When Republican congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina heckled President Obama during his address to a joint session of Congress this week, it was no surprise that the subject was immigration.
It's also no surprise that while the House Republican leadership demanded that Wilson apologize for his intemperance and breach of protocol, pro-GOP talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and right-wing bloggers have defended him and urged him to stand firm.
For the moment, at least, the most effective opposition to the Obama administration comes not from the Republican Party establishment but from the talk-show/tea-party right, which -- if it has its way -- will convert the GOP into an almost exclusively white, zealously religious, mostly Southern party. For these people (including Southern Republicans such as Wilson) immigration is a red-meat issue.
As a Republican from South Carolina, Wilson knows this movement well. His home state, the cradle of secession, has a history of sending viciously partisan lawmakers to Washington, beginning with slavery's great apologist, Sen. John C. Calhoun, and more recently with that redoubtable champion of white supremacy, Sen. Strom Thurmond, for whom Wilson once worked.
Throughout the early 19th century, congressional disputes occasionally turned violent -- and more than a few led to duels outside the Capitol -- but perhaps the most egregious incident occurred in 1856, when South Carolina congressman Preston S. Brooks attacked Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner. Outraged by a speech Sumner had given concerning the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Brooks entered the Senate chamber and, finding the Northern lawmaker working at his desk, began to beat him over the head with a walking stick. By the time two other congressmen intervened, Brooks had shattered his cane and left Sumner unconscious and with injuries so severe he was absent from the Senate for three years.
Historians generally agree that the assault marked an end to the mid-century period of compromise and ushered in the increasingly poisonous climate that climaxed in civil war four years later.
With this sort of history as background, it's a little easier to understand how South Carolina, which flew the Confederate battle flag over its statehouse until 2000, has emerged as the place where Republican blood comes closest to flowing the talk-show-approved hue of red. Recall that the state's scandal-plagued GOP governor, Mark Sanford, alleged that Obama's stimulus package would usher in Weimar-style hyperinflation and refused to accept Recovery Act funds until a court ordered him to -- this despite the nation's sixth-highest unemployment rate.
