In yet another reminder that the Republican Party is now being run by complete assholes — as if we needed such reminders after January 6, when two-thirds of House Republicans voted to overturn the 2020 election — the New York Times reports (Paywall-free linky!) that House Republicans sabotaged a bill to honor a history-making Black judge last month. The bill would have renamed the federal courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida, after Justice Joseph W. Hatchett, Florida's first Black Supreme Court Justice, and the first Black judge appointed to the federal bench in the South. Hatchett died last year at the age of 88.

Back in December, the measure had passed in the Senate easily, where it was sponsored by both of Florida's Republican senators. Like many such bills, it was so uncontroversial that it passed on a voice vote, without debate. It was set to sail through the House as well, with the unanimous support of Florida's 27 House members. It's the sort of routine nice thing for local heroes Congress regularly handles without a hitch.

But at the last minute before the March 30 House vote, Republicans suddenly decided they couldn't possibly support renaming the federal building for Justice Hatchett, and the bill died, because under the fast-track rules used for the measure, it needed a two-thirds majority to pass. Some Republicans found themselves very challenged when asked to explain their sudden opposition to the bill that they'd sponsored just hours before:

Asked what made him vote against a measure that he had co-sponsored, Representative Vern Buchanan, Republican of Florida, was brief and blunt: “I don’t know,” he said.

As it turned out, there was a perfectly shitty reason for the GOP reversal: Ostensibly, it was because aides for Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia), had dug up a 1999 AP article about an appeals court ruling in which Hatchett had overturned a Florida law allowing students to lead prayers at graduation ceremonies — a ruling that was completely in line with previous Supreme Court rulings on prayer in schools.

The Times doesn't mention this, but we certainly will: the House vote also came the week after virtually the entire right wing had conniptions during the Senate confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, slurring her as soft on child porn offenders and a supposed friend of "Critical Race Theory." But golly, none of the House Republicans mentioned that spectacle, so it couldn't possibly have been a factor in rejecting recognition of another historic Black judge, could it?