The Trump administration has been forced to change course in the face of political pressure this year, but I’m aware of only one instance in which officials have felt compelled to reverse a reversed reversal.
To understand what I’m talking about, consider this new report from The Washington Post:
The U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday deleted language from its new workplace harassment policy that had downgraded the definition of swastikas and nooses from overt hate symbols to ‘potentially divisive,’ an abrupt turnaround after the more lenient interpretation of those items was allowed to take effect this week despite objections from Congress.
In a message to all Coast Guard personnel, Adm. Kevin Lunday, the service’s top officer, said those revisions had been ‘completely removed’ from the policy manual.
Let’s take a moment to review how we arrived at this point.
On the afternoon of Nov. 20, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Coast Guard would no longer classify swastikas as hate symbols, instead adopting new guidelines that would label the Nazi-era insignia as “potentially divisive.” The same policy was intended to apply to nooses, too.
The Coast Guard falls under the Department of Homeland Security, and after the Post’s initial report, a DHS official described it as “an absolute ludicrous lie,” “unequivocally false” and “fake crap.”
The evidence suggested otherwise. Indeed, as the public learned of the proposed guidelines and outrage over the change grew, officials did exactly what many predicted they would do. On Nov. 21, less than a full day after the Post’s initial report was published, the Coast Guard reversed course in a move that the newspaper described as “stunning and lightning-fast.” Under the revised policy, swastikas and nooses would be considered “hate symbols.”
Nevertheless, earlier this week, the Post reported that the Coast Guard allowed a new workplace harassment policy to take effect that downgraded swastikas and nooses from overt hate symbols to “potentially divisive” symbols. This news prompted immediate and bipartisan pushback on Capitol Hill, leading to the latest in a series of shifts on Thursday. In November, when the controversy first broke, some senators demanded answers about how and why the initial change was proposed in the first place. Given the bizarre shifts, the congressional scrutiny clearly deserves to be even more intense now. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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