SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A29T
he young American pilot was
perplexed — and a little bit
angry. A veteran of World War
II, he was now flying nerve-
r attling missions in his Douglas
C-54 transport plane over the menac-
ing artillery of an army of enemies (who
used to be allies) to deliver supplies to
allies (who used to be enemies).
This was the head-scratching fate of
the earliest Cold Warriors. Many of
them had been shot at by Germans.
They all knew men who had been killed
or maimed by Germans. The Soviets
had been allies, and reliable ones —
hard fighters who shortened the ordeal
considerably by giving Hitler a two-
front war. Now, three years after the
German surrender, Americans were
defying Soviet guns to feed hungry
Germans. Something about that did
not sit right.
Wasn’t there a story about the Ro-
mans leveling the conquered city of
Carthage, then plowing the ground
with salt? That’s how this young man
felt about Germans.
The pilot’s name was Gail Halvorsen.
He was a Mormon from a hardscrabble
farm life in Idaho and Utah. In the
Depression, he would look up from his
chores at the pale blue sky and imagine
himself flying. As a young man he
joined the Civil Air Patrol and made
those dreams come true. His wartime
assignment was to fly transport planes
in the Atlantic theater over waters
haunted by prowling U-boats.
Conquered Germany was divided
among the former allies into four occu-
pied zones, and its capital, Berlin, was
similarly divided, though the entire city
lay in the Soviet zone. The U.S., British
and French parts of Berlin were acces-
sible by only one road and one railway
across Soviet territory, and as competi-
tive tensions rose in the post-war peri-
od, the Soviets came to see those arter-
ies as a tool for driving their rivals out.
“What happens to Berlin happens to
Germany,” explained the Soviet foreign
minister. “What happens to Germany
happens to Europe.”
In June 1948, Moscow ordered the
routes cut. Determined not to give up
Berlin, President Harry S. Truman set-
tled on an unprecedented, and unprov-
en, solution: an airlift to supply roughly
2 million people with everything they
needed to live. Coal for heat. Wheat for
bread. Meat, potatoes, soap, paper. Ev-
erything. The necessary logistics pre-
figured FedEx; the air-traffic control
augured O’Hare. At its peak, after Ger-
man volunteers built a third airport
with millions of bricks from their city’s
rubble, Operation Vittles — the Berlin
Airlift — landed an average of one plane
every 63 seconds around the clock.
Halvorsen flew one of them. And he
wasn’t too happy about feeding Ger-
mans, until one day he found himself
drawn to a throng of children outside
the fence at Tempelhof airport. With
excited gestures, they managed to
touch the pilot’s heart — which, it
turned out, was just waiting to thaw.
These weren’t enemies, he saw; they
were poor, deprived children, just as he
had been, watching the sky, just as he
had done.
In his pocket were two sticks of gum.
Halvorsen handed them through the
fence, and was astonished to see the
kids who grabbed them portion the
wrappers into tiny pieces, which they
passed around for the other children to
smell. “The expression of pleasure was
unmeasurable,” he once recalled.
He promised to bring more candy on
his next trip, and devised a waggle-
wing signal to let them know when he
was landing. True to his word, he
dropped three packages the next day,
tied to parachutes he made from
h andkerchiefs.
Halvorsen’s buddies contributed
their own candy rations and handker-
chiefs, and more sweets floated from
his plane. Word climbed the chain of
command: “Operation Little Vittles”
gained an official stamp and more
pilots. The story of the Candy Bombers
traveled stateside, where it touched
everyone who heard it. Candy makers
offered boxes of goods. American chil-
dren donated their own sweets. Volun-
teers signed up to tie parachutes.
Germans who had lived in fear of the
sound of bombers overhead now heard,
in the droning of aircraft engines, the
most stirring music since Beethoven.
And the children who tasted sweets
from the sky grew up to see their city,
and their country, reunited four dec-
ades later.
They never forgot Lt. Gail Halvorsen
— “Uncle Wiggly Wings,” as they called
him — though he handed off responsi-
bility for the mission to another pilot
and returned home to marry the gal
who had been waiting since he went to
war. They raised five children together.
Halvorsen, who retired from the
U.S. Air Force as a colonel, took com-
mand of Tempelhof field in Berlin in
1970, and the city welcomed its favorite
U.S. ambassador back. Well into his
90s, Halvorsen enjoyed reenacting his
history by borrowing a plane to drop
candy for delighted Utah schoolkids.
He died on Wednesday, a very old
pilot at 101 — having shown the world
that kindness is a superpower.DAVID VON DREHLEProof that,in wartime,kindness is asuperpowerAnother Trump judge has struck,
in another bid to defang the
Voting Rights Act. This deci-
sion wouldn’t ordinarily merit
much notice — it’s a single opinion by a
district court judge. But it offers stark
evidence of Donald Trump’s toxic judi-
cial legacy, illustrates how conservative
justices invite legal mischief to bubble
up from the lower courts, and threatens
what remains of one of the country’s
proudest legislative achievements.
The ruling came Thursday from
U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky of
Little Rock, a Harvard Law School
graduate, Federalist Society member (of
course) and former Arkansas solicitor
general. Rudofsky found that Section 2
of the Voting Rights Act, which protects
minority voters against unfair redis-
tricting or other voting practices that
have discriminatory effects, can only be
e nforced by the Justice Department. No
civil rights groups, no individual voters
need apply — I mean, are entitled to file
suit.
This radical interpretation flies in
the face of the history, purpose and
longtime interpretation of the Voting
Rights Act; it ignores congressional
intent and long-standing Supreme
Court rulings. And, if it were to stand, it
would all but guarantee that the protec-
tions of the Voting Rights Act would be
meaningless whenever there is a Re-
publican in the White House.
No judge has ever — ever — thrown
out a Section 2 claim on the grounds
that the law barred suits by private
plaintiffs. Even Arkansas, whose newly
redrawn state legislative district lines
were at issue in the case before
R udofsky, didn’t make this argument.
Rudofsky raised it on his own — and
said he would toss the case unless the
Justice Department decided to join it in
the next five days.
This is part of an ugly pattern that
has left the Voting Rights Act in tatters.
In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, the
Supreme Court’s conservative majority
eviscerated Section 5 of the law, which
required certain states to obtaina dvance approval for voting changes.
That pretty much just left Section 2,
which allows lawsuits after changes are
enacted.
But last year, in an Arizona case,
Brnovich v. Democratic National Com-
mittee, the high court engaged in a
wholesale rewriting of Section 2 that
drained it of effectiveness in cases
involving voting rules and procedures.
Just this month, intervening in an
Alabama redistricting case, the court
signaled new hostility to using Section 2
to challenge district lines that reduce
the ability of minority voters to elect
candidates of their choice.
Rudofsky’s ruling is a direct out-
growth of Brnovich. The majority opin-
ion was so egregious — it “mostly
inhabits a law-free zone,” Justice Elena
Kagan wrote in dissent — that hardly
anyone paid attention to a concurring
opinion by Justices Neil M. Gorsuch
and Clarence Thomas that said it was
“an open question” whether private
parties could sue under Section 2.
As I’ve written before, the Gorsuch-
Thomas concurrence was an especially
dishonest piece of work. To buttress
their bias against private suits, Gorsuch
and Thomas cited a single appeals court
case from 1981 that simply mentioned
the issue. For decades, before and after
a congressional rewrite of the law in
1982, the existence of a private right of
action was assumed; Brnovich, which
itself involved a lawsuit by a private
party, cited nine other such cases. The
question wasn’t ajar — not until Gor-
such and Thomas cracked it open.
Their gambit worked. When civil
rights groups challenged Texas’s new
voting law under Section 2, the state
took up the Gorsuch-Thomas offer and
argued that the plaintiffs didn’t have
any right to sue. Texas lost, with the
judge writing in December that “it
would be ambitious indeed for a district
court... to deny a private right of
action in the light of precedent and
history.”
Not too ambitious for Rudofsky, who
proclaimed he was just doing his job,even if it led to unfortunate results.
“The question,” he wrote, “is not
whether the Court believes the Voting
Rights Act has been and continues to be
a force for good and progress in our
society. (I do.)... The question is not
whether the Court believes cases like
this one are important to pursue. (I do.)
“The narrow question before the
Court is only whether, under current
Supreme Court precedent, a court
should imply a private right of action to
enforce § [Section] 2 of the Voting
Rights Act where Congress has not
expressly provided one. The answer to
this narrow question is no.”
This is a crock, dressed up in legal
frippery.
Rudofsky is correct about two things.
Section 2 doesn’t explicitly contain a
private right to sue. And in recent years,
the court has been increasingly reluc-
tant to find such authorization when
the statutory text doesn’t include it.
That’s not the end of the story,
though. As the Justice Department told
Rudofsky in a filing, “long-standing
case law, the structure of the Voting
Rights Act, the Act’s broad enforcement
provisions, and authoritative sources of
congressional intent confirm that there
is a private cause of action under
Section 2 to challenge such redistricting
plans.”
Rudofsky not only contorted the law
to knock down each of these arguments
— he went beyond what Gorsuch and
Thomas had said to insist that he had to
dismiss the case even though Arkansas
hadn’t raised the issue.
Why does all this matter? Because
Rudofsky might be just the start. Be-
cause the federal government has limit-
ed resources to bring these voting rights
cases and, under Republican adminis-
trations, demonstrably limited interest
in doing so. And because, as Kagan put
it, “a law this Court once knew to
buttress all of American democracy” is
increasingly being whittled into insig-
nificance by activist judges who claim
they are simply following the law, even
as they strain to neuter it.RUTH MARCUSTrump judges are tag-teamingthe Voting Rights ActERIC LEE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Voting rights protesters outside the U.S. Capitol in January.The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. was
16 years old when he rode the train from
Chicago with Till to see family in Missis-
sippi. Standing in front of the ramshackle
remnants of Bryant’s Grocery in Money,
Miss., the 83-year-old Parker recounted
the events that led to his cousin’s kidnap-
ping and murder.
He described Till as a “fun-loving
prankster” who was begged by relatives
to learn the ways of the South, those
unwritten but universally understood
rules about how Black people were to
behave, especially around White girls and
women. That’s why Parker said that when
Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant, “If I could
have gone into the ground, I would have
gone into the ground.”
But there was no escape. Bryant’s
husband and an accomplice later kid-
napped Till from his great-uncle’s house.
They tortured him before murdering him
and dumping his body in the Tallahatchie
River, weighted with a 75-pound cotton
gin fan. Till’s mutilated body was found
three days later. Mamie Till-Mobley took
her son’s body back to Chicago and held
an open-casket funeral. “Let the people
see what they did to my boy,” she said.
“This community wants the Emmett
Till story told to the world,” Haaland said.
“There are people living today who re-
membered Emmett Till, and knew him.
There are people who were there. Those
are the folks we need to hear from.”
Her tears came when asked why she
felt it was important for her to stand
where the civil rights movement unfold-
ed. “As an American, I feel it’s myThe first time I saw Deb Haaland
cry, she was a congresswoman
from New Mexico, and she was
standing on the Edmund Pettus
Bridge in Selma, Ala.
It was 2019, during a civil rights
pilgrimage led by John Lewis. Rep. Lisa
Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) wailed out as a
hymn was sung, and Haaland reached to
comfort her. It was impossible not to be
moved standing with Lewis on the bridge
where he was almost killed in 1965.
So it wasn’t a surprise to watch tears
well this past week for Haaland, now the
interior secretary, as she stood outside
the Mississippi courthouse that once set
free the murderers of Emmett Till. For
Haaland, the first Native American to
serve as a Cabinet secretary, visiting
these sites doesn’t just mean remember-
ing the injustice inflicted upon Black
people; it means walking the ancestral
lands that were home to Indigenous
people long before the slave ships came.
Long before the boundaries between the
races were drawn, and then reinforced by
Jim Crow. She knows what it means to
come from people who experienced
prejudice and violence — the kind of
violence that killed Till when he was just
14 years old.
A 2017 act of Congress spurred the
current effort to incorporate existing
sites that honor the history of Till’s
1955 lynching into the National Park
Service, and it’s what brought Haaland to
the Mississippi Delta to listen. What she
heard was pain from a community that
wants Till’s story told truthfully.obligation to know and understand the
history of our country. And, the South,”
she said haltingly, “... it’s a tragic history
that none of us should shy away from.”
When Haaland speaks, she does so
with the humility of a true public servant.
But there is something more. She’s an
Indigenous woman and a 35th genera-
tion New Mexican, and her ancestors
bore the brunt of the country’s founding
white supremacy.
“We have similar tragic histories,” she
said to me outside the courthouse.
“Right? The United States painted Native
Americans as savages.... It’s easier to
commit genocide against a savage than it
is a human being. So in that respect,
when Emmett Till was dragged from his
bed that fateful night, do you think they
thought of him as a human being?”
Black people know the answer, and so
do Indigenous people. As Haaland said,
“African American and Native American
communities are kindred spirits.”
There is no timetable for the National
Park Service to send its Mississippi site
recommendations to Congress, which
could approve a proposed Emmett Till
national park through legislation. The
president could also use his executive
authority under the Antiquities Act.
First, Haaland insists, the job is to
make sure everyone’s voice is heard in
this process. “Our job is to tell America’s
story,” she told me. “We want to make
sure that America’s story is told from the
folks who have not always been invited to
the table, who have not always had a say
in what their own history has been.”JONATHAN CAPEHARTBlack and Native people are kindred spiritsin adversity. Deb Haaland understands that.The House of Savoy on the Italian
Peninsula was a dynasty so fickle
across the centuries that critics
said it never finished a war on the
side on which it started, unless the war
lasted long enough for Savoy to change
sides twice. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)
fascinates not because she is the House of
Savoy in human form, although she is,
but because she exemplifies a phenom-
enon that has rarely been less rare —
consistently inconstant politicians.
Mace became a congresswoman on
Jan. 3, 2021, three days before President
Donald Trump incited the assault on the
Capitol. On Jan. 7, she said, Trump’s
“entire legacy was wiped out yesterday”
when he, as she later said, “put all of our
lives at risk.” Asked in the days after the
attack if she thought he had a future in
the Republican Party, she said: “I do not.”
He noticed.
She trod a sinuous path back toward
obeisance, but Trump, unmollified, this
month endorsed Mace’s Republican pri-
mary opponent. The next day, Mace stood
in front of Manhattan’s Trump Tower and
made a 104-second video. It was a grovel
akin to Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV
standing barefoot in the snow for three
days outside the castle of Pope Gregory
VII, hoping to have his excommunication
reversed. (It was, but Gregory, who had a
Savoyesque knack for changing his mind,
later excommunicated Henry again.) In
her video, Mace says she was one of
Trump’s earliest supporters, worked for
him in seven states in 2016 and thinks he
made America, freedom and democracy
“stronger all around the world.”
Her Savoy-like somersault is less acro-
batic than J.D. Vance’s in his attempt to
win Ohio Republicans’ U.S. Senate nomi-
nation. He has deleted his October 2016
tweet endorsing independent presiden-
tial candidate Evan McMullin. Vance has
called Trump “noxious,” “offensive,” “rep-
rehensible,” “cultural heroin” and “an
idiot.” He has said “I can’t stomach
Trump” and “I’m a Never Trump guy.”Never, however, came and went, and
Vance went to Mar-a-Lago seeking abso-
lution. Vance is trailing Josh Mandel,
who knows how to be emollient to
Trump. Mandel says he decided to run for
the Senate a third time because impeach-
ing Trump was unfair. In his Mar-a-Lago
audition, Mandel told Trump that he,
Mandel, is a “killer” and a “balls to the
wall” fighter. As a senator, he will fight,
among other things, “atheism” and
Washington “cocktail parties.”
Although polarization is rampant, the
doctrine of Savoyism — flexibility in
defense of incumbency is no vice — has
bipartisan adherents. For example, many
Democrats persistently say that climate
change is not just a serious problem; it is
an “existential” threat that, unless
promptly and uncompromisingly fought,
will extinguish life on Earth. But first
things first. The national average price of
a gallon of gasoline is $3.48, which in
inflation-adjusted terms is about 57 cents
more than it was 60 years ago.
Many Democrats, although green as
all get-out, think the federal gasoline tax
(about 18 cents a gallon) should be
suspended, for eternity or until after the
November elections, whichever comes
first. This is today’s existentialism. It
bears a resemblance to the mid-20th-
century intellectual fad with that name.
It was (according to people who were not
enthralled by it) the belief that because
life is absurd, philosophy should be, too.
Meanwhile, the climate warrior in
chief, President Biden, has inscribed his
name on the ever-lengthening list of
presidents who, to produce microscopic
and evanescent downward pressure on
gasoline prices, have tapped the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve. Biden released
50 million barrels, which is about what
Americans consume every 66 hours. The
SPR exists to cushion the nation in an
emergency. Today’s emergency is the
threat — existential, of course; is there
another kind? — that disgruntled
m otorists pose to elected incumbents.
The planet’s supposed emergency is
s econdary.
In 2019, the year after Robert Francis
(a.k.a. Beto) O’Rourke failed to win a
Senate seat from Texas, he said this while
failing to become president: “Hell yes,
we’re going to take your AR-15, your
AK-47.” Today, O’Rourke, who might be-
come a has-been without ever having
been, is running for governor and saying:
“I’m not interested in taking anything
from anyone. What I want to make sure
we do is defend the Second Amendment.”
The Book of Genesis on O’Rourke, and
others: “Unstable as water, thou shall not
excel.”
Contemporary politics, which is simul-
taneously sinister and silly, can leave you
in tears or in stitches. Considering the
amount of nonsense spoken, it is consol-
ing that so many people mean so little of
what they say.GEORGE F. WILLBehold theRepublicansomersaultsfor TrumpContemporary politics,which is simultaneouslysinister and silly, can leaveyou in tears or in stitches.