I have already written (here) that one of Lott’s most significant contributions to the conservative agenda is to discredit worthy causes because of his association with them. Here’ just one, relatively minor, example.
Every list of Lott’s past positions — usually presented as a list of past transgressions and offenses against all that is good and true — includes his opposition to what was termed the “Civil Rights Act of 1990.”
Lott was one of 34 senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which reversed five Supreme Court rulings that had limited the ability of minorities to win job discrimination lawsuits and damages. After President George H.W. Bush vetoed the bill, Lott voted for a different version in 1991.
Lott was one of 34 senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which broadened the remedies available in employment discrimination and affirmative action cases.
… one of a minority of senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990.
1990: Voted against expanding the Civil Rights Act to give new remedies to victims of discrimination.
Left unsaid in most of these articles is that President Bush I vetoed this bill (although he did sign an only slightly improved 1991 version). More important, there were good, non-Lott, non-racist reasons for people to vote against it. For example, Stuart Taylor of The American Lawyer, not normally thought of as a Lott-like racist, wrote in Legal Times:
If enacted and enforced as written, the bill’s disparate-impact provisions would create a powerful presumption that any employer with a work force in which minorities were significantly under-represented was guilty of racial discrimination.
The bill would also make the burden of overcoming this presumption so heavy that it could pressure employers surreptitiously to use quotas to improve their statistics — hiring and promoting racial minority-group members or women, as the case may be, on a preferential basis over equally or better qualified white males…. [D]isparate-impact rules creating such pressure are strong and socially divisive medicine, and the new bill as written would administer too heavy a dose. [Legal Times, 2/12/1990, p. 21]
The Gannett article quoted above cavalierly refers to the bill aiding “victims of discrimination,” but, as Taylor pointed out, under the bill as written
the beneficiaries of disparate-impact suits would not necessarily be victims of discrimination. And the defendants would not necessarily be guilty of anything but hiring and promoting the people they consider the best qualified.
Similarly, the late Morris Abram, southern liberal and icon of the early civil rights movement, wrote of the 1990 act that
[p]roportionality of result, not equality of opportunity, is the touchstone of this flawed legislation. It creates a presumption of guilt based only on crude race or gender statistical imbalances in the workplace, and then forces employers to rebut that presumption under a standard of proof that rules out the pursuit of excellence as a defense and is very difficult to meet. The cumulative weight of this stacked deck will make the risk of having the wrong numbers so great that the employer, in self-defense, will hire by quota…. It would do something I never thought I would see in America – it would make racial, ethnic and sex imbalance alone presumptively illegal. [Morris Abram, “Senate’s Quota Bill vs. King’s Dream,” Memphis Commercial Appeal,” 9/16/1990, p. B7]
Now, thanks a Lott, anyone who opposed this bill, like Sen. Nickles, is presumptively racist.
I feel sorry for you, Host Rosenberg. Now opposing “affirmative action”, even bonehead-stupid affirmative action programs (I’m really a very weak “preferentialist”, but the posting mechanism ate my comment on that), means looking like a segregationist. Perhaps you know how it feels to oppose the Occupation of the West Bank, but still loathe Yasser Arafat, or to oppose unilateral War on Iraq without being “objetively pro-Saddam”. Even when these positions are correct (I happen to adhere to my examples), the nuances are hard to explain.
But I don’t think I’m too sorry. The reliance of the GOP on the bigot vote has been perfectly clear for twenty years (as was the similar reliance of the Democratic Party from the end of Reconstruction up to the Civil Rights Era). What’s happened, and I think it’s great for the country even while I don’t understand it, is one small incident suddenly overturned the entire Zeitgeist. As recently as last month the Republicans captured the Governorship of Georgia, in an upset, on a platform to restore a modified version of the Confederate Flag as the state’s own. (I believe this was also a major plank of the successful GOP South Carolina candidate, whose victory was expected.) Lott’s association with overtly white supremacist groups was never hidden, but Stanley Crouch’s 1999 attack on him went exactly nowhere. What happened with all these un-bigoted conservatives and libertarians that you only now realize with whom you have been in bed? It’s no accident, to my mind, that the right-wing blogosphere out after Lott is disproportionately black, Jewish, or gay. But that can’t explain all of it.
Meanwhile, the GOP political establishment seems to think this will all blow over, now that Lott has gone to Canossa. Bad for the country, even if it’s probably good for my Democrats.
Well, Andrew, I think you’ve taken a big swing and connected with about a third of the ball, which is not bad — maybe a pop fly, but maybe a hit as well. I assume you’ve reading right along here, in which case you will know that I completely agree about the “poetic justice” of the Repubs now catching holy hell for their Faustian bargain with Southern racists. If this were still 1964 or 1968 I would (still) be on your side of the aisle. But it isn’t. Late, to be sure, even Southern Repubs have picked up, dusted off, and raised high the colorblind banner that the Dems threw in the dust around 1968. So far the Repubs have been quite good at dumping their rotten apples. I think of Nixon and David Duke right off the bat, with Lott waiting in the wings to go. I don’t see this from the Dems (Sharpton, Baghdad Bonior, Clinton). If Lott survives, I’m wrong and the Repubs will deserve what you (with me agreeing) will say about them.
I don’t where you get your blogospheric ethnic affiliation info, but if you bought a kit somewhere I’d return it. Last I looked Glenn Reynolds was neither black, Jewish, nor gay, and that is also true for whole hosts of anti-Lott conservatives. (I don’t know whether the blogosphere in general is disproportonately Jewish, etc., but if it is you’d have to show that the anti-Lott conservatives were even more disproportionately Jewish/black/gay for your point to be valid.) It’s a rather silly point anyway, I think. By the way, in case you don’t regularly read National Review Online, you should take a look at the interesting article today by Quin Hillyer pointing out that even Lott’s home town papers, from Mobile throught Baton Rouge to New Orleans — conservative papers all — think he should be dumped. I’ve been following the press pretty closely on this, and it’s hard to find Southern conservative papers who support Lott. But then, as I said, this isn’t 1964 or 1968 any more, much as Lott wishes it were and you seem to think it is (what with Repub racists and Dem. civil rights’ers. But then, as I’ve been arguing, it’s hard to believe in civil rights when you believe discrimination in a good cause is O.K.).
Your point about the “GOP establishment” thinking this will just blow over also seems to me to be out of touch with what’s happening. It will be establishment Senators, with either covert of overt support from the White House who force Lott out.
Hi John, and don’t forget Buchanan has been pretty much shut out too.
I know nothing about the Georgia governors race, and I have not read the Republican platform for the SC governor’s race, but there was NO mention of restoring the Confederate flag to top of the statehouse in the 2002 campaign in the reports that I read of the campaign, the debates, etc. NONE. I am SC voter, and I do follow these things. (I personally was against that rag on top of the statehouse, and once made the joking suggestion that Uncle Billy needed to come back and do the job RIGHT.) It was NOT a major part of the campaign for the 2002 Repbulican candidate for governor.
The Confederate flag NEVER has been part of the SC state flag. The issue in SC was the flying of the flag from the top of the statehouse.
In fact, in the 1998 campaign, the Democrats secretly encouraged the pro Confederate flag forces against a Republican governor who attempted to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse.
By the way, Fritz Hollings was the governor of SC when the Confederate flag was put on top of the statehouse. He never said anything about the flag until perhaps the very end (and I doubt that).
Please do your research!
Here’s a Wash Times opinion piece on Georgia. And here is CNN on how the victorious Gov-elect is now retreating from his pledge to restore the flag (or, more accurately, to hold a referendum on the issue).
You’re right, the flag issue in SC was in 2000. How time flies.
As far as Fritz Hollings goes, I am not sure I see your point. Any white Southern politician of Hollings’s age has that type of baggage. The question is which of them still believe it, or, worse, what to do about the next generation who adopted it in their youth (Lott).
Turning to John Rosenberg’s reply, I don’t think we’ll know what I hit until we see who walks out of the GOP Caucus Room in one piece. [Is it a secret ballot?] I hope I’m wrong, but Lott seems to be lining up many endorsements.
(BTW, is the animus against Clinton political, or for the natural reason you have a daughter?)