The climate is so different from the one that produced the Civil Rights Act. Why the Civil Rights Act couldn't pass today

It was a painful tableau: The bipartisan leaders of Congress linking hands in the Capitol Rotunda and swaying to the strains of “We Shall Overcome” as they commemorated the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi sang along with the crowd, but Mitch McConnell and John Boehner’s lips were frozen in silent, self-conscious smiles.

The climate in today’s Washington is so different from the one that produced what many scholars view as the most important law of the 20th century that celebrating the law’s legacy is awkward for Republicans and Democrats alike. Neither party bears much resemblance to its past counterpart, and the bipartisanship that carried the day then is now all but dead.


Congress is deadlocked on every big question, from immigration reform to a grand bargain on taxes and spending, so it’s hard to believe the two parties once cooperated to address the single most controversial domestic issue of the day — legal equality for the races — or that Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill 50 years ago Wednesday, in the middle of a presidential election year. Now Boehner is suing President Barack Obama for failing to faithfully execute the laws, and Reid inveighs daily about the Koch brothers’ contributions to GOP causes.

( PHOTOS: Civil Rights Act turns 50)

The current congressional leaders gathered last week not to honor Johnson — or any of the legislative leaders who actually passed the landmark law — but to award a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal to The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, whose crusade helped create the climate that made the bill possible. In his life, racial tensions helped make King such a polarizing figure that both Johnson and John F. Kennedy worried about seeming too close to him, but in martyrdom and myth, he is the only politically safe ground on which present day leaders could unite.

Yes, Reid paid tribute to the bill’s Republican floor leader, Thomas Kuchel of California (though he mispronounced his name as KEE-chul, not KEE-kul). And Boehner invoked the crucial role played by his fellow Ohio Republican, Rep. William McCulloch, in helping Kennedy and Johnson pass the bill, but the very next day, Boehner betrayed McCulloch’s bipartisan legacy by announcing his intention to sue Obama for usurping congressional powers.

“The Republican Party today doesn’t really honor its past,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.” “The Republican Party that had been ceased to be sometime in the 1980s, and the modern party — the radical conservative party — not only has little or no interest in honoring its history, it is actively hostile to it.”

( PHOTOS: Civil rights summit)

Part of the problem is this: Although the Civil Rights Act passed the Senate by 73-27, with 27 out of 33 Republican votes, one of the six Republicans who voted against it was Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who weeks later became the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer and started the long process by which the Party of Lincoln became the party of white backlash, especially in the South. Today, Republicans hold complete legislative control in all 11 states of the Old Confederacy for only the second time since Reconstruction.

Current GOP Chairman Reince Priebus has hired dozens of black and Latino field organizers, and he himself has made the rounds to historically black colleges and universities in an effort to launch College Republican chapters there. “Having bipartisanship on campus and giving our students options is really important,” he told a gathering at Central State University near Dayton, Ohio, in May.

( On POLITICO Magazine: Did Obama Fail Black America?)

But the position of the GOP’s congressional wing on issues from immigration, to voting rights, to the minimum wage (while helping to rack up Republican victories in individual districts) is broadly alienating to most African-American voters. So are efforts at the state level to impose new voter identification laws or other limits on access to the ballot box that disproportionately affect black voters. All that makes it hard for today’s GOP to lay plausible claim to its undisputed legacy on civil rights.

At the same time, the Democratic Party’s stance on civil rights has steadily shifted from the color-blind approach of 50 years ago — a belief that if blacks and whites were granted equal standing at the ballot box and in public spaces and the workplace, justice would prevail — to an emphasis on color-conscious remedies like affirmative action and social programs that redistribute wealth.

“Republicans have never gotten on board with that last piece,” Kabaservice said, “and so Democrats now almost have to define Republicans as anti-civil rights.”

Indeed, Democrats have seized that viewpoint, sharpening their civil rights rhetoric against Republicans to the point where bipartisanship on the issue has all but disappeared. Obama himself has found it difficult, and even politically dangerous, to discuss questions of race too frankly in public, and he issued an anodyne proclamation in honor of the bill’s anniversary, pledging to “renew our commitment to building a freer, fairer, greater society” but making no mention of the Republicans’ crucial role in its passage.

At a forum at the Library of Congress the same day as the Rotunda ceremony — co-sponsored by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) to commemorate LBJ’s role in passing the bill — few if any Republicans were in attendance, and Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) made a fiery speech, noting that “the Red South” could yet be vanquished if hundreds of thousands of unregistered black voters signed up and cast ballots for Democrats.

The forum was interrupted by examples of the attention-deficit disorder so common to Congress’ three-day workweek (Pelosi ducked in before rushing to an event on pediatric AIDS; Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) ducked out to attend a book signing for his own memoir) that some who might have most benefited from the message were not there to hear Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). Fifty years ago, as a young leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis endured vicious beatings from racists, but he chose to recall that era’s “coalition of conscience,” and of the role of Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) in passing the bill. Asked by the panel’s moderator, Johnson’s former aide, Tom Johnson, to explain how that coalition fell apart, Lewis confessed that he had no ready or easy answer.

It fell to Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Johnson Robb, to remind the audience that one top Republican, House Minority Leader Charles Halleck (R-Ind.) actually lost his leadership for daring to work too closely with her father in the support of civil rights and other measures, to the ire of his conservative caucus.

Indeed, to a degree astounding to modern partisan sensibilities, Republican congressional leaders effectively neutralized civil rights as a political issue in 1964, by cooperating with northern Democrats to pass the bill, instead of torturing the opposing party by letting it fall victim to its internal divisions on civil rights. And Halleck was not the only Republican to pay a price.

Four years later, on the night of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Kuchel, the Senate’s Republican whip, who had tirelessly supported civil rights, lost the California Republican primary to Max Rafferty, the conservative state superintendent of education. Rafferty charged that Kuchel was a creature of Washington, too consumed with national issues, not loyal enough to Republican orthodoxy and out of touch with the folks back home. Eric Cantor’s recent defeat is a reminder that some things haven’t changed in 50 years.

Perhaps the most pointed question of the week was asked by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who mused aloud about what King and his contemporaries would think of today’s climate in the capital. “Would they not challenge us,” he wondered, “to come together across lines of party and geography in a great cause?”

But the “great cause” Levin went on to cite — restoration of a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down last year — is given no chance of passing the House, despite co-sponsorship from Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) for creating new criteria for determining which states must obtain approval from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws.

“There are no real Republican leaders on civil rights or voting rights, aside from Sensenbrenner,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the Election Law Blog. “And it’s only going to get more awkward, because we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The anniversaries of all these just serve to show how different things are today.”

Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at POLITICO and contributing editor for Vanity Fair as well as the author of the book “An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”