All right, Republicans, we get it — you want to please your most radically conservative followers next November, so you’ll muddy the memory of a fine and decent Tallahassee judge who stood for racial justice and fairness.
For no apparent reason, GOP House members recently ganged up to stall U.S. Rep. Al Lawson’s proposal to name the federal courthouse in Tallahassee for the late Judge Joseph W. Hatchett.
The only plausible reason is that 186 House Republicans — including 10 from Florida — wanted to reinforce their image as political heirs of the sort of racists the South sent to Washington in a long-gone era.
Ostensibly, they were sore about a decision Hatchett once made regarding prayer in public schools. Uh-huh, sure.
C’mon GOP, we know where you’re coming from. You made your motives clear by repeatedly attacking Obamacare, pretending to believe Donald Trump’s Big Lie, your assault on abortion and sexual privacy, and most recently by trying to frame Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as soft on kiddie porn.
If anyone still wonders how low you’d go, you’re now trying to smear Disney as somehow anti-family.
So we get it. Your midterm game plan counts on loyal mainstream Republicans, the MAGA mob, the conservative independents, and moderate Democrats who’ve given up on Joe Biden. That leaves, still to be wooed, those who liked “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo” until it got so darned cerebral.
But blocking the naming of a courthouse for the first African American on the Florida Supreme Court and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal?
More from Bill Cotterell:
Congress and state legislators name buildings, roads, bridges, battleships, mountains, wilderness tracts and schools in honor of all sorts of citizens, usually after they pass away. It’s a nice gesture but not a big deal — certainly not worth making a spectacle.
The Democrats can act pretty strange, too, and have been known to fight over silly stuff that matters only to their own far-left extremists. But naming a building for a late, respected judge is a new perigee of political pettiness.
The recent House vote was just a procedural move, blocking a two-thirds majority required to advance Lawson’s naming bill. A Georgia congressman rallied the “Nay” votes, citing Hatchett’s decision in the school-prayer case.
Hatchett’s lifetime work for ethics in government and justice in the courts needs no defense from newspaper scribblers but let me cite another case that illustrates his sense of justice. On the federal appellate court in Atlanta, Hatchett dissented in a case I covered, Georgia’s first execution of modern times.
A woman in Miami had two suitors who were probably not real bright. She wanted her ex-husband’s life insurance, so she got the men to go to Macon, Ga., and kill him. Long story short, the triggerman and the woman were sentenced to death and the other guy got out in eight or 10 years.
Then the woman won a new trial and wound up with a life sentence. The other man died in Georgia’s electric chair.
How can that be justice, Hatchett asked in his dissent. Three defendants, equally culpable, and three different results. As a layman, I admired his argument that — whatever you think of capital punishment — it ought to apply evenly.
Partisan elected politicians shouldn’t judge judges, who have to make rulings on statues and legal precedent, not what voters want. It’s not known how Hatchett might have felt, personally, about the school prayer case or any of the hundreds of other decisions he rendered on the state and federal courts, but no one ever accused him of not ethically following the law.
Having failed to get the super-majority this time, Lawson can still get the courthouse named for Hatchett the long way — maybe after the elections, when the Republicans no longer need to pander so pointlessly to the lunatic fringe of their party.
Lawson introduced another bill last week, directing the treasury to strike a commemorative coin honoring James Weldon Johnson, the Jacksonville native who wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” known as the Black National Anthem. The proposal honors Johnson’s contributions to the civil rights movement, Harlem renaissance, literature, politics and law.
Anybody want to speculate what shocking revelations the Republicans will dig up to justify votes against minting a commemorative coin? Never doubt their ability to smear anybody.
As the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel said in an editorial about naming courthouse last week, “When it seemed that Republicans in Congress couldn’t stoop any lower, they did.”
Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column, He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com
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