Abigail Thernstrom, vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Edward Blum, senior fellow at the Center for Equal Opportunity, ask the apparently impossible: they ask Republicans in Congress to “Do The Right Thing.”
When it comes to issues involving race, apparently the first instinct of congressional Republicans is to grovel. They don’t believe in appeasement abroad–only at home. The immediate issue is the reauthorization of the “emergency” provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act–provisions such as preclearance that constitute such a radical, unprecedented intrusion into state electoral prerogatives that they were originally designed to expire in 1970. Repeatedly extended, they are now due to die on Aug. 6, 2007.
But, terrified by the reauthorization campaign that the NAACP, the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights, and other advocacy groups have begun to mount, Republicans in the House and Senate are pledging their support for reauthorization. Dennis Hastert, Tom DeLay and House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner have announced that they will introduce legislation extending the “temporary” provisions another 25 years. This comes on the heels of Bill Frist, who said: “We must continue our nation’s work to protect voting rights. And that is why we need to extend the Voting Rights Act.”
Read, as they say, the whole thing to see why “Sen. Frist’s statement is a non sequitur.”
Someone should complain of the effrontery of these opportunists pretending to be statesmen capable of planning ahead 25 years. If they could project the future that the voting rights act, as currently enforced, makes all but unavoidable, they would know that it would cause there to remain only a partitioned country. They are writing the plans for Yugoslavia, for balkanization, and not a peacable kind either.
Since when have Republicans been opposed to racial quotas/preferences of any kind?
Bush 1 signed the 1991 “Civil Rights” act (which he originally called a quota bill until the NAACP hurt his feelings by calling him bad names)and put David Souter on the Supreme Court.
Bush 2 argued for “diversity” and “making race a factor” in the Grutter v. University of Michigan/Bollinger Supreme Court case, and then mad the man – Alberto Gonzales – who wrote his amicus curaie the US Attorney General. Not to mention, of course, his Hispanic fetish.
Reagan talked about ending affirmative action, but was talked out of it by Bob Dole – the same Bob Dole who refused to endose prop 209 in California (to end quotas in colleges and government jobs) in 1996 when he ran for Prez.
And of course, Reagan gave us O’Conner, who wrote the Grutter opinion, and Kennedy, who stated his general support of racial preferences despite opposing the Grutter decision.
Finally, it was Nixon who basically invented affirmative action and imposed it with executive orders.
At least Clinton talked about changing race-based affirmative action to class-based affirmative action. On affirmative action, Clinton was probably the most conservative President since the inception of affirmative action circa 1970.