South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint.

by Moe White

Last month Jim DeMint, South Carolina’s junior senator, became one of the most powerful elected officials in America. He shares his power with former Rep. Dick Armey, who founded “Freedom Works” and its public face, the Tea Party movement.

Armey was the third-ranking Republican in the House during the Gingrich era, and he worked closely with Tom DeLay to ensure absolute loyalty from their rank and file. That method produced lockstep congressional votes for the George W. Bush agenda well into Bush’s second term, and allowed the Republicans to push through even the most controversial bills without compromise.

The country is still paying the piper for most of the Bush-era legislation, though almost all the problems that arose from it are now being blamed on Obama — not just by Republicans, but by a docile, ignorant media that swallows spin as fact and Republican talking points as headlines, and by a frustrated electorate whose anger at elected officials is so overwhelming and incoherent that they want to throw out even the people they just voted in.

DeMint, like Armey before him, wields his power with procedural tactics coupled with blatantly dishonest claims and false statements designed to rile up the public against the nation’s first black president.

Last summer, echoing the great racist Strom Thurmond’s stand on civil rights, he proclaimed that stopping health care overhaul would be “the president’s Waterloo.” He appeared regularly before public gatherings as well as on television to promote his distortions of the actual legislation. And he succeeded: Waterloo arrived with Martha Coakley’s historic loss in the Senate race in Massachusetts, and with it the loss of the Democrats’ supposedly filibuster-proof supermajority (not that the Democrats knew what to do with their votes, but that’s another story).

The next day the president, like Napoleon, admitted defeat: he caved in to DeMint and decided to “scale back” the scope of health care. Having long ago given up on its original core feature, providing universal coverage, he will now take what he can get — which will likely be nothing, from a congress that doesn’t want to give him anything and is now terrified of the consequences if they do.

The collapse of meaningful health care reform was not DeMint’s only victory over Obama. The same day — the first anniversary of Obama’s historic inauguration — the president’s candidate to head the Transportation Security Administration, Erroll Southers, withdrew his name from nomination.

The reason? DeMint used the “right” of any senator to put an anonymous hold on any nominee to any office, knowing that his fellow Republicans were likely to stay in lockstep with him. He cited his fear that Southers would allow TSA employees to unionize. DeMint represents the most anti-union state in the country, so his ideology is no surprise; but the fact that one right-winger’s supposed fear of unions should be allowed to outweigh the nation’s security needs is appalling and dangerous.

What’s equally astounding, and terribly sad, is that a state that so detests unions has among the lowest income levels, weakest educational systems, and poorest health care statistics in the country, all problems that are ameliorated by strong union representation. But voters there regularly elect right-wing politicians who pander to racist fears — “big government run by northern liberals” generally means “blacks and Jews taking over the country” — while colluding with big business to keep those same voters from ever climbing out of poverty (or enjoying the right to unionize).

Sen. DeMint stopped Southers’s nomination in its tracks, and with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, he has brought the president his Waterloo. Now he can have even more confidence that the Democratic majority will not be able to overcome his opposition to …anything he opposes. And because he has great strength of will, the courage of his convictions, and his hatred of the president to sustain him, he will not yield.

Despite last year’s huge mandate for change, neither the president nor the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, had the wits, the will, or the willingness to stand up against the junior senator from South Carolina, who likes things just the way they are. In effect, they handed Jim DeMint veto power over the president’s entire agenda, and they did it without, seemingly, any awareness that they had just made him the most powerful elected official in the nation.

(Since then, Richard Shelby of Alabama has challenged him for the title by putting a formal hold on ALL SEVENTY of Obama’s nominees for federal posts — an unheard of insult and an egregious abuse of Senate rules. But why should that bother Shelby, with DeMint’s shining example before him?)

South Carolina in History
DeMint is the heir of, and a throwback to, many South Carolina predecessors in elected office. Among the most notorious is Rep. Preston Brooks, who, in 1856, so as to “defend the honor” of his cousin, Sen. Andrew Butler, beat Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner with a cane for his remarks about Butler’s support of slavery; it took Sumner years to recover his health. In 1902, Sen. Ben Tillman followed precedent by punching his Palmetto state colleague John McLaurin in the face after McLaurin questioned his motives and integrity.

More recently, in 1964, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond engaged in a wrestling match outside a Senate meeting room with Texan Ralph Yarborough. Thurmond had gained notoriety as the 1948 “Dixiecrat” candidate who left the Democratic Party in his determination to block Truman’s civil rights legislation benefiting African Americans. After his death it was learned that, as a young man, this same avowed racist had secretly fathered a mixed-race child with his family’s maid.

Thurmond’s incredible hypocrisy naturally brings DeMint’s present-day S.C. colleague, Governor Mark Sanford, to mind. Sanford, who has long claimed the “Christian-family-values” mantle, sneaked off to Argentina to be with his mistress and “soul-mate,” leaving his four sons home with his wife over the Father’s Day weekend. The state also boasts Rep. Joe Wilson, whose shouting “You lie” during President Obama’s address to a joint session of congress was such a breach of protocol that even fellow Republicans — except DeMint — condemned it. A famous television broadcaster once told me, “A man is known by the company he keeps.” How true that is of Jim DeMint.