’t matter, that they were never beaten, whipped, and yes, enslaved.

I’m lily-white, so I don’t presume to understand how they must feel toward us. But I can say with certainty that had my ancestors been held in bondage and considered 3/5 of a human being, I might well harbor some resentment towards the ones whose ancestors enslaved them – especially if today, they ignored that part of history, if they continued to try to take away my right to vote, if they used fire hoses and attack dogs on me when I marched for my rights, if they tried to shut me out of educational opportunities, out of meaningful jobs, out of society itself.

You cannot ignore 12 percent of population. You cannot run them through the LSU football and basketball programs, cheer for them as heroes, and then discard them like yesterday’s news when their eligibility is up.

You have to treat people with some dignity whether you like it or not.

My grandfather drilled into me the conviction that you can take a lot of things from a man, but never take his dignity.

Cade Brumley, with Tuesday’s pronouncement, has thumbed his nose at the dignity of African Americans, Native Americans, and, if his moratorium extends to the Holocaust, Jews.

We should be reminded of that callousness every day because it resides in every member of our congressional delegation but one. It will be a dominant issue in this year’s legislative session, it already permeates the U.S. Congress and if allowed to fester, it will destroy this country from within like a cancer.

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