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Thomas Farr's Failure To Disenfranchise One Additional Black Man Sinks Nomination

The Republicans needed ONE black man in America to go along with their racist plans, and couldn't get him.

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(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

How racist do you have to be to lose Tim Scott? And if you can’t get Tim Scott, how are you going to reliably appeal to any African-American who has achieved an education level beyond Diamond and Silk?

Those should be the questions Republican party leaders are asking themselves this morning after Tim Scott scuttled another Republican judicial nominee because of the nominee’s documented history of bigotry.

Tim Scott is no hero. Yes, he voted against Ryan Bounds and now Thomas Farr. But he’s also voted for Brett Kavanaugh and literally every other judicial nominee that Trump has put forward. I don’t know that Bounds and Farr were materially more racist than any number of other judges Trump has put forward, but I do know that Scott doesn’t particularly mind voting to confirm racist judges. What he seems to mind is when that racism has been documented. He minds when the Republicans are so brazen that they shove the racism of their judicial nominees in his face and dare him to say something.

Tim Scott’s problem is a fairly normal pathology among black Republicans: they’re fine with racism and bigotry unless the racism and bigotry is happening to them. Studies have long shown that a lack of empathy is a defining feature of the conservative psychology. In black Republicans that lack of empathy frustratingly metastasizes into the victim blaming of other African-Americans who are hobbled by racism black Republican believe they themselves have overcome. It’s only when racism is deployed against the black Republican, personally, and costs them something, that they get super pissed about it.

Yes, white people, I’ve just explained Mia Love to you. Or Justice “Hi-tech lynching.” Love and Clarence Thomas are plenty pissed about racism when it gets in their way. When it happens to somebody else, they won’t lift a finger to help.

There will always be black Republicans because there will always be blacks who are happy to support the policies of oppression as long as they don’t feel personally oppressed. Thankfully, these callous people account for only a small minority of American blacks. Most African-Americans, and especially most successful African-Americans, keenly feel the responsibility to either lift our brothers and sisters up or knock down the barriers holding others back. Most African-Americans see their rational self-interest in fighting oppression even if they’re not the ones directly experiencing it, that particular day. And at the very least, most African-Americans do not want to contribute to oppression of others, even when they feel sufficiently insulated from that oppression.

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Which brings me back to the nomination of Thomas Farr and the nearly unanimous support he received from Republican party. One of the most damaging lessons of Donald Trump’s success is that it proves something that Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich and any number of Republicans have long believed about this country: you don’t need non-whites in your party. If you are aggressive with gerrymandering and voter suppression, if you allow the Electoral College to do its political apartheid-level work, then you can literally run this country over the objection of the non-whites living in it. There will always be some non-whites who go along with you anyway (see above), and there are enough white people who will allow you to enact whites-only policies if they are sufficiently motivated.

A Republican party that had any desire to appeal to non-white voters would not have nominated Thomas Farr — who is a Jesse Helms acolyte that has spent his career trying to uphold Jim Crow levels of voter suppression. THAT’D BE A DEAL BREAKER for a national party that believed it was living in a pluralistic society. Even if a racist cabal was able to push such a nomination to the forefront, party officials uncomfortable with open bigotry would crush such a nomination, should such non-racist officials exist in your party.

Nominating Thomas Farr was an insult to every black person in this country. Tim Scott, a man who would like nothing more than to sit in his tree house and pull the ladder up behind him, has essentially told the Republican party that he was personally insulted by Farr’s nomination. A rational Republican party might use this moment to reflect on what it has become. Republicans who have sold their very souls for judicial nominations might reflect on how their alleged love for the Constitution has led them to promoting straight bigots to the bench. There is no earthly reason to nominate judges who can’t pass Tim freaking Scott’s test of racial tolerance. They could probably fire a T-shirt cannon at the next Duke/UNC game and hit a white guy who will rule like Farr 99 percent of the time without showing up to the Eastern District of North Carolina in Roger Taney cosplay.

The Republicans are nominating people like Farr to be insulting to African-Americans. The insult is the point. They’re saying “we don’t want you, we don’t need you, and we certainly don’t give a damn about what you think.” They were so excited to nominate this guy that they forgot that they actually needed literally ONE black man’s approval. They needed ONE black man in the entire country, and they couldn’t even get him. It should be a wake-up call that their entire party is now basically at war against the rights of non-whites. A WAR THEY’VE LOST BEFORE.

Instead… their lesson will be: “Whatever, let’s re-nominate Farr in the new Congress, when we have 53 Republicans Senators. Then, we REALLY don’t need to worry about black people monkeying up our plans.”

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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