Political Comics, Memes, Jokes, etc.

[GMDino]

(02-03-2016, 02:05 PM)StLucieBengal Wrote: Begrudgingly Signing the CRA because his veto was going to be overridden is hardly a good thing.  He just rode the coat tails on something he could no longer fight against because the country moved on.  

He is a racist piece of garbage who gets an atta boy for signing a bill he was against for people he hated.  

I think we play revisionist history on some of these beloved progressive presidents and forget what they actually believed.

And update that jeremy piven photo.   He has lost weight.

I'd start a fresh thread about it to avoid tying up this one but you might ignore dismiss it.

http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/summer/civil-rights-act-1.html

Quote:LBJ Champions the Civil Rights Act of 1964 
By Ted Gittinger and Allen Fisher

• Larger Version
  
  

In an address to a joint session of Congress on November 27, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson requested quick action on a civil rights bill. (LBJ Library)

Just five days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson went before Congress and spoke to a nation still stunned from the events in Dallas that had shocked the world.


Johnson made it clear he would pursue the slain President's legislative agenda—especially a particular bill that Kennedy had sought but that faced strong and vehement opposition from powerful southern Democrats.


"No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long," Johnson told the lawmakers.


Then, serving notice on his fellow southern Democrats that they were in for a fight, he said: "We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law."
That chapter became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.


Forty years ago, Johnson set out to do what he had done in 1957 and 1960 as Senate majority leader—steer a civil rights bill through a Congress controlled to a great extent by southern Democrats who so strongly opposed it. But he was no longer majority leader and could not buttonhole wavering members in the cloakroom or do horse-trading with them to get what he wanted or promise rewards or punishments.
This is the story of how Lyndon Johnson set the stage for this legislation years before and how he choreographed passage of this historic measure in 1964—a year when the civil rights movement was rapidly gaining strength and when racial unrest was playing a role in the presidential campaign.


The story is often told, but this account is supplemented with details discovered in recent years with the opening of Johnson's White House telephone recordings and with excerpts from the oral history collection at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.


...


It begins in 1957, with Johnson as Senate majority leader, engineering passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, a feat generally regarded as impossible until he did it.


"To see Lyndon Johnson get that bill through, almost vote by vote," said Pultizer Prize–winning LBJ biographer Robert Caro, "is to see not only legislative power but legislative genius."




One key to Johnson's success was that he managed to link two completely unrelated issues: civil rights and dam construction in Hells Canyon in the Sawtooth Mountains of America's far northwest. Western senators were eager for the dam, which would produce enormous amounts of electricity. For years the advocates of public power and private power interests had fought to determine whether the dams would be built by government or private companies.



Those favoring public power were generally liberals from the Northwest states; they were liberal on civil rights as well, but they had no large numbers of African American voters in their states to answer to, so a vote against civil rights would not hurt them very much. LBJ brokered an agreement that traded some of their votes to support the southern, conservative position favoring a weak civil rights bill. In return, southerners would vote for public power at Hells Canyon.



...


The Kennedy administration took office in 1961 as national sentiment in favor of stronger civil rights legislation,with means of enforcement, was growing.


President Kennedy, however, was loath to ask the Congress for strong legislation on the issue. Although he was personally sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, his political instincts warned against taking action.




Then came one of those events that forces the hand of a cautious leader.




On May 2, 1963, a horrified country watched on television as the public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, T. Eugene "Bull" Connor, and his policemen and firemen descended on hundreds of African American marchers, including schoolchildren, with attack dogs, nightsticks, and fire hoses.



In response to the resulting national uproar, on June 11 Kennedy went on national television to announce that he was sending a tough civil rights bill to the Congress. A few hours later, Medgar Evers, director of the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was murdered in the driveway of his house.



...


...civil rights was mired in the House Rules Committee, where Judge Smith would not give it a hearing. On December 2, Johnson called Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, to enlist her editors in pressuring representatives to sign a discharge petition. That would bring the bill out of the Rules Committee. Many representatives were against a discharge petition on principle, believing that it undermined the committee system. LBJ suggested that the Post run articles arguing "every day, front page . . . [about] individuals: 'Why are you against a hearing?' Point them up, and have their pictures, and have editorials, and have everything else that is in a dignified way for a hearing on the floor."


To persuade Republicans to sign the petition, LBJ continued:

Quote:We've only got 150 Democrats; the rest of them are southerners. So we've got to makeevery Republican [sign]. We ought to say, "Here is the party of Lincoln. Here is the image of Lincoln, and whoever it is that is against a hearing and against a vote in the House of Representatives, is not a man who believes in giving humanity a fair shake. . . . Now if we could ever get that signed, that would practically break their back in the Senate because they could see that [this movement] here is a steamroller."

Articles critical of Smith and those who were cooperating with him began to appear in the Post.




Now, for once, Chairman Smith faced a serious challenge to his power to kill a bill that he disliked. An unlikely coalition had come together on the Rules Committee, of liberal Democrats, moderate and liberal Republicans, and a single conservative midwesterner, Republican Clarence Brown of Ohio. Brown controlled enough GOP votes to force Smith's hand by threatening to wrest control of the committee from him. Rather than face that loss of power and resulting humiliation, Smith agreed to hold hearings on civil rights in early January. There would be no need for a discharge petition.



Smith did not give up without a fight. His committee held hearings for three weeks, but in the end the chairman asked for the votes to be counted. The bill passed, 11-4.




Meanwhile, the nation's clergy had begun to throw its weight behind civil rights. The National Council of Churches would eventually spend $400,000 in its lobbying efforts. Historian Robert Mann wrote, "During the House debate, the gallery sometimes seems to overflow with ministers, priests, and rabbis—most of them voluntary watchdogs, or 'gallery watchers,' who tracked the votes and other activities of House members."




But Howard Smith had one last arrow in his quiver—perhaps "bombshell" would be a better term. During the debate on the House floor on Title VII, the equal employment part of the bill, the Virginian offered an amendment stating that not only should discrimination in employment based on race, creed, color, and national origin be illegal, as Title VII then stated, but distinctions based on sex as well. The House was thunderstruck. Now the question was not only where did the predominantly male Representatives stand on the question of race, but where did they stand on women?



Certainly Smith hoped that such a divisive issue would torpedo the civil rights bill, if not in the House, then in the Senate. But the new-found strength of the civil rights movement trumped Smith's ace. The House gulped, then accepted Smith's amendment. On February 10, 1964, the bill passed the House 290 to 130.

And there is so much more.  So please, stop just making stuff up or repeating what you "think" or "believe"


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