Matthews: Jim Crow Has Found a New Home in Today’s GOP

On his Thursday “Hardball” broadcast on MSNBC, host Chris Matthews took aim at the Republican Party for its opposition to President Barack Obama and in particular for the letter Senate Republicans signed on to warning the Iranian regime against an agreement on nuclear weapons that didn’t also get the approval of the U.S. Congress.

Transcript as follows:

Let me finish tonight where I started. Someday years from now, people will look back on this presidency and see it in sharper contrast.

They will read how it started with the Republican Senate leader calling for the president’s defeat, declaring that the business of the opposition from the first day was to ensure the new president: (a), accomplishes nothing, and, (b), gets booted from office as quickly as possible. They will read up a U.S. congressman yelling “you lie” during a State of the Union. They will read how the speaker of the House invited without informing the president, a foreign leader, to denigrate his foreign policy before the entire Congress.

And as of this week, they will learn that a new senator from Arkansas got the signatures of 46 other senators on a letter to the hardliners in Iran, urging that they reject the efforts of this president to keep them from building a nuclear weapon.

They will read all this and wonder what was that made this Republican opposition so all out contemptuous of an American president, what it made threat them — made threat him as below respect, below the dignity historically accorded to his office.

They will look at the concerted effort of Republican legislative leaders in three dozen states to make it harder for minorities to vote, even claiming partisan victory when successful in that effort. They will then look at a picture of this president, a picture of this man and perhaps get the idea that the age of Jim Crow managed to find a new habitat in the early 21st century Republican Party.

(h/t Newsbusters)

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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