If election denialism is a major ill of our times, it must be acknowledged that Lewis, however heroic before entering politics, was a persistent wrongdoer.
The Postal Service announced Tuesday that it will put John Lewis, who died in 2020, on a postage stamp in 2023. This says a lot about what gets forgiven from bomb-throwing partisan politicians when they are liberals. While there is a fair case for honoring Lewis for his life before his three decades in Congress, it is a very odd moment in our politics to honor him.
The case in Lewis’s favor is his legitimately brave and heroic time as a civil-rights leader in the 1960s, which included being arrested dozens of times, co-organizing the 1963 March on Washington, and, most famously, being beaten by Alabama police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965. If Lewis had died before he entered Congress in 1987, his would be an American life worth honoring. Indeed, National Review editorialized in honor of that life in 2020, and rightly so.
But it is not so easy to ignore Lewis’s career in politics, and the Postal Service doesn’t try; its announcement of the stamp cites his time in Congress, which it characterizes merely as “steadfastly defending and building on key civil rights gains that he had helped achieve in the 1960s,” and it chose for his image a photograph of Lewis from 2013. No word is offered as to the uglier side of his career in partisan politics, in which he did much to create today’s bitter and paranoid political climate.
Today, whatever hysterical claims you may hear from Joe Biden and other fringe figures, there is no “Jim Crow 2.0.” Voting is easier and more widespread than ever before, and black turnout in Lewis’s native Georgia keeps breaking historic records, including in the just-completed race for a Georgia Senate seat between two black men. By contrast, we are constantly told by liberals — and not entirely without reason — that the big challenge to democracy after 2020 is attacks on the legitimacy of our elections by “election deniers” such as Donald Trump.
Yet, on this very issue, Lewis was a persistent wrongdoer. This goes back to the 2000 election: “On January 20, 2001, John Lewis did not attend George W. Bush’s inauguration. He didn’t make a big deal about it, but Bush losing the popular vote coupled with the contentious Florida recount left Lewis feeling less than magnanimous. According to contemporaneous press accounts, the Georgia congressman and civil rights icon spent Inauguration Day in his Atlanta district.” Lewis would do far worse four years later. In 2004, when Bush was reelected, some Democrats descended into conspiracy theories about Diebold voting machines and pervasive “voter suppression,” theories as unsupported by evidence as Trump’s “stop the steal.”
Lewis was one of the congressional Democrats who promoted this insanity by voting against certifying Bush’s Ohio electors:
Thirty-one Democrats voted, with no justifiable basis, against certifying Bush’s 2004 election, in which he won a national popular majority and carried Ohio by 118,000 votes. They included James Clyburn, now the House majority whip; Maxine Waters, now chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee; Bennie Thompson, now chairman of both the House Homeland Security Committee and the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack; Raúl Grijalva, now the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee; Eddie Bernice Johnson, now the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee; Ed Markey, now a senator; John Conyers, who served as chairman of the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees; and John Lewis, who today is the namesake of the Democrats’ current election bill. Democrats who ducked that vote include House majority leader Steny Hoyer, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, Senators Ben Cardin and Bob Menendez, and current House Intelligence Committee chairman and lead 2019 impeachment manager Adam Schiff.
This was every bit as much of a cynical, base-pleasing, lie-spreading partisan stunt as when Republicans in Congress did the same thing in January 2021. Like a number of Republicans in 2021, Lewis and other Democrats in 2005 claimed simply to be raising questions about the integrity of the election; like those Republicans, however, Lewis and his fellow Democrats were literally voting to overturn an American presidential election, and simply relying on the fact that other people would be responsible enough to prevent it from happening. The fact that both sides did this is not a defense of either, but an indictment of both. The argument that Democrats did no immediate harm in January 2005 ignores how slippery slopes work: the fact that Democrats pushed the envelope in attacks on the legitimacy of our elections for two decades helped too many Republicans talk themselves into the notion that they were just playing by the Democrats’ rules. Nor is any of this an excuse for what Donald Trump did after the 2020 election; that was, as I have written, often at great length, unique, unprecedented, and dangerous. But other Republicans were not the president. What John Lewis did in 2005 is exactly the same thing that Democrats now say is “sedition” on the part of House and Senate Republicans.
Lewis wasn’t done. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Lewis lent his considerable moral capital to lead yet another effort to delegitimize the president’s election, which involved pervasive false claims that the election had been rigged:
John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman regarded as the moral leader and conscience of the Democratic Party, told Meet the Press in January 2017, “I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president. . . . I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.” Lewis led 62 congressional Democrats in boycotting Trump’s inauguration. They said why they were doing this. Don Beyer: “I will not be part of normalizing or legitimizing a man whose election may well have depended on the malicious foreign interference of Russia’s leaders.” Jamie Raskin: “The moral and political legitimacy of this presidency are in the gravest doubt.” Jerrold Nadler said that “the Russian weighing in the election, the Russian attempt to hack the election — and frankly, the FBI’s weighing in on the election — I think makes his election illegitimate. It puts an asterisk next to his name.” The inauguration was — unlike the typical American handover of power — marred by violent protests that led to over 200 arrests.
Within a few months, polls showed that two-thirds of Democratic voters believed, falsely, that Russian hackers had stolen the election for Trump, and federal investigators had been launched on a tw0-year-long probe of a nonexistent crime of “collusion.”
Stolen-election theories were not Lewis’s only toxic contribution to American political discourse. To listen to the media today, John McCain was a saint of bipartisanship unfairly persecuted by Republicans; to listen to Trump’s defenders, it doesn’t matter what a Republican does or says, he will be tarred as a racist and a monster. Both are rewriting history, the former by forgetting how McCain was smeared when he ran against Barack Obama in 2008, the latter in assuming that the effectiveness of such smears will be the same whether or not they have a basis in fact. One of the most egregious and irresponsible efforts at race-baiting McCain came in October 2008, from John Lewis, just weeks after McCain had showered Lewis with praise:
“What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history,” Lewis said in a statement. . . . “Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse. . . . George Wallace never threw a bomb,” Lewis noted. “He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama. . . . As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all,” Lewis said today. “They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy.”
Lewis was, it should be noted, comparing McCain to George Wallace based on McCain’s and Palin’s daring to mention Obama’s own extensive associations and friendships with extremists and literal bomb-setting domestic terrorists. This was all the more reprehensible coming from a man with Lewis’s moral authority.
Of course, Lewis did this again. As our editorial noted, “in 2010, he was one of three congressmen who claimed that Tea Party members screamed racial epithets and spat at them as they walked from Capitol Hill. The charge of spitting was withdrawn, and no tape was ever produced that captured the epithets.” In 2012, claiming at the Democratic convention that a vote for Mitt Romney would be a vote to “go back” to the Jim Crow he fought against in the 1960s, and telling Dan Amira of New York magazine, “I think there’s a deliberate, systematic effort to win or steal this election before it even takes place.” He was preparing the ground for a stolen-election narrative if Obama had lost — and it requires little imagination to consider how dangerous that narrative would have been for the country. In 2016, Lewis went back to the Wallace well again: “I’ve been around a while and Trump reminds me so much of a lot of the things that George Wallace said and did. . . . Sometimes I feel like I am reliving part of my past. I heard it so much growing up in the South. I heard it so much during the days of the civil rights movement.” Had he wanted this to be taken seriously, he might have considered not crying wolf at McCain, Palin, Romney, and the Tea Party.
True, Lewis’s Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill testified to a more generous and civil man away from the cameras. But on the public stage, he spent the last two decades of his career in public office spending his earned moral authority in attacking the legitimacy of our elections and smearing political opponents as segregationist wannabes. These are not the most important parts of his record, although they would be given more prominence if he had been a Republican. But if we are actually in a moment of peril for democracy because of the rejection of election outcomes and overheated demonization of political opponents, it is a very strange moment to put Lewis on a stamp.