Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) apologized on Thursday for daring to question the presidential election results of 2020. In a letter to “My friends in North Tulsa,” Lankford said that his actions “caused a firestorm of suspicion among many of my friends, particularly in black communities around the state. I was completely blindsided, but I also found a blind spot.”
What was Lankford’s supposed sin? He joined with some other Republican senators, such as Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, in challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election. This was supposedly racist, or at least “insensitive” to the feelings of black Oklahomans, particularly in Tulsa.
Lankford has been on a Senate commission to remember the 1921 destruction of a predominantly black area of Tulsa, known as Greenwood, by a mob of white Tulsans. The riot, or massacre, began when some white Tulsans attempted to lynch a young black man who had been arrested for allegedly attempting to rape a white woman. (As it turns out, the police were about to release the man because apparently nothing happened, but the local newspaper, The Tulsa Tribune, had distributed a highly inflammatory and largely inaccurate story implying the man was guilty). But now, many of those on the Senate commission want Lankford booted off.
What did Lankford challenging the results of the presidential election have to do with his participation on a commission about the Tulsa race riot?
It seems that Lankford and others cited the Electoral Commission that was created by Congress in 1876 to settle a controversial presidential election as a precedent for creating a commission to resolve the 2020 contest, in which there controversies in several states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona. After the Commission of 1876 voted 8-7 that Republican Rutherford Hayes had defeated Democrat Samuel Tilden 185-184 in the Electoral College, it appeared the country might be headed toward a second civil war.
To settle the dispute, Hayes agreed not to run again in four years, appoint a southern Democrat as postmaster general, and remove the remaining federal troops from three southern states, ending Reconstruction. After the troops were removed, Jim Crow or segregation laws became common in not only those three states, and not only in the South, but in many northern states, as well.
Of course, Lankford, Cruz, Hawley, et al. were not citing the compromise that led to the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, but rather the Electoral Commission that preceded it and really had nothing to do with it.
Despite these facts, a narrative was quickly created that Lankford and the others were citing the implementation of segregation laws as their precedent for challenging the results of the 2020 election. This makes no sense, but facts don’t really matter when political demagoguery is involved.
Lankford has now been properly shamed, and is responding as the Left would like him to respond, expressing his regret that he dared to challenge the election results and simply accepting the false narrative created by the Left with all the meekness he could muster.
“What I did not realize was all of the national conversation about states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, was seen as casting doubt on the validity of votes coming out of predominantly black communities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit,” Lankford wrote in his plea for forgiveness.
“After decades of fighting for voting rights, many black friends in Oklahoma saw this as a direct attack on their right to vote, for their vote to matter, and even a belief that their votes made an election in our country illegitimate. I can assure you, my intent to give a voice to Oklahomans who had questions was never also an intent to diminish the voice of any black American,” Lankford continued.
Finally, Lankford said, “I should have recognized how what I said and what I did could be interpreted by many of you. I deeply regret my blindness to that perception, and for that I am sorry.”
It appears that Lankford has been duly shamed, so much so that his remarks to Public Radio Tulsa are being interpreted by many as now leaving the door open to convicting President Trump in the Senate!
Lankford told Public Radio Tulsa, referring to President Trump’s speech on January 6 in which he allegedly incited an insurrection, “The difficulty is trying to be able to evaluate, was there something unique about this particular speech that would have incited a riot that’s different than a speech that happened, you know, two weeks before or a week before that. So that’s going to be the challenge here, and the focus is obviously not just removing the president from office — he’s already out of office — it is, can you constitutionally remove someone from office who’s already out of office, because the goal is really to keep them from ever running again.”
So Lankford has gone from questioning the election results in some states and implying there might have been vote fraud in the 2020 election, to not only apologizing for doing so, but even to considering voting to convict Trump and not allowing him to ever run for office again.
This is what such charges of racism are all about — getting politicians such as Lankford to buckle to pressure to accomplish some liberal cause. Lankford should understand one thing: If he thinks his actions in challenging the election results created a “firestorm,” if he is as weak and malleable as his public statement sounds, he should see the firestorm that will come upon his chances for reelection now that he has revealed himself as giving into this obvious politically inspired feigned outrage.
Trump carried all 77 counties in Oklahoma. In fact, no Democrat has managed to carry a single county in Oklahoma since 2000. It is doubtful that Lankford was going to get many, if any, votes from those in Oklahoma who demagogically use the race card as they have in this case, but his apologies for supporting the Republican nominee could very well lead to a stiff primary challenge in 2022.