The Number Two Republican in the Senate Endorsed a Candidate Who Said Muslims Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Serve in Congress

By Jacob Weindling  |  October 25, 2017 | 4:30pm
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The Number Two Republican in the Senate Endorsed a Candidate Who Said Muslims Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Serve in Congress

John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas and the Senate Majority Whip, just endorsed Roy Moore, a former judge who won the Republican primary over the establishment pick, Luther Strange.

Roy Moore has said, among many other offensive things:

— “Maybe Putin was right” about his opposition to same-sex marriage.

— That America’s lack of faith in God played a role in 9/11.

— “My personal belief is that [Barack Obama] wasn’t” born in America.

— He wrote in 2006 that: “Islamic law is simply incompatible with our law. In 1943, we would never have allowed a member of Congress to take their oath on ‘Mein Kampf,’ or someone in the 1950s to swear allegiance to the ‘Communist Manifesto.’ Congress has the authority and should act to prohibit [Keith] Ellison from taking the congressional oath today!”

This is what I was talking about in my column about Jeff Flake’s retirement and the GOP’s hopelessness.

The entire point of the Republican Party is to gin up racial animosity to vote for politicians who will enact hyper-corporatist policies that would never be able to win an election on their own merits. That’s it. The rest is just details. Richard Nixon debuted the Southern Strategy in the 1960s, coopted the segregationists who swung four states to George Wallace in 1968 into the GOP, and that has been the foundation of the party ever since.

Roy Moore is simply the logical conclusion of where the Republican Party has moved over the last fifty years, and it actually makes perfect sense that one of the staples of the GOP would endorse this moronic bigot.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.

 
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