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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Thad Cochran should reward Black voters for helping him win GOP primary


Democrat Representative Bennie Thompson

Thompson - "Reward Black Voters"
  • I thought Sean Hannity was going to piss himself on live radio when reports came out that Blacks in Mississippi voted for a Conservative Republican Senator in the primary.  Gee, I thought we wanted African Americans to vote Republican.
  • Thad Cockran is not exactly a flaming liberal.  He has a 79% American Conservative Union rating for 2013.  Compare that to Harry Reid's 16% ACU rating.
  • Maybe Republicans should look on this as an opportunity to grow the party.


Senator Thad Cochran (R., Miss.) needs to reward the black voters who crossed party lines to support him in his runoff against tea party challenger Chris McDaniel by backing some concrete policy initiatives, according the the state’s only member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

“We have historically black colleges in our state who do the best job they can trying to educate our citizens,” Representative Bennie G. Thompson told National Review Online during a Wednesday interview at the Capitol. ”I’d like to see efforts that they receive full funding. I’d like to see the health care of our citizens improved; our children die too young. I’d like to see an increased effort to make sure that the minority unemployment rate inn our state is reduced. So, there are a lot of opportunities for us to start with.”

Thompson said that it wasn’t difficult for Cochran to rally black voters against McDaniel. “I don’t know anybody black who likes the Tea Party. So, if a tea-party person is running against another Republican and you ask a black person, they’re going to support the regular Republican,” he said.

“Their platform is counter to a lot of the beliefs of many African Americans. We think there is a place in government to make the lives of its citizens better; that there is a place in government to make sure that education, health care, and other things are available to all citizens. So, that’s a reasonable expectation of government. But this ‘limited government’ and other things that you hear from a lot of tea-party candidates does not resonate well with the black community.”

Via The National Review.


Congressman John R. Lynch
Republican, Mississippi
Major, United States Army
Served tours in Cuba and the Philippines.
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In the 19th century the GOP stood up for the Civil Rights of African Americans and was rewarded with the vast majority of their votes.  Maybe if there was less Republican bitching and more genuine reaching out then the Democrat lock on the Black vote could be broken.
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 John Roy Lynch (September 10, 1847 – November 2, 1939) was born into slavery, he became free in 1863.  In 1873 he was elected as the first African-American Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives.  During Reconstruction after the American Civil War, he was among the first generation of African Americans elected to the U.S House of Representatives, serving 1874-1877 and again in the 1880s.
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In 1876 the Democratic Party of Mississippi contested Lynch's third-term election; for years, elections in the state were increasingly accompanied by violence and fraud as Democrats worked to regain political power. Since 1874, the Red Shirts, a white paramilitary group active on behalf of the Democratic Party, had worked openly to intimidate and suppress black voting, assassinating blacks and running Republican officers out of town.
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By then Congress was dominated by Democrats, and the Elections Committee ruled against Lynch in this contest. As a result of a national compromise, in 1877 the federal government withdrew its troops from the South, and Reconstruction was considered ended. The Democrats had taken control of the state legislature.
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In 1880 Lynch ran against the Democrat James R. Chalmers, and contested the Democrat's declaration of victory. Lynch fought for a year and was awarded the seat by Congress in 1882. The next election was close, leaving him little time to campaign. Lynch lost re-election in 1882 by 600 votes.
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Lynch served as a member of the Republican National Committee for Mississippi from 1884 to 1889. In 1884, future President Theodore Roosevelt made a moving speech by which he nominated Lynch as Temporary Chairman of the 1884 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Lynch was the first African American to chair the Convention.
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See more John R. Lynch
 

Black Republican Leaders, 1875
Many of the newly enfranchised Southern black men now formed "Black and Tan" clubs, which along with similar organizations like the Union League, helped to institutionally tie these voters to the Republican Party. 

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