A House GOP Opportunity: A Resolution Calling on Biden, Democrats to Apologize for Dem

Well.

Democrats and the media have made much about former President Donald Trump unknowingly hosting a white supremacist and anti-Semite at a Mar-a-Lago dinner. The guy was brought along as an unannounced guest of Ye (as Kanye West now calls himself).

The former president issued this statement:

This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about.

The Biden White House issued a statement on the incident that said this:

Bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in America – including at Mar-a-Lago.

Agreed. Without a doubt, Trump, who had no idea who Ye’s unannounced guest was — as the guest himself admits — agrees as well. And, for the record, the notion that Donald Trump, who negotiated the Abraham Accords and has a Jewish daughter and son-in-law, is anti-Semitic is insultingly laughable.

Also, for the record, as the Nation noted, Biden proudly hung with white supremacists. The headline:

When Joe Biden Collaborated With Segregationists

The candidate’s years as an anti-busing crusader cannot be forgotten—or readily forgiven.

If anyone should be looking himself in the mirror about his ties to white supremacists, it should be Joe Biden — not Donald Trump.

But if the Biden White House really believes what it said in that statement about there being no place in America for white supremacy, then surely it would agree that slavery was the personification of white supremacy, bigotry, and hate.

Which is why the House GOP and presumed Speaker-to-be Kevin McCarthy have a golden opportunity to right a 157-year-old decidedly bigoted, hateful, and racist wrong — by the Democratic Party.

What is that opportunity?

It’s time for a House resolution calling on President Joe Biden to officially apologize for his party’s once very seriously official and repeated support of slavery from 1840 to 1860.

In 2008, as Democrats prepared to nominate then-Sen. Barack Obama for president, I noted right here in this space (and it was also picked up and run in the Wall Street Journal) that the website of the Democratic National Committee had gone about the business of rewriting the history of the Democratic Party by simply whitewashing it. I began by noting this:

As Democrats prepare to nominate Senator Barack Obama to be the first black president, the Democratic National Committee and its chairman Howard Dean have whitewashed the party’s horrific and lengthy record of racism. The omission is in the section of the DNC website that describes the party’s history. The missing history raises the obvious question of whether the Democrats, unable or simply unwilling to put their party on record as taking direct responsibility for one of the worst racial crimes of the ages…

That would be slavery.

I went on:

The DNC website section labeled “Party History,” linked here, is in fact scrubbed clean of the not-so-little dirty secret that fueled Democrats’ political successes for over a century and a half and made American life a hell on earth for black Americans. Literally, the DNC official history, which begins with the creation of the party in 1800, gets to the creation of the DNC itself in 1848 and then…poof!…the next sentence says: “As the 19th Century came to a close, the American electorate changed more and more rapidly.”

A full 52 years of Democrat Party history had been erased. Why? Because of what the party supported officially and repeatedly in that time period: slavery. And beyond that — segregation. Both are the very embodiment of white supremacy.

I had the list of what Democrats refused to acknowledge in their air-brushed party history. It included these:

• There is no reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery. There were 6 from 1840-1860.

• There is no reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms that either supported segregation outright or were silent on the subject. There were 20, from 1868-1948.

• There is no reference to “Jim Crow” as in “Jim Crow laws,” nor is there reference to the role Democrats played in creating them. These were the post-Civil War laws passed enthusiastically by Democrats in that pesky 52-year part of the DNC’s missing years. These laws segregated public schools, public transportation, restaurants, rest rooms and public places in general (everything from water coolers to beaches). The reason Civil Rights heroine Rosa Parks became famous is that she sat in the front of a “whites only” bus, the “whites only” designation the direct result of Democrats….

• There is no reference to the fact Democrats opposed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth banned slavery. The Fourteenth effectively overturned the infamous 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision (made by Democrat pro-slavery Supreme Court justices) by guaranteeing due process and equal protection to former slaves. The Fifteenth gave black Americans the right to vote.

Full stop.

There’s more along these lines in the party’s actual history — opposition to civil rights laws passed in the 1860s and 1870s by Republicans, on-the-record support for the Ku Klux Klan, and using the Klan as, in the words of historians, the party’s “terrorist arm” and “military force.” Then there was the segregation of the federal government by Democrat “progressive” President Woodrow Wilson.

And so on goes this shameful, disgraceful list of support for white supremacy.

But the focus of a House resolution demanding a formal apology should stay on the original evil here — slavery. Evil it most assuredly was. Yet six different times from 1840 to 1860, the Democratic Party put itself officially on record in its quadrennial platforms as supporting slavery. Talk about white supremacy!

And here’s the kicker: To this moment, the Democratic Party has never gone on record with an official apology to black Americans for supporting the enslavement of their ancestors.

Never. Not once. Isn’t it about time?

If the Biden White House and Trump critics are genuinely concerned about an accidental dinner guest at Mar-a-Lago — to reemphasize, a guest the former president did not invite or even know was going to show up — then isn’t it more than past time for an official party apology from today’s titular leader of the Democratic Party? An apology for the repeated, decidedly official support for slavery by the Democratic Party that, in fact, had a serious impact on actual public policy? Something that has not been done in the 157 years since slavery was abolished — and abolished over the objections of Democrats in Congress?

Thus, the need for a simple Republican House resolution calling on the Democratic Party leader of today, President Biden, to apologize on behalf of his party. An apology for unarguably the most horrendous party-supported evil in American history.

That apology would be coming 157 years late, but better late than never. And it should pass unanimously, with Biden’s support — and that of every single House Democrat.

Right?

Right?