I used to be something of a fan of Tavis Smiley’s. I thought of him as a smart guy who I agreed with sometimes, disagreed with sometimes, but always made sense.
That assessment, sad to say, is further and further from what he is now.
Case in point: the following exchange between Mr. Smiley and Andrew Sullivan (who usually agrees with him), from Smiley’s Tuesday show on PBS – which I pulled from Brad Wilmouth’s article at newsbusters.org:
TAVIS SMILEY: It was, to be sure, a violation of democratic norms, but it was more than that. To me, it was a trampling on the Constitution by the Republican party who did not give Mr. Garland a hearing. They can vote him up or they can vote him down, Barack Obama didn’t do it because he had nothing to do. He was obligated to put forth that nomination, and they were obligated to take it up, I believe, and vote up or down. So it wasn’t just a violation or an abrogation of norms, it was a trampling on one of our most precious documents.
ANDREW SULLIVAN, NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Well, I think if you were to parse the document, it doesn’t say they must.
SMILEY: Sure.
SULLIVAN: It says he may nominate, and you don’t have to have nine people on the court.
SMILEY: That’s true.
SULLIVAN: So I don’t think they violated the letter of the Constitution, but they violated the spirit. And the spirit matters because that’s what gives it life. And if it’s just a dead letter, it’s just a dead letter. And I find that incredibly depressing, and I have to say that the violation was really, to my mind, disrespect to the President of the United States, contempt for the President of the United States, which they had for eight years.
SMILEY: No doubt about that. I raised this issue, you know, a year ago when this happened, and some people got it and some people maligned me for it. But what happens next? We end up reconsidering, you know, people being slaves again? We end up reconsidering the right for women to vote? We could, I mean, my point is, you can parse that thing 18 different ways. So if we’re going to — if the conversation is going to be, “well, they didn’t violate the letter of the Constitution, but” — you take my point?
SULLIVAN: I do.
Huh??????
To be against Republicans’ decision not to bring Judge Garland up for a vote? No problem at all from me. I agree with them now, agreed then, and wrote as much as much at the time (here is just one example).
But to compare Republicans’ actions to deny a lame-duck President’s supreme Court pick – which were fully within the constitution, and, in any event, had been duplicated by Democrats over the years – to re-instituting slavery and subjugating women?
That, folks, is off the deep end. WAY off the deep end…
…which, I’m truly sorry to say, is where Tavis Smiley is more and more likely to be.
Too bad.
