This headline caught my eye on Wednesday:

Lawler Recognized as Most Effective Republican in Civil Rights Policy Area of the 118th Congress

I know you started yawning before you even got to the end of that one, but for those of us who watch Mike Lawler, this was head-snapping.

Mike Lawler? Civil rights?

The reality behind this claim should make us all deeply skeptical of any Congressional press release, but most definitely all of Mike Lawler’s. It all fits into our current Bizarro World, where the CDC says vaccines may cause autism, and our spray-tanned dotard dictator dances the night away with a murderous Saudi Prince after closing the latest Trump Organization deals.

Lawler is trumpeting a new report issued by the Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL). The CEL is a partnership between the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University that has developed a scoring methodology to measure the effectiveness of our lawmakers. See Rule of Lawler’s prior post, Center for Effective Surrender.

The CEL this week released a new set of “Interest & Legislative Effectiveness Scores (ILES)” for the 118th Congress (2023-25). Lo and behold, there was Mike Lawler on top of the leader board for the Republicans in one of the 21 different issue areas listed: Civil Rights.

It’s hard to get past the oxymoronic concept of an effective Republican on civil rights. A pretty low bar, I’d say. The sweet spot for legislators like Mike. Grab that low-hanging fruit when nobody’s looking, then arrange it in a fruit bowl of sweet nothings.

As the CEL itself recognizes:

In analyzing issue area success, we see that very high scores arise either from a truly remarkable performance in lawmaking by an individual in his or her chosen area, or because that area featured very little lawmaking activity across all members.

Let’s bank on the latter for Lawler, especially in a Congress where the GOP held the House reigns, and was consumed with investigations of the Biden crime family, the weaponization of the government, and climate cartels. Indeed, Lawler achieved his illustrious civil rights banner by sponsoring 2 “civil rights” bills in the 118th Congress, neither of which made it into law.

The first was the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act, which was designed to protect small business owners, not promote the rights of the disabled. Critics argued it would have weakened ADA enforcement. The bill never made it out of committee.

The second bill, the only one that CEL classified as “substantive and significant,” was the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, which passed the GOP-controlled House, but died in the Senate. This Act would have expanded the definition of “antisemitism,” as considered by the Department of Education when investigating antisemitic acts on college campuses. The act of a legislator devoted to civil rights, or a cynical bid for the favor of his largest campaign fund contributor, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee?

It is for these two failed and inconsequential bills that Mike Lawler scored one of 84 spots on the somewhat interesting, but ultimately pointless, CEL scorecard. A scorecard designed for retail politicians like Mike Lawler who focus on obscure formulas and algorithms to gin up their profile and serve their own ambitions. A man who turned this obscure and empty entry in a ledger of curiosities into a full-blown press release, projecting himself as a Republican John Lewis. Said Lawler, “I’m deeply grateful for this recognition.” I think he meant self-recognition.

Of course, Donald Trump has done just fine without Lawler’s antisemitism act or any other legislative authority, using antisemitism as pretext to demand whatever he wants from the nation’s top universities, clamping down on free speech, DEI programs and “woke” leadership.

Donald Trump will certainly not be gathering accolades for his advancement of civil rights. The suppression of free speech; the demise of the Voting Rights Act; the masked stormtroopers profiling, tackling & terrorizing at will; the prosecutions of political foes; “quiet, Piggy” ….

And if he is remembered at all, it won’t be for the advancement of civil rights. Mike Lawler will be recalled as a prop for the king of uncivil wrongs.

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Photo credit: DAVID PASHAEE/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images