It’s a sad day when Congress has to pass legislation urging the president of the United States to speak out against racist hate groups, but that’s where we are, ’Merica.
On Tuesday, Congress overwhelmingly approved legislation demanding more “forceful denunciation of racist extremism from the president,” the Washington Post reports.
“The first thing it’s going to do is give some real comfort for these families,” Sen. Tim Kaine—who introduced the Senate version of the resolution, along with fellow Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark R. Warner—told the Post. Kaine was referring to the deaths of Heather Heyer and two Virginia State Police troopers who died in a helicopter crash while patrolling the Charlottesville, Va., area during the Unite the Right rally Aug. 12.
“No. 2, I think it’s great for [Democrats and Republicans] to be able to make a moral call that white supremacy’s not acceptable, and I want the president to have to sign it,” Kaine said. “We wouldn’t have had to add in that point had he not demonstrated this moral equivocation at the time, but I think it would be a really good thing.”
President Donald Trump took heat from both sides of the aisle for refusing to condemn the terrorist actions of white nationalists at the rally. Following the attacks, which left Heyer dead after a car plowed into a group of nonviolent protesters, Trump noted that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the march.
Here’s how the Post describes the legislation:
The resolution calls on Trump to “speak out against hate groups that espouse racism, extremism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and White supremacy” and also “use all resources available to the President and the President’s Cabinet to address the growing prevalence of those hate groups in the United States.”
It also calls on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “investigate thoroughly all acts of violence, intimidation, and domestic terrorism by White supremacists, White nationalists, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and associated groups” and to “improve the reporting of hate crimes” to the FBI.
Now we can all wait to see how long it takes Trump to hide the legislation on his desk so that he has trouble finding it and therefore can’t sign it. You know that he hates that Congress is continually outplaying him and forcing his hand into signing things he doesn’t want to sign, but the measure of this Republican president is that the Republican-led Congress lightweight-hates his ass, too.
Read more at the Washington Post.