Republican About Face On Civil Rights!

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. marches through Selma. John Lewis (right) was injured in the event. He would later run for U.S. House as a Democrat.

The past doesn't seem to match up with the present. It's unfortunate that Republicans of present day are trying to rewrite history on the backs of the Black community. They have no freaking clue on what impact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 done for America.

That law banned discrimination in the workplace, retail establishments and services.

Yeah, the Republicans were instrumental in helping Democrats pass Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws. They deserve credit. But to keep saying it was only them when the Democrats held the majority and presidency is kind of disingenuous.

Today's Republican Party has no care for Civil Rights. They're proceeding to tear apart the very fabric of equal rights for Blacks, Hispanics and those in the LGBT community.

People like Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) would gladly repeal Civil Rights laws, if given the opportunity.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida), Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) claim they're a product of diversity within the Republican Party. Yet, they're the ones who vote to restrict your rights to vote. They rather see Blacks, Hispanics and Muslims locked up just like their fellow Republicans.

In a party that's 90% WHITE and 10% EVERYONE ELSE, you would think the problem solely lies within the party not the Democrats they love to attack for being a "racist" party.

The Republican governors are so eager to pass voter identification laws and rolling back early voting days.

They feel that "voter fraud" is a huge problem in urban community. Say if Tyrone Boykins and Shenquia Teasunae Johnson were without their state issued identifications and they were registered to vote. They wouldn't have an opportunity to vote. Even though you have to sign a book letting you are present, you still don't have enough credibility according to the Republicans. You're only allowed to vote once. Obviously you're not carrying three different identities to vote.

Black conservatives love to rail against the Democrats about being the party that supported racism.

Instead of looking into the facts, they'll just pull stuff right out of their asses.

Harry J. Enten of the Guardian wrote a pretty interesting piece about Republicans "claim" to Civil Rights.

Andrew Breitbart talks to Black Tea Party protester. The conservative agitator died of a heart attack in 2012.

He debunks the theory that Republicans mainly contributed to passage of Civil Rights. He even says that if the Democrats were the "racist" Black conservatives claim them to be, why did they nominate Barack Obama for president?

Enten wrote that Republicans are having trouble with minorities. Some like to point out that the party has a long history of standing up for civil rights compared to Democrats. Democrats, for example, were less likely to vote for the civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. Democrats were more likely to filibuster. Yet, a closer look at the voting coalitions suggests a more complicated picture that ultimately explains why Republicans are not viewed as the party of civil rights.

He wrote that if look you at the party vote in both houses of Congress, it fits the historical pattern. Republicans are more in favor of the bill:

80% of Republicans in the House and Senate voted for the bill. Less than 70% of Democrats did. Indeed, Minority Leader Republican Everett Dirksen led the fight to end the filibuster. Meanwhile, Democrats such as Richard Russell of Georgia and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina tried as hard as they could to sustain a filibuster.

This guy represents Republicans. This guy is probably one of the reasons why Blacks hate the Republican Party.

Of course, it was also Democrats who helped usher the bill through the House, Senate, and ultimately a Democratic president who signed it into law. The bill wouldn't have passed without the support of Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, a Democrat. Majority Whip Hubert Humphrey, who basically split the Democratic party in two with his 1948 Democratic National Convention speech calling for equal rights for all, kept tabs on individual members to ensure the bill had the numbers to overcome the filibuster.

Put another way, party affiliation seems to be somewhat predictive, but something seems to be missing. So, what factor did best predicting voting?

You don't need to know too much history to understand that the South from the civil war to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 tended to be opposed to minority rights. This factor was separate from party identification or ideology. We can easily control for this variable by breaking up the voting by those states that were part of the confederacy and those that were not.



You can see that geography was far more predictive of voting coalitions on the Civil Rights than party affiliation. What linked Dirksen and Mansfield was the fact that they weren't from the south. In fact, 90% of members of Congress from states (or territories) that were part of the Union voted in favor of the act, while less than 10% of members of Congress from the old Confederate states voted for it. This 80 pt. difference between regions is far greater than the 15 pt. difference between parties.

He concluded that nearly 100% of Union state Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act compared to 85% of Republicans. None of the southern Republicans voted for the bill, while a small percentage of southern Democrats did.

The same pattern holds true when looking at ideology instead of party affiliation. The folks over at Voteview.com, who created DW-nominate scores to measure the ideology of congressmen and senators, found that the more liberal a congressman or senator was the more likely he would vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, once one controlled for a factor closely linked to geography.

That's why Strom Thurmond left the Democratic party soon after the Civil Right Act passed. He recognized that of the two parties, it was the Republican party that was more hospitable to his message. The Republican candidate for president in 1964, Barry Goldwater, was one of the few non-Confederate state senators to vote against the bill. He carried his home state of Arizona and swept the deep southern states – a first for a Republican ever.

Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Congresswoman from California holds hands with Georgia's Democratic Congressman John Lewis (a former civil rights leader) as they walk across the U.S. Capitol lawn to vote on the Affordable Healthcare Reform Law.

Now, it wasn't that the Civil Rights Act was what turned the South against the Democrats or minorities against Republicans. Those patterns, as Trende showed, had been developing for a while. It was, however, a manifestation of these growing coalitions. The South gradually became home to the conservative party, while the north became home to the liberal party.

Today, the transformation is nearly complete. President Obama carried only 18% of former Confederate states, while taking 62% of non-Confederate states in 2012. Only 27% of southern senators are Democrats, while 62% of Union state senators are Democrats. And 29% of southern members in the House are Democrats compared to 54% in states or territories that were part of the Union.

Thus, it seems to me that minorities have a pretty good idea of what they are doing when joining the Democratic party. They recognize that the Democratic party of today looks and sounds a lot more like the Democratic party of the North that with near unity passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 than the southern Democrats of the era who blocked it, and today would, like Strom Thurmond, likely be Republicans.