A tip of the hat to Cardoza for having the common decency to correct Foxx.Thinkprogress wrote: During a debate on the House floor today over designating 21 miles of the Molalla River as “wild and scenic,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who opposes the legislation, tried to claim a progressive environmental record for her party. “Actually, the GOP has been the leader in starting good environmental programs in this country,” said Foxx.
Foxx then extended her claims of the GOP’s progressive history to the issue of civil rights. “Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the ’60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle,” said Fox. “They love to engage in revisionist history.” When Foxx finally yielded her time on the floor, Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA) passionately rebuked her:
CARDOZA: Today, what I’m hearing on the floor really takes the cake. The gentlelady from North Carolina, in her statement just now, indicated that the Republican GOP had passed the Civil Rights Act legislation with almost no help from the Democrats. I can’t believe my ears. It was the Kennedy and Johnson administration where we passed that Great Society legislation. It was over the objections of people like Jesse Helms from the gentlewoman’s state that we passed that civil rights legislation. John Lewis…
FOXX: Would, would the gentleman yield?
CARDOZA: No, I will not yield. John Lewis, a member of this House, was beaten on the Edmund Pettus bridge to get that civil rights legislation passed. Tell John Lewis that he wasn’t part of getting that legislation passed.
When she was given a chance to respond, Foxx could only say that Jesse Helms wasn’t elected to the Senate until 1972.
Foxx’s claim that Republicans were the real engine behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a common notion among conservatives. But as Cardoza points out, it was President Lyndon Johnson who “choreographed passage of this historic measure in 1964.” In fact, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), voted against the legislation.
To support the claim that Republicans were actually the architects of civil rights, conservatives often point out that a “higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the civil-rights bill.” But this ignores the “distinct split between Northern and Southern politicians” on the issue. When this is taken into account, the facts show that “in both the North and the South, Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act at a higher rate than the Republicans.”
Interestingly, this sort of claim has been made before, by one Francis or Frances Rice, a black woman who is the head National Black Republican Association*, and so crazy that even other black republicans (well, all those few of them) have disavowed her group.
*Some kind of weird fringe association in Florida that attempts to tar democrats with racism based on their civil war era past, I believe.The 30-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black.
The Frances Rice quote isn't really relevant to Fox's case, but it was cited in an article I found and it's just so crazy I had to post it.
Note that this isn't the first time Virginia Foxx has decided to rewrite history- she once declared the Matthew Shepherd case was a hoax and manufactured by democrats as an excuse to pass Hate Crimes legislation.
That's all I can really say, is to continue to boggle at the level of complete tribalism it must take to baldfacedly make these claims: It's sheer tribalism- they start with the conclusion that Republicans are Right because they start with "I want to feel good about myself", then move on to "So why are the Democrats wrong?", and when faced with doing something reprehensible, even 40 years ago, instead of denying it they just pretend it wasn't them.
Which is really odd, because from 2005-2006 the Republican electoral strategy seemed to be 'apologise to Blacks, court Black vote', to the point of the NRSC (I believe, or some republican organisation) apologising for his party's lack of support for the civil rights act, and Bush stating he wanted the party to be more accomodating to minorities and African Americans in particular, something which was given standing ovations from the Republicans he was giving a speech to.
Did the sting of defeat and the loss of all the moderates in 2006 and 2008 cause even that level of sanity to be ripped out from the Republicans? Did they decide "well, if we can't win the black vote, we'll just win the white racist vote" by consulting the 1980s handbook without determining how American demographics have changed? Or am I just reading too much into a few crazy republicans?
