TW: Bartlett brings out a quote from one of his books to counter Harry Reid's comparison of the Civil Rights Act passage to the current health reform process. Comments like Reid's are not particularly useful since they are easily countered with passages like below. But while Bartlett's point about Republican participation in the Civil Rights Act is accurate, it's accuracy holds only relative to the electoral composition as of 1965.
The Civil Rights Act itself was a primary (although not exclusive) catalyst for the fracturing of the Democratic party whereby almost all of those inclined to vote against things like the Act migrated in ever more rapid fashion to the Republican party. Yes relics like Byrd exist but then he is over 90 years old. When his genre have died or retired they have not been replaced within the Democratic party. The transition did not happen overnight it has taken decades but it is now nearly complete.
So while Bartlett's quotes are literally true, the more important lesson is what happened after the passage of the Act. Not only are the old Southern Dems nearly extinct, those Republicans of 1965 who voted for the Act are a nearly extinct species in today's Republican party.
Bartlett failed to mention the wing of the Republican party which also voted against the Act, the Goldwater wing the direct forebears to the Reaganites of the 1980's and the W. Bushies of the 00's. Combine those blocs with today's tea bagging, Palin worshipping base of the Republican party, who would have had nothing to do with the Act in 1965 just as today it viscerally opposes efforts to legitimize gay marriage and rails against any perceived "government" intervention which was a prime argument of those Southern Dems in 1965 (and for decades prior) to the Civil Rights Act, and voila you have today's Republican party. Little wonder any moderation in opposition to any moderate to progressive legislation is considered a vice by the Republicans.
This stratification of the parties where the odd alliance within the Democratic party of the old Southern bloc and the Yankee liberals no longer holds. Whilst the Rockefeller Republican social liberals no longer align with old line Midwestern conservatives has greatly altered electoral equations and made comparisons to pre-1965 party alignments and bi-partisanship efforts largely irrelevant.
From Bruce Bartlett:
"The enormous desire to memorialize the senseless murder of John F. Kennedy, plus Johnson’s determination to demonstrate his power and purge his own racist past by getting a substantive civil rights bill through the Senate, proved a formidable combination...[but the bill was filibustered anyway] people like Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, whose individual filibuster of the 1964 civil rights bill is the second longest in history..Only a true believer would ever undertake such a futile effort.
Even so, one final element was essential to passage of the civil rights bill—the strong support of Republicans. Although Democrats had a historically large majority in the House of Representatives with 259 members to 176 Republicans, almost as many Republicans voted for the civil rights bill as Democrats. The final vote was 290 for the bill and 130 against. Of the “yea” votes, 152 were Democrats and 138 were Republicans. Of the “nay” votes, three-fourths were Democrats. In short, the bill could not have passed without Republican support. As Time Magazine observed, “In one of the most lopsidedly Democratic Houses since the days of F.D.R., Republicans were vital to the passage of a bill for which the Democratic administration means to take full political credit this year.”
A similar story is told in the Senate...Of those voting “nay,” 80 percent were Democrats, including Robert C. Byrd and former Vice President Al Gore’s father, who was then a senator from Tennessee...Close observers of the Senate deliberations recognized that the Republican leader, Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, had done yeoman work in responding to the objections of individual Republicans and holding almost all of them together in support of the bill. “More than any other single individual,” the New York Times acknowledged, “he was responsible for getting the civil rights bill through the Senate.”
http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1300/who-opposed-civil-rights-act-1964
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