Posted on 01/21/2003 5:13:42 AM PST by SJackson
By acting decisively on the basis of fundamental Republican principle, George W. Bush is taking the Party of Lincoln off the defensive on civil rights, where it has never belonged.
The administration filed a "friend of the court" brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the system of racial preferences the University of Michigan uses to grant admission. This, coupled with Bush's severe scolding of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott for making a racially insensitive remark, and his renomination of U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering to the Court of Appeals, reaffirms the Republican commitment to equal justice under law, and the GOP's opposition to racism in all its forms.
Republicans, unlike Democrats, have nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to race relations.
The Republican Party was formed to fight slavery. Republicans in Congress supported overwhelmingly every civil rights bill before the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and were chiefly responsible for passage of those bills. (More than 80 percent of Republicans in Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All but one Republican - ex-Democrat Strom Thurmond - voted for the Voting Rights Act.)
Every segregationist who ever served in Congress was a Democrat. It was a Republican president (Eisenhower) who sent federal troops to remove Democratic governors who were standing in schoolhouse doors.
Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented, for Republicans, the kind of victory over segregration that Lee's surrender at Appomattox had been over slavery. Republicans thought their century-long fight for equal rights was essentially won.
Having come late to the struggle for civil rights, the Democratic Party morphed easily from supporting policies which discriminated against blacks to supporting policies which discriminate against whites.
The chief Democratic sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, said the Civil Rights Act did not provide for quotas. "If the Senator can find in Title VII...any language that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not there."
Humphrey, perhaps the most sincere man ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, doubtless meant what he said. But "affirmative action" has been the basis of Democratic policy on race ever since.
The myth that Republicans have something to be ashamed of on race relations is based on a malicious distortion, and on a lie.
Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president that year, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because he thought it would lead to quotas. A founder of the NAACP in Arizona who had voted for every previous civil rights bill, and who was responsible for desegrating the Arizona National Guard (well before Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces), Goldwater could not reasonably be accused of racism (though he was).
The lie concerns Richard Nixon and his so-called Southern Strategy in 1968.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
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