By Hugh Murray
On June 29,
2012, Chief Justice John Roberts surprised the nation by voting with the
liberal bloc of four to rule that Obamacare was legal under the
Constitution. His ruling caused both
amazement and confusion. Roberts did
side with the conservative four to rule that the mandate to purchase health
insurance under the commerce clause was unconstitutional; this part of the
court’s decision was read first, causing both CNN and Fox News to conclude that
the essential financial part of the law had been struck down. However, Roberts went on to write that the
law was Constitutional because it was covered by the taxing powers granted to
Congress.
Roberts and
the Supreme Court had been under some attack by the liberal media because of the
Court’s decision, earlier that week, to reaffirm the Citizens United ruling of 2010 allowing corporations and unions to
spend as much as they like supporting political candidates under the rubric of free speech. Moreover, ever since the oral arguments on
the Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare), many feared that the Court would
find the law unconstitutional. Both
liberals and conservatives assumed that the swing vote would be Justice Kennedy,
a Republican appointee whose voting pattern is rather unpredictable. But in this instance, Kennedy voted solidly
with the conservatives of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. It was the usual conservative Justice Roberts
who abandoned the conservative camp to save Obamacare. And suddenly, there were more favorable
stories in the media praising Roberts, and his picture was the cover of Time Magazine, 16 July 2012 with the
clever title, “Roberts Rules.”
My point
here is not to analyze the health care law of over 2,000 pages. Nor is it to analyze the sophistry of Roberts
ruling. My objective is to compare
Roberts to another Republican leader who, at a crucial time, also stepped forward
to save the day for liberals – Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois.
In 1964
Democratic President Lyndon Johnson urged passage of civil rights
legislation. The trouble was that most
of the opponents of the proposed law were some of the most influential Democratic
Senators. As in the past, these
Democrats threatened to filibuster, that is, talk the bill to death without
ever voting on it. The Southern
opposition was composed of 22 Senators (21 Democrats and one Republican). Northern and liberal Democrats had more votes
than the opposition, almost 40 Senators.
But to stop a filibuster, a vote of 2/3s of the Senate was required –
some 67 votes. How could the liberal
Democrats attain enough votes for cloture and the end of debate on the law, so
that finally a vote on the proposed law could be taken?
The
Southern opponents of the bill were led by Georgia’s Sen. Richard Russell, but
they included men like Sen. Sam Ervin, who would win the acclaim of liberals later
in his career when during the Watergate investigation into dirty tricks by the
Nixon Administration, Ervin pressed hard questions on the defenders of
Presidential Privilege and secrecy.
Also, among the opponents of the civil rights bill was Arkansas Sen.
William Fulbright, who would become one of the early critics of the Vietnam
War, and an inspiration to a young Arkansan, Bill Clinton.
Northern
Democrats promoting the civil rights law were led by Minnesota’s Hubert
Humphrey. He had first come to
prominence in 1948 as the young Mayor of Minneapolis who proposed a civil rights
plank to the 1948 Democratic Convention.
The hot convention hall became even more heated in the debate on this issue,
and when it passed, with only 52.8% of the delegates favoring it, numbers of
other delegates stormed out of the convention.
They abandoned Harry Truman’s Democratic Party to establish the States’
Rights Democratic Party (known as Dixiecrats) and carried four states in the
November election. Humphrey had led the
victorious fight for adoption of the civil rights plank in the Democratic platform
in 1948. In 1964 he was leading the
fight for passage of a civil rights bill for all Americans. In the convention, he needed only a simple
majority. Similarly, to pass the
legislation in the Senate would merely require a majority, but to cut off
debate so the Senate could vote on the legislation would require a 2/3s majority, or 67 of the 100 Senators. To achieve that large a majority, the
Democrats would have to rely on Republican Senators.
The eastern
establishment of the Republican Party was quite comfortable with civil rights
legislation. The first state Fair
Employment Practices law had been passed in New York state with the support of
Gov. Thomas Dewey. It earned Dewey few Black
votes when he ran against Truman in 1948, and the NAACP basically became a
front-group for the Democrats, even firing a founder of the organization, W. E.
B. Du Bois, when he endorsed Progressive Henry Wallace. Some of the more Mid Western Republicans were
undecided about a federal civil rights bill, and one prominent Senator, Barry
Goldwater of Arizona, opposed a national civil rights law.
Not all
Americans were pleased with the prospect of the federal civil rights legislation. 1964 was a presidential election year, and
everyone assumed that Lyndon Johnson, sworn in only in late November 1963,
would easily become the Democratic nominee.
However, segregationist Democratic Governor George Wallace of Alabama
entered several Democratic primaries in Northern states. Johnson was not on the ballot, but had
surrogates run on his behalf as favorite sons.
The returns were a shock to many liberals. Staunch segregationist Wallace won 25 to 42%
of the Democrats voting in the primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and
Maryland. Clearly, some Northern
Democrats were expressing their opposition to the proposed civil rights
movement, Black riots, and pending civil rights legislation.
The
Republican Establishment promoted several presidential candidates acceptable to
the liberal, Dewey wing of the party, and most of these fell behind another liberal,
New York Republican Governor, Nelson Rockefeller. The more conservative wing rallied round
Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who, though supporting civil rights at the state level, had voted against the federal
Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In
hindsight, we know Goldwater lost to Lyndon in a landslide. Yet surely, some Republicans hoped to win by
wooing that 25-42 % of Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights law – those who
showed their beliefs by voting for Wallace.
In this effort, Goldwater failed.
He lost the vote national 60 to 40, and carried only his own Arizona and
the four Dixiecrat states of 1948 and Georgia.
The era of Reagan Democrats would have to wait.
The point
is that in the spring of 1964 there was no guaranty that the CR Act would pass
Congress and become law. Republican
Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen stepped to the plate. He had already become famous for his
discussion of federal finances: “A billion here, a billion there; and soon
you’re talking about real money.”
Dirksen declared that he and other Republican Senators would vote for
cloture of debate (and thus allow a direct vote on the proposed CR legislation)
if the bill were modified by accepting some of his amendments. Most of his amendments, and those by a few
others like Sen. John Tower of Texas, were meant to make it abundantly clear
that the new legislation would not be a quota bill, that standardized
examinations could be used, and if some groups failed to pass, there would be
no hiring to promote racial balance.
Indeed, that would be illegal, for that would be hiring for racial
reasons. Only intentional discrimination
in hiring was to be a crime. All these
amendments were incorporated into the CR bill.
In summer
1964 most Republican Senators joined with the liberal Democrats to vote cloture
and end debate. Voting for cloture were
46 Democrats and 27 Republicans; voting against were 21 Democrats and 6 Republicans. While 69% of the Democrats wanted to end the filibuster,
82% of the Republicans voted to do so. A
few days later the bill passed 71-29, with similar percentages. The media would have us forget that a higher
percentage of Republicans voted for the CR Act than did the Democrats. Indeed, 78% of the no votes came from
Democratic Senators. President Johnson
signed the bill into law in 2 July 1964.
Sen. Dirksen had saved the day, and he too was featured on the cover of
Time Magazine, 22 June 1964, with the cover story, “The CR Bill: Product of
Principle and Compromise.” Of course, in
1964 Time’s influence was far greater than in 2012.
However,
despite all the guarantees that language and law can provide, the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 was subverted and perverted by the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, the agency meant to enforce it.
With the aid of liberal judges, and worse, the appointees to the Suprme
Court by Republican Presidents, the CR Act was twisted into a quota law,
requiring hiring for racial (and later ethnic and gender) balance. Statistics were used to find guilt of
discrimination even when no intent to discriminate was proven. For example, if an employer sought to hire only
high-school graduates, the EEOC charged that this was illegal for it would have
a disparate impact because a smaller percentage of Blacks than whites had
attained that level of education. And so
that requirement was struck, as well as performance on aptitude tests, IQ
tests, criminal records, etc. The only
objective test permitted was the quota test for racial and other balance.
(Indeed, on 5 July 2012 a federal judge in New York struck down a firefighters’
exam because few Blacks could pass it, and ordered quota hiring instead.)
Liberal
President Nixon offered a Supreme Court seat to liberal Republican Tom Dewey,
but Dewey declined. Nixon then appointed
as Chief Justice Warren Burger, who wrote the Griggs decision, which was sophistry at it worst, and which turned
a law which forbade quotas into the quota bill we have endured for 40
years. Under Nixon, quotas became the
law of the land, and he expanded them to include women, Hispanics, Amerindians,
and later, some Asians. Nixon made
affirmative action preferences and quotas national policy.
Some
readers will be incredulous that I refer to Nixon as “liberal.” This is not what they learnt at university
and on television. Yet, as Phil Ebersole summarized on his blog,
Nixon “created
affirmative action in its present form. He responded decisively to an economic
emergency by imposing wage and price controls. He proposed a Family
Assistance Plan which would guarantee a minimum income for all Americans, and a
Comprehensive Health Insurance Act which would have provided a public option as
an alternative to private health insurance. He endorsed the Equal Rights
Amendment for women.
“The Comprehensive Health Insurance Act was rejected by
Congress. So was the Family Assistance Plan, but the Earned Income Tax Credit
was enacted as a substitute and compromise.
“The President did sign into law the Equal Employment
Opportunity Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air
Act. His administration established the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and the Council on
Environmental Quality.”
Early in his
Presidency, the Nixon Administration had to lobby the NAACP to support the
Philadelphia Plan, with its hiring by racial quotas. The bill barely squeaked through the House of
Representatives. Yet, this was the
official beginning of affirmative action as we now know it. And in addition to domestic policies, the
Nixon Administration negotiated with Mao’s China, severing some of our foreign
policy from rigid anti-Communism.
Sen. Dirksen,
by the late 1960s was clearly disillusioned with what was happening in the name
of the Civil Rights Act, some of which had been written in his senate
office. Dirksen went to Nixon to
complain about the subversion of that law into quota requirements with
preferences given to lesser qualified and unqualified applicants for positions,
in clear violation of the wording and spirit of the law. Dirksen was even thinking of openly opposing
Nixon on these policies. But Dirksen had
cancer, and passed from the scene in November 1964. Liberals then used their domination of
universities and media, the academedia complex, to convince most Americans that
the Civil Rights Act had been passed to impose quotas, racial balance, and
preferences for the pet groups of the EEOC.
Dirksen was
crucial in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, once the camel’s head was under the
tent, it moved in, not with one hump, but with two and more. Despite the clear language to the contrary,
the US has been suffering under quota hiring, quota promotions, quota
university admissions, quota scholarships, quota contracts since Nixon – and in
obvious violation of the words of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Perhaps, the
words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can clarify what happened. Speaking of the Affordable Health Care Act
(Obamacare), she said on 9 March 2010 we
should pass the bill to find out what is in it.
The liberals
and the bureaucrats KNOW what is in the Obamacare law: ANYTHING THEY WANT TO BE
IN IT. They do not care about the
wording of the law. They care about the
back-door committees that will implement, interpret, and expand that law. They care about their power. Just as the EEOC turned the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, - a law that forbade quotas, hiring for racial balance, that permitted
tests in which some groups might do poorly, forbade racial discrimination (race
preferences), all this was consciously subverted by the EEOC, the agency meant
to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And so Obamacare will be manned
by those who will make the law into anything they want it to be, even if it
directly contradicts the law they are supposed to enforce.
I suspect one
day Chief Justice Roberts will rue his Obamacare decision, as Sen. Dirksen was
disturbed by the subversion of the civil rights law he did so much to enact,
and the subversion of which was already evident prior to his death.
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