The LBJ Renaissance

I will confess to the fact that I am of an age where I remember JFK's assassination and Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing in as Kennedy's succession and then his 1964 re-election.  I also remember his disastrous decision to escalate the fool's errand in Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This fatal decision ultimately led to Johnson's decision not to seek re-election in 1968.  Johnson was not without his faults, but sadly his contributions to the advancement of civil rights is now often obscured by the Vietnam War disaster.  But for Johnson, the civil rights effort begun under John F. Kennedy might have died.   As The Daily Beast reports, a new appreciation of Johnson's civil right role - at least out of GOP/white supremacist circles - is re-emerging.  It is telling that the GOP claims that Democrats "buy votes" from blacks through handouts.  The reality is that many blacks still remember which political party forced through the Voting Rights Act - and Act that Republicans seek to gut and render useless.  Here are some excerpts:

History often casts its glow fickly. Sometimes we get a sense of how one will be reflected in its light contemporaneously. Sometimes it takes a little longer to sort things out.

In 1865, when an assassin’s bullet felled Abraham Lincoln, his loss was felt immediately and his place in the presidential pantheon all but assured. Though he had elicited withering criticism during the course of his four-year presidency, the sixteenth president had lived to see the Civil War to its bloody end, keeping the Union whole while putting a constitutional end to the odious institution of slavery. “It is small consolation that he died at a moment in the war when he could best be spared,” wrote Harper’s Weekly just after his death, “for no nation is ready for the loss of such a friend.”


It has taken history far longer to catch up to the legacy of our 36^th president, Lyndon Johnson.  
A hundred years after Lincoln’s passing, Johnson stood before Congress and delivered one of the great, unheralded speeches of its age, a plea before Congress to put the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Though slavery had long been abolished at Lincoln’s hand, racism, virulent and intractable, continued to plague much of America. A year earlier, Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first meaningful civil rights bill since Reconstruction, striking down Jim Crow laws that allowed for racial segregation throughout the South.

“[I]t is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice,” Johnson said as he looked over his former Congressional colleagues in the House chamber, many of them unyielding segregationists, as his mouth tightened and his eyes narrowed determinedly. “And we shall overcome.”

Through what became known legendarily as “the Johnson Treatment”—wielding political capital, horse-trading, threatening, cajoling, flattering, whatever it took—Johnson got his Voting Rights Act. He considered the law his greatest legislative accomplishment. That’s saying something given that he also saw through Medicare, Medicaid, the Immigration Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act, the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act, the Public Broadcasting Act, the Arts & Humanities Act and a spate of other landmark laws. 

It took Lyndon Johnson to finish what Abraham Lincoln had started.

Yet despite his titanic role in America’s quest for civil rights, the greatest domestic movement of the Twentieth Century, LBJ has been largely underappreciated—even ignored—until recently. While Lincoln won his war, vanquishing the Confederate Army, Johnson could never quite overcome the Communist insurgency in Vietnam. It was Ho Chi Minh who prevailed, not LBJ.

Now, forty-five later, Lyndon Johnson seems to finally be getting his due; history’s light is beginning to penetrate the shroud of Vietnam that has darkened his legacy. “I absolutely think the time has come,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin of reevaluating Johnson’s legacy in a front page New York Times story on Sunday. “When he left the office, the trial and tribulations of the war were so emotional that it was hard to see everything else he had done beyond Vietnam.”

[I]n early April, the LBJ Presidential Library will host a Civil Rights Summit to mark the act’s fiftieth anniversary that will draw a host of luminaries including many aging heroes of Civil Rights movement and as many as four U.S. presidents. Moreover, LBJ is regularly upheld in the media as a president who got laws passed through Congress at a time when Washington sausage-making has all but ground to a halt.

Though Johnson died over four decades ago, succumbing to heart failure at his beloved LBJ Ranch in 1973 at the age of 64, we are only now starting to get the true measure of the man.

The Radical - and Scary - Ron Paul

While Ron Paul continues to attract followers, many do not seem to know all of his baggage and in someways frightening past positions. Once you do a thorough overview, it becomes difficult to figure out what the man currently believes and just how big of a threat he'd be to civil liberties even though he claims to be a libertarian. Paul seems to welcome mob majority rule and if you're black, Hispanic, foreign born, or gay, he seems to believe the government has no business in protection your rights from the worse prejudices and bigotry of the majority. A column in the Washington Post looks at some of Paul's past statements and positions. The only good news in any of it is the knowledge that Paul is not likely to be the GOP nominee. Here are some column highlights:

No other recent candidate hailing from the party of Lincoln has accused Abraham Lincoln of causing a “senseless” war and ruling with an “iron fist.” Or regarded Ronald Reagan’s presidency a “dramatic failure.” Or proposed the legalization of prostitution and heroin use. Or called America the most “aggressive, extended and expansionist” empire in world history. Or promised to abolish the CIA, depart NATO and withdraw military protection from South Korea. Or blamed terrorism on American militarism, since “they’re terrorists because we’re occupiers.” Or accused the American government of a Sept. 11 “coverup” and called for an investigation headed by Dennis Kucinich. Or described the killing of Osama bin Laden as “absolutely not necessary.” Or affirmed that he would not have sent American troops to Europe to end the Holocaust. Or excused Iranian nuclear ambitions as “natural,” while dismissing evidence of those ambitions as “war propaganda.” Or published a newsletter stating that the 1993 World Trade Center attack might have been “a setup by the Israeli Mossad,” and defending former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and criticizing the “evil of forced integration.”

Each of these is a disqualifying scandal. Taken together, a kind of grandeur creeps in. The ambition of Paul and his supporters is breathtaking. They wish to erase 158 years of Republican Party history in a single political season, substituting a platform that is isolationist, libertarian, conspiratorial and tinged with racism. It won’t happen.

Whatever his personal views, Paul categorically opposes the legal construct that ended state-sanctioned racism. His libertarianism involves not only the abolition of the Department of Education but also a rejection of the federal role in civil rights from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is the reason Paul is among the most anti-Lincoln public officials since Jefferson Davis resigned from the United States Senate.

A federal role in civil rights is an attack on a “free society.” According to Paul, it is like the federal government dictating that you can’t “smoke a cigar.” The comparison of civil rights to the enjoyment of a cigar is a sad symptom of ideological delirium. It also illustrates confusion at the heart of libertarianism. Government can be an enemy of liberty. But the achievement of a free society can also be the result of government action — the protection of individual liberty against corrupt state governments or corrupt business practices or corrupt local laws.

Paul’s conception of liberty is not the same as Lincoln’s — which is not a condemnation of Lincoln. Paul’s view would have freed African Americans from the statism of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act. It would have freed the occupants of concentration camps from their dependency on liberating armies. And it would free the Republican Party from any claim to conscience or power.

Growing GOP Extremism at the State Level

The growing insanity of the Republican Party at the national level - e.g, that Michele Bachmann could even launch a presidential campaign that was taken seriously - is frightening enough. But in some ways even more frightening things are developing at the state level. Mississippi's legislation to grant embryo's person hood status so as to criminalize abortion and even some types of contraception is one such example (its no coincidence as Bob Felton notes that Mississippi high school graduates have an average composite ACT score of 18.81 — the lowest in the country) that might actually become law. Another case of batshitery comes from Alabama - another state not exactly known for embracing modernity and civil rights for all - where the state is challenging the right of the United States Justice Department to investigate possible civil rights abuses connected to Alabama's anti-immigrant immigration law in a manner reminiscent of George Wallace back in the battles over desegregation. The New York Times editorial looks at this disturbing mindset and these are some highlights:

Surely Alabama’s attorney general, Luther Strange, did not mean to summon the memory of Gov. George Wallace when he picked a fight with the Department of Justice last week over the state’s new immigration law.

Surely no law-enforcement official of his stature would have responded to a fact-gathering request by challenging the federal government’s “legal authority” to investigate reports of civil rights abuses. Could there be an attorney general in the South — or anywhere — who is not acutely aware, and mindful, of the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

The federal inquiry was prompted by the state’s new immigration law, which took effect in September, part of which requires schools to check the immigration status of schoolchildren and their parents. The Justice Department has already sued Alabama over the law, the nation’s cruelest collection of immigration enforcement schemes and punishments. After receiving reports that students were being harassed and bullied, and that frightened parents were keeping children out of school, the department asked 39 school superintendents for data on student absences and withdrawals since the school year began.

Instead of acknowledging that the Supreme Court has upheld every child’s right to a public education regardless of immigration status, and that the new law requires schools to collect the information that the government was seeking, Mr. Strange sent Thomas Perez, head of the Civil Rights Division, an ultimatum. . . . . “Your letter does not state your legal authority to demand the information or to compel its production. If you have such legal authority, please provide it to me by noon Central Standard Time on Friday, November 4, 2011. Otherwise, I will assume that you have none and will proceed accordingly.”


Mr. Perez’s reply, sent Friday, was to the point. He cited Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act. He also reminded Mr. Strange of an array of other laws that federal agencies would be considering when investigating possible violations in Alabama: the Fair Housing Act, the Safe Streets Act, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “among others.”

The law’s architects and supporters proclaim that their goal is to catastrophically disrupt the lives of illegal immigrants and their families. With reports of harassment and panic, and of a mass exodus of immigrants fleeing the state, the potential for civil rights abuses is acutely obvious.

That Alabama’s attorney general would not welcome a federal inquiry, but bristle instead, with an implicit appeal to state’s rights — with all the defiant history of intolerance and minority oppression those words suggest — says volumes. All Americans should feel ashamed.

No doubt some readers will accuse me of beating up Republicans while giving Democrats a free pass. I make no claim that Democrats are perfect or that the Democratic Party doesn't have problems too. However, the increasing level of hate, incivility and desire to turn the clock back to less than honorable periods in this nation's history seems to derive increasingly solely from the GOP and its Christianist/Tea Party base. They would turn American into something very ugly if they could have their way.

Senator Edward Kennedy - Dead at 77

I only met Ted Kennedy once years ago while a student at the University of Virginia in the days when Chuck Robb was the president of the law school's Student Legal Forum, but I recall how impressed I was by him. Back then, Kennedy was in his early 40's and a very handsome guy in person not to mention a moving speaker. Lunatics of the far right will probably rejoice at Kennedy's passing, but for those who value civil rights and equality for all citizens, Kennedy never let up the quest and he was certainly a friend to LGBT Americans. Like all of us, he made mistakes in his life time, but tried to make a meaningful difference for others - for that I commend him. It will be difficult to replace his stature in the Senate and it will be interesting to see who is picked to replace him. Here are highlights from the Washington Post:
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Edward M. Kennedy, one of the most powerful and influential senators in American history and one of three brothers whose political triumphs and personal tragedies captivated the nation for decades, died late Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 77. He had been battling brain cancer.

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His family announced his death in a brief statement released early Wednesday. "We've lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever," the statement said. "We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice, fairness and opportunity for all."

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President Obama released a statement Wednesday morning, pointing out that "virtually every major piece of legislation to advance the civil rights, health and economic well being of the American people bore his name and resulted from his efforts. . . .

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Long before he fell ill, Kennedy made health care a major focus of his career, terming it "the cause of my life." His legislation resulted in access to health care for millions of people and funded cures for diseases that afflicted people around the world. He was a longtime advocate for universal health care and was instrumental in promoting biomedical research, as well as AIDS research and treatment. He was a leader in the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Bill -- with Sen. Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.) -- which allowed employees to keep health insurance after leaving their job.

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On most other issues, most notably the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kennedy was bitterly opposed to the Bush administration. He once said that his proudest Senate vote was his 2002 vote against authorizing Bush to use military force against Iraq. "There was no imminent threat," he said in a 2004 speech at the Brookings Institution. "This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud."