As Louisiana GOP censures Mitt Romney, David Duke laughs

The Republican State Central Committee, the elected body that controls the internal governance of the state party, essentially said Romney for too long has been mean to poor, defenseless President Trump. The censure resolution blamed Romney for such transgressions as “allowing conservative spoiler candidate Evan McMullin to lease his 2012 campaign e-mail list,” writing an anti-Trump column for the Washington Post, and continuing “to deliver belligerent statements and comments about President Trump while largely ignoring far more egregious conduct and obnoxious rhetoric” by various Democrats.

The horror, the horror.

The resolution made no mention of Romney’s vote to convict Trump in the Senate trial that concluded last week, but resolution sponsor Mike Bayham admits it received “a lot more votes” at the RSCC because Romney broke ranks on impeachment. The resolution passed overwhelmingly by voice vote.

I’ve known Bayham for many years. He’s a good guy. I believe him when he told me he drafted his anti-Romney censure motion in May of 2019 and that the only reason he held it until now was that he was urged to wait, for party unity purposes, until after Louisiana’s race for governor ended in November. Bayham’s distaste for Romney runs deep. As a delegate to the 2012 national convention, Bayham insisted on voting for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum instead of Romney even though Santorum had already withdrawn.

Still, a censure in the political sense is a very formal action almost akin to the “shunning” practiced by various Christian denominations. It is a sanction often discussed but rarely effectuated.

Surely someone in the Louisiana Republican hierarchy knows the party’s own history involving censure. In 1989, after Duke had won a surprise upset in a special election for a state legislative seat, conservative RSCC member Beth Rickey tracked Duke to what amounted to a national neo-Nazi meeting and then caught him selling Nazi-related tracts from his state legislative office. She and fellow committee member Neil Curran very publicly urged the RSCC to censure the Ku Kluxer.

As national news media covered the 1989 meeting, most of the RSCC members balked. They offered a variety of reasons. A few probably supported Duke. Many thought censure would be a slap in the face to the voters who elected him. Plenty feared, in somewhat cowardly fashion, that their own voters would rebel against other Republicans because Duke had publicly renounced his vile racist past and had made himself a spokesman for “mainstream” conservative issues such as lower taxes and welfare reform.

Alas, many RSCC members pounced on and misused a salient point made by my father, Haywood Hillyer III, who at the time was the party’s national committeeman. My father, a lawyer, was a stickler for details and for history. Historically, “censure” usually is not just a statement of strong disapproval but a punishment an organization imposes on one of its own members — and only its own. My father’s interpretation of party rules was that the legislature could censure a legislator, and the RSCC could censure an RSCC member, but the latter couldn’t censure the former.

A dedicated opponent of Duke and an ally and mentor of Rickey’s, my father behind the scenes wanted the motion changed from “censure” to a resolution of condemnation to make sure it was legal — and in hopes that it would get even more votes. Word spread, but the message got garbled. Others on the committee, wanting to avoid the embarrassing debate altogether, seized on my father’s point that the RSCC wasn’t technically “responsible” for Duke but missed his point that condemnation of Duke was morally necessary. They successfully moved to “table” the Curran-Rickey resolution and buried it without further discussion.

(My father later wrote up and secured unanimous passage of a terrifically strong anti-Duke resolution by the party’s eight-person executive committee, but that’s a different story.)

The result of the RSCC imbroglio was a national black eye for the Louisiana Republican Party, one still cited in some national news reports three decades later. In Louisiana, that failure to censure comes up, one way or another, in almost every election cycle.

But my father’s original point, that it makes no sense for one organization to go far afield of its own bailiwick to “censure” somebody outside of it, was correct. That’s what makes it even more absurd that the Louisiana RSCC just censured Romney, a senator from Utah. To shun someone not even remotely within one’s jurisdiction is nonsense.

Yet the picture now is painted. The Republican Party of Louisiana couldn’t rouse itself even to condemn (much less censure) former Klan leader Duke for pushing neo-Nazism from his state legislative office, but it now censures its own recent presidential standard-bearer right after he voted his conscience.

What a lack of perspective that shows. What an embarrassment.