LAT: Who'll Apologize for the Filibuster? - The Senate's Sick 'Apology' = Hypocrisy on Lynching

Who knew the Senate was so cheeky? On Monday, a mere three weeks after the centrist, bipartisan Gang of 14 agreed, ever so proudly, to save the institution's fabled filibuster, senators passed a resolution apologizing for the chamber's failure to enact anti-lynching legislation....

What wasn't said is that the Senate was "uniquely culpable" because it cherished the filibuster — a procedural rule that enhances each member's individual power — over the Constitution. The Senate's failure to acknowledge the cause of its homicidal negligence robs its apology of much meaning or sincerity....

The apology, in effect, covers up just how self-interested the Senate's actions really were, and how indefensible the filibuster remains. It distorts history....

Landrieu exuberantly proclaimed: "I am so proud we were able to reach an agreement that truly reflects the best traditions of the Senate."

...Her fellow sensible centrist, Republican Susan Collins of Maine, said the agreement "helps preserve the unique culture of this institution," a "culture in which legislative goals are reached with patience and perseverance."

These senators are insulting our intelligence. The filibuster is an anti-democratic instrument that upsets the delicate system of checks and balances already written into the Constitution. Liberal Democrats in the Senate aren't in favor of lynching, but they are fighting to preserve a reactionary weapon that, in future wrenching national debates, will empower obstructionists to kidnap that body just as they did during the civil rights debates. Not acknowledging that the filibuster was at issue in the lynching context, not even to address the filibuster's tarnished history, amounts to intellectual cowardice....

I wonder what this guy's politics are.

Andrés Martinez was named editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times in September 2004. He is responsible for The Times' daily editorial pages.

Martinez had previously served as assistant editorial page editor and a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, and had been an editorial writer at the paper since 2000. He also was a 2004 Pulitzer Prize finalist for editorial writing. Prior to joining the New York Times, Martinez was an editorial writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

He is the author of "24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas."

Before entering journalism, Martinez practiced communications law in Washington, D.C., and served as a law clerk for a federal district judge in Dallas.

A native of Mexico, Martinez earned a B.A. degree in history from Yale University in 1988, a M.A. degree in Russian history from Stanford University in 1989 and graduated from Columbia University Law School with a J.D. degree in 1992.

Republicans as a party? Yes you are right. However, we must also acknowledge that a large part of those states who are now conservative, were, at the time of the civil rights era, dixicrats. They were not the donks of today. I post this as someone who was raised in AZ by regan democrats. I have voted Republican all of my life, starting with Reagan in 84. My mom and dad have not voted for a donk at any level since '84.

I live in NC now, and can tell you that the south has really reformed it's thinking since the 60's; but in the 60's quite a few folks from my neck of the woods were staunchly opposed to civil rights. We need to be intellectually honest with this issue. Some conservatives, even Goldwater, were opposed to civil rights in the 60's. Now, the GOP did not, and has not become a racist party. Only one Democratic Senator who voted against civil rights shifted allegiances to the Republicans. That Senator, Strom Thurmond, later renounced his segregationist past and voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1980. Most democrats who opposed civil rights such as Albert Gore Sr., J. William Fulbright, and future Democratic Senate Leader (1977-1988) and former KKK member Robert C. Bryd (who democrats now call the conscience of the senate) remained Democrats. The vast majority of southern segregationist did not become Republicans.

Segregationists created the Dixiecrats and stayed with their party of origin, the Democratic Party, when the civil rights movement succeeded. Republicans did not make gains in the south till much later. One can argue, and I do, that segregationists were voted out of office by "the new south" conservatives after the major realingment that nixon started and is just now becoming cemented with the south becoming "red".

As to goldwater's vote, and state's rights in general, both are (and were) valid conservative arguments (AUH20 was not approving "seperate but equal" on a moral basis, but opposed the bill on the grounds that its public accommodations section violated people’s rights to do business with whom they pleased). Brown v Board was the right "idea" enacted by the wrong branch of goverment. I think that eventually, America would have realized on it's own, and voiced through the balot box, that jim crow was bad, on a state by state basis. We would have the same society with no silliness like affirmative action, and resulting judicial tyrany (the courts finding new "rights" for everyone under the 14th). It would have taken longer, but given our current political state of affairs, better.

I agree with much of what you say, but the basic "big lie" was that segregationists were by definition, Conservatives. A few, like Thurmond were, but most, were solid New Deal Democrats who loved big government spending. Many segregationists were also Cold War "Hawks', but many like Gore and Fullbright, were anything but Hawks, and probably in some degree of sympathy to global Marxism. Being a segregationist had nothing to do witth being liberal or conservative... they were both.

It's the MSM linking of the Conservatives with Segregation that is the source of confusion.

As to the switch of the South from the Democrat to Republican party, don't overlook the large influx of transplants from the North & Midwest to the South in the decades after WWII. The strength of the Republican party in the south is not in the center Cities, not in the isolated rural areas, but in the new suburbs where those Yankees settled.

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