A key part of the Republican strategy to hold the governor’s office and the state house in Texas is to keep African-American and Hispanic turnout at manageable levels. For example, Republicans think that the fact that Barack Obama is not on the ballot in HD 133 will help them defeat Kristi Thibaut. But it’s not just hope that gets voters to the polls. It’s also anger. Hispanic turnout and performance nationwide didn’t increase in 2006 because Latinos were excited about the Democrats on the ballot. Instead, they were mad the about nasty immigration debate and the way Republicans were making United States citizens of Hispanic descent feel like something less than real Americans.

By appealing to the tea baggers he needs to win his primary, Governor Rick Perry (helped out by Attorney General Greg Abbott) may find himself incurring the wrath of African-American and Hispanic voters alike. Back in April, Perry hinted at secession and endorsed a non-binding resolution in support of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment. Cowed neither by the law nor the fact that Texas has more uninsureds than any other state, Abbott jumped on board — ostensibly to block health care reform but really to score points with the extreme elements of the party.

Problem is, the 10th Amendment is more than just the refuge of today’s tea baggers. Throughout our country’s history, it has also been the preferred constitutional strategy of those who had no interest in letting non-whites sit at the table. In his book, The Tenth Amendment and State Sovereignty, University of Arkansas Law Professor Mark Killenbeck writes:

Alone of the 10 amendments that, by some reckonings, the Bill of Rights comprises, the Tenth Amendment has a sordid past. In the mid-nineteenth century, it served to shield the institution of slavery, and on the eve of secession Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi rested his defense of the rights of slave states on the Tenth Amendment. When, in the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress sought to safeguard the liberties of the freedmen, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as “repugnant to the Tenth Amendment.” By these holdings, as Jesse Choper has pointed out, the Court “largely thwarted the political branches’ efforts to insure racial freedom and to advance the civil liberties of the politically underprivileged. These causes, as a consequence, were blocked for nearly seventy-five years.”

In more recent times, the Tenth Amendment became the mainstay of racists seeking to preserve Jim Crow. A Texas Democrat charged that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World War II edict on fair employment practice violated the Tenth Amendment, and the Mississippi governor, Fielding Wright, who was Strom Thurmond’s running mate on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948 grounded his opposition to Harry Truman’s civil rights program on the Tenth Amendment. In 1960, the president of the Southern States Industrial Council, calling attention to “its opposition to the encroachment of the Federal Government into the area of authority reserved to the States by the Tenth Amendment,” single out the attempt “now being made to enact a so-called ‘Civil Rights’ bill” as “the culminating effort to denude the States of all power.” During the mobilization of Freedom Summer in 1964, southern white students, led by six Delta State College undergraduates, formed the Association of Tenth Amendment Conservatives to defend “the time-honored and history-proven custom” of racial segregation against the “impending invasion” of Mississippi by northern college students. In like manner a year later, Congressman John Bell Williams of Mississippi, a white supremacist firebrand, told a Natchez constituent that he favored legislation “reaffirming the limitation of powers imposed on the federal government by the Tenth Amendment.”

With the immigration debate, Republicans counted on Hispanics not holding their rhetoric against them. That Obama got two-thirds of the Hispanic vote shows how well that worked. In Texas, Republicans are betting that the history of the Tenth Amendment doesn’t get held against them. Given that Texas recently became a majority-minority state, that may not be a very good bet.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Blog, Election 2010, Latino Vote, Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.