Why the Civil Rights Act couldn’t pass today
At the same time, the Democratic Party’s stance on civil rights has steadily shifted from the color-blind approach of 50 years ago — a belief that if blacks and whites were granted equal standing at the ballot box and in public spaces and the workplace, justice would prevail — to an emphasis on color-conscious remedies like affirmative action and social programs that redistribute wealth.
“Republicans have never gotten on board with that last piece,” Kabaservice said, “and so Democrats now almost have to define Republicans as anti-civil rights.”Continue Reading
Indeed, Democrats have seized that viewpoint, sharpening their civil rights rhetoric against Republicans to the point where bipartisanship on the issue has all but disappeared. Obama himself has found it difficult, and even politically dangerous, to discuss questions of race too frankly in public, and he issued an anodyne proclamation in honor of the bill’s anniversary, pledging to “renew our commitment to building a freer, fairer, greater society” but making no mention of the Republicans’ crucial role in its passage.
At a forum at the Library of Congress the same day as the Rotunda ceremony — co-sponsored by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) to commemorate LBJ’s role in passing the bill — few if any Republicans were in attendance, and Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) made a fiery speech, noting that “the Red South” could yet be vanquished if hundreds of thousands of unregistered black voters signed up and cast ballots for Democrats.
The forum was interrupted by examples of the attention-deficit disorder so common to Congress’ three-day workweek (Pelosi ducked in before rushing to an event on pediatric AIDS; Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) ducked out to attend a book signing for his own memoir) that some who might have most benefited from the message were not there to hear Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). Fifty years ago, as a young leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis endured vicious beatings from racists, but he chose to recall that era’s “coalition of conscience,” and of the role of Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) in passing the bill. Asked by the panel’s moderator, Johnson’s former aide, Tom Johnson, to explain how that coalition fell apart, Lewis confessed that he had no ready or easy answer.
It fell to Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Johnson Robb, to remind the audience that one top Republican, House Minority Leader Charles Halleck (R-Ind.) actually lost his leadership for daring to work too closely with her father in the support of civil rights and other measures, to the ire of his conservative caucus.
Indeed, to a degree astounding to modern partisan sensibilities, Republican congressional leaders effectively neutralized civil rights as a political issue in 1964, by cooperating with northern Democrats to pass the bill, instead of torturing the opposing party by letting it fall victim to its internal divisions on civil rights. And Halleck was not the only Republican to pay a price.
Four years later, on the night of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Kuchel, the Senate’s Republican whip, who had tirelessly supported civil rights, lost the California Republican primary to Max Rafferty, the conservative state superintendent of education. Rafferty charged that Kuchel was a creature of Washington, too consumed with national issues, not loyal enough to Republican orthodoxy and out of touch with the folks back home. Eric Cantor’s recent defeat is a reminder that some things haven’t changed in 50 years.
Perhaps the most pointed question of the week was asked by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who mused aloud about what King and his contemporaries would think of today’s climate in the capital. “Would they not challenge us,” he wondered, “to come together across lines of party and geography in a great cause?”
But the “great cause” Levin went on to cite — restoration of a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down last year — is given no chance of passing the House, despite co-sponsorship from Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) for creating new criteria for determining which states must obtain approval from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws.
“There are no real Republican leaders on civil rights or voting rights, aside from Sensenbrenner,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the Election Law Blog. “And it’s only going to get more awkward, because we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The anniversaries of all these just serve to show how different things are today.”
Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at POLITICO and contributing editor for Vanity Fair as well as the author of the book “An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”