The historic national monument honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was unveiled this week in Washington. Reflecting on the history that led up to this occasion, GOP freshman Rep. Allen West (FL) — the only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus — offered his thoughts on the seminal civil rights leader’s legacy to the National Journal. When asked whether King has “informed decisions in your career or personal life,” West painted Dr. King as if he were a conservative icon:

Dr. King’s message is and always shall be relevant. It is about individual responsibility and accountability to seek the highest good in your life … as a nation seeks its highest good. America can only be as great as the sum of its parts, all parts.

I think that, if Dr. King were to come back and see what has become of the black community, he would be appalled: The exorbitantly high unemployment rate, the second- and third-generation welfare families, the rampant decimation of the inner-city black communities, the incarceration rate of young black men, and the breakdown of the black family would all bring a tear to his eye.

Indeed, King might weep at the current, socio-economic decimation of American black communities. But it is not for failing to follow what West offers as King’s conservative message, one of “individual responsibility and accountability.” Indeed, King’s own words, inscribed in the memorial, rebuke the idea of individualism –”We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” — for one an undeniably progressive view of an ideal world — “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies; education and culture for their minds; and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”

These progressive values are not merely enshrined in his words but explicitly espoused, pursued, and defended in every action he took, up to his very last:

• King Died Supporting A Public Sector Union’s Strike: In King’s final sermon, he called upon the people of Memphis to join together in support of the Memphis sanitation worker’s AFSCME-led strike. “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness,” King preached. “when we have our march, you need to be there. If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school — be there.”
• King Compared Poverty To “Cannibalism” And Called For It’s “Direct And Immediate Abolition”: King believed that poverty “is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization.” He called for America to abolish poverty by guaranteeing “white and Negro alike” a minimum income.
• King Called War Funding A “Demonic Sucking Tube” Undermining Poverty Programs: King opposed the Vietnam war in no small part because it diverted precious resources away from anti-poverty programs. “A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. . . . Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”
• King Said Poverty Made Him “Question The Capitalistic Economy”: King called for a radical restructuring of America’s economic system. “And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. . . . You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?’”

As Princeton University Prof. Cornel West noted today, King dedicated his life to fighting four catastrophes he identified: Militarism, materialism, racism, and poverty. By twisting his legacy into one that somehow justifies policies that make these catastrophes worse, West and his colleagues risk trampling on the very message West seeks to commemorate:

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

Earlier this week, House Judiciary Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) admitted that the purpose of an anti-immigrant hearing he plans to hold shortly is to “embarrass the president.” In an interview with the right-wing publication Human Events Rep. Steve King (R-IA) goes even further, saying that the goal of the hearing should be nothing less than public humiliation of the Obama Administration.

A key House Republican is calling for congressional hearings into President Obama’s decision to grant “administrative amnesty” by pulling out hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens already in the deportation pipeline. [...]

King said Congress has limited powers in what it can do to force the Obama administration to adhere to immigration laws, but that it can cut funding to the departments involved “to send a powerful message to the White House. Or, we can hold hearings and bring them forward to publicly humiliate them until they become politically vulnerable, and at that point, Obama might withdraw such a position,” King said.

The McGuffin driving King’s latest attempt to humiliate President Obama is the administration’s recent decision to prioritize enforcement of immigration laws against undocumented immigrants who are violent or otherwise potentially dangerous. But the truth is that some kind of prioritization is absolutely necessary unless King plans to jack up the federal deficit in order to round up immigrants who pose no threat whatsoever to anyone.

It would cost a massive $285 billion to round up every man, woman, and child who is in the United States illegally and deport them to their country of origin. That’s more than six times the Department of Homeland Security’s entire budget for FY 2011. Given these financial constraints, the Obama Administration unquestionably made the right decision by targeting its very limited resources on efforts that actually protect the American people from harm.

If King wants to argue that America should take on even more debt to round up taxpayers and college students, then he is welcome to make those arguments. Clearly, however, King has no interest in discussing actual facts and real data — he just sees an opportunity to embarrass President Obama.

A harsh new anti-immigrant policy in Georgia has closed the doors of some of the state’s best universities to undocumented students. But a group of five professors have devised a plan to give some of these students at least a taste of the education they’ve been denied by GOP lawmakers:

The five University of Georgia professors have started a program they’re calling Freedom University. They’re offering to teach a rigorous seminar course once a week meant to mirror courses taught at the most competitive schools and aimed at students who have graduated from high school but can’t go to one of those top schools because of the new policy or because of cuts to state scholarship programs.

“This is not a substitute for letting these students into UGA, Georgia State or the other schools,” said Pam Voekel, a history professor at UGA and one of the program’s initiators. “It is designed for people who, right now, don’t have another option.”

The professors said they’re seeking accreditation so credits could be transferable in the future if their students are accepted at other state universities. The program has minimal costs, with professors donating their time and a local Latino community outreach center offering a free space.

Last fall, the university system’s Board of Regents barred any state college or university that has rejected academically qualified applicants in the past two years from admitting illegal immigrants. That includes five of Georgia’s top colleges and universities. Undocumented students can still apply to other public schools for higher education, but only if they pay significantly higher out-of-state tuition.

The policy was implemented in response to concerns that state colleges “were being overrun by illegal immigrants, that taxpayers were subsidizing their education and legal residents were being displaced.” That’s despite the fact that the Board of Regents own study concluded that less than 1 percent of the state’s public college students were illegal immigrants and that undocumented students who pay out-of-state tuition more than pay for their education.

Since then, students and immigration advocates have participated in a string of major protests, including one just days ago at the University of Georgia.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court surprised most Court watchers by not striking down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, which requires voting districts who have historically engaged in discrimination to “preclear” any new voting rules with a federal court or the Department of Justice before those rules can go into effect. Yet, while the justices allowed the law to survive, they dealt it a severe blow — permitting voting districts to “bail out” of the law if they can show that they have not recently engaged in race discrimination and are not likely to do so in the future.

Yesterday, Arizona decided that being able to bail out isn’t good enough. They want one of the backbones of American civil rights law tossed out entirely:

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, a Republican, said that the portion of the law requiring the state to get prior approval from the Justice Department for any changes to the state’s election laws exceeds Congressional authority and is unconstitutional.

“The portions of the … Act requiring preclearance of all voting changes are either archaic, not based in fact, or subject to completely subjective enforcement based on the whim of federal authorities,” Horne said in a statement.

The Arizona lawsuit mostly apes the claims from the 2009 decision that weakened the law. It argues that Section Five unfairly singles out certain states without requiring every voting district in the country to seek preclearance. Yet Arizona also raises a new and deeply radical objection to the law, claiming that the VRA “exceeds Congress’s authority under the 14th and 15th Amendments because it suspends all changes to state election law – however innocuous – until preclearance is given by the federal government.” If this theory were actually adopted by the Supreme Court, it would mean that the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional the day it was first signed in 1965.

There is legitimate reason to fear that Arizona will win its claim, however, at least on the somewhat narrower grounds that Congress was wrong to apply the law to some states and not others. In the 2009 oral argument, the Court’s conservatives were very skeptical of Congress’ decision to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act without updating the list of states subject to preclearance to reflect which states are currently most guilty of voting rights violations. Supreme Court uberlawyer Tom Goldstein predicted back then that the Court was simply giving Congress a brief window to update Section Five before they take a hatchet to it; “[i]f the statute remains the same by the time the next case arrives,” Goldstein warns, “the Court will invalidate the statute.”

If Goldstein is right, and he’s has a history of being right, the real culprit here is likely the Senate’s broken rules. It’s unlikely that a majority of the 111th Congress wanted to see one of the most effective civil rights laws in American history die in the Roberts Court, but the Senate’s nearly unlimited opportunities for obstructionism left them with no time to actually update the law and still accomplish many of their other priorities.