The great John Lewis died last week. A man who was beaten by police for the crime of championing voting rights. A man who rose to Congress and into history for his relentless battle to enable all to vote. One of America’s giants.
The great John Lewis died last week. US Senator Chris Coons of Delaware had this to say upon his passing:
Coons said he had a sleepless night Friday and was “struggling” with losing Lewis Saturday.
“I thought I would get to see him and speak to him again,” Coons said during a phone conversation with The News Journal Saturday afternoon.
“He’s the closest thing to a living saint that I’ve ever met.
“What made him special is he didn’t just watch history pass by. He made history. He changed the arc of our country.”
Coons went on and on:
“John was clear-eyed,” Coons said. “He saw how wrong and how racist and how unequal America was and is and it made him mad every day. But he had the kind of heart that could also believe in the possibility of progress when so many others accepted that that’s the way things are.
Coons has a lot of distasteful traits. One of his most distasteful being the way he gives himself the rub by associating himself with great people like John Lewis.
OK, folks, time to reveal the brazen hypocrisy. The Chris Coons crying crocodile tears over arguably the greatest voting rights advocate we’ve had is the exact same Chris Coons who voted against Obama’s superb nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division. Why did he vote against this nominee? Because cops of the same ilk of those who beat up John Lewis at the Edmund Pettis Bridge confronted Coons, and Coons bought their argument:
U.S. Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware joined six other fellow Democrats on Wednesday in blocking President Barack Obama’s choice to oversee the Justice Department’s Civil Rights office.
Coons said he voted against Debo Adegbile’s nomination moving forward because of law enforcement objections to his role in the defense of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
“There is no question that Mr. Adegbile has had a significant and broad career as a leading civil rights advocate, and would be an asset to the Justice Department,” Coons said in a statement. “But at a time when the Civil Rights Division urgently needs better relations with the law enforcement community, I was troubled by the idea of voting for an Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights who would face such visceral opposition from law enforcement on his first day on the job.”
Chris Coons gave cops veto power over who should head up Civil Rights Enforcement in America and who should lead the fight for voting rights. Because Maureen Faulkner would be sad, and because racist cops wouldn’t countenance it. Oh, and please tell me why the Civil Rights Division ‘urgently need(ed) better relations with the law enforcement community’. Certainly not if law enforcement was part of the problem, which they still are. It’s not the role of the Civil Rights division to keep the police unions happy.
His vote was a ‘fuck you’ to the great John Lewis and to disenfranchised minorities all over the country. All of Coons’ rhapsodic nostalgia for his alleged schoolboy journeys on behalf of civil rights (his ‘Bearded Marxist’ days?) cannot hide the fact that he is a bullshit artist who, when John Lewis was depending on him, sputtered “B-b-but Mumia Abu Jamal” and abandoned Lewis because a buncha cops said so.
Any Democratic voter who believes that voter suppression must end needs to vote for someone who not only shares that belief, but has demonstrated that she will fight for those rights. That person is not Chris Coons. He’s proven it. That person is Jess Scarane.