Hanan Ashrawi Quotes
We do not expect much from a pre-election [American] government. It is hostage to the election process.
Hanan Ashrawi, Education Minister, Palestinian Authority, Palestine Delegate to Arab-Israeli Peace Talks, Speech, National Association of Arab Americans, October 17, 1996
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Referring to the Senate's right to ratify treaties and the effect on negotiations,
Madison was right on most things, but got this one wrong. Of course he did not anticipate the era of mass communication which makes demagoguery in large areas possible.
He was a Congressman at the time. The problem of legislating in an election year seems to have always been difficult.
With its multiplicity of committees and the polarization of the parties, Congress has been unable to legislate on large, comprehensive problems that involve more than a single issue at a time.
His Republican Party had filibustered more bills in the Senate then had been done previously in all of the Senate History together. Congress passed fewer bills in his first two years than any other Congress in history.
The Congress was in a hyper-partisan gridelock and was unable to pass most legislation.
Ironically, for 100 years after the Civil War, it was the Democrats who tried to keep the Blacks from voting as until Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt began to attract Negro votes, Blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican. In 1964 President Johnson, with bipartisan support overcame the Southern Democratic Filibuster and passed the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act. The Republican leadership, sensing the Southern Democratic Anger at the Democratic Party Leadership, implemented their Southern Strategy and embraced the most racist Southern Democrats if they would switch parties. Most did quickly. Soon, almost all the conservatives had abandoned the Democratic Party. This made the Republican Party more conservative and soon liberal Republicans were extinct and by the end or the 20th century, most of the moderates were gone. With almost all of the worst racists in the nation becoming Republicans and being warmly welcomed by the Republican leadership, almost all Blacks became Democratic voters. Then the racist conservatives went back to their time-tested mechanisms for suppressing the Black vote—only this time it was for the benefit of the Republican party. Soon the non-racist Republicans, realizing that minority voter suppression could be an effective mechanism to offset the greater minority fertility rate, the increased voting rate of the young, and the alienation of many unmarried women to the more conservative Republican ideology, got behind voter fraud prevention—a more acceptable purpose for activities that coincidently could make it more difficult for minorities to register and vote. Those activities were what Judge Debevoise was referring to in this quotation.
Hanan Daoud Mikhael Ashrawi is a Palestinian leader, legislator, activist, and scholar who served as a member of the Leadership Committee and as an official spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace process, beginning with the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991. In 1996, Ashrawi was appointed as the Palestinian Authority Minister of Higher Education and Research. Prior to that, she was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Birzeit University and head of its Legal Aid Committee since the mid-1970s.
