Quote Originally Posted by homer13j View Post
At the time they were pretty much all Ds and all are still quite on the fringe. And I'm thinking your definition of "constitutionalist" is quite different from mine...
Yeah. I may well have the wrong name for the group. I'm refering to the group that believes that anything not explicitly included in the Constitution is explicitly illegal, regardless of laws.


Now I consider myself a student of history (currently building a website dedicated to Ohio trolley lines - all dead by 1938), but not political history. The way I understand it the Civil Rights Act was locked in a house committee by southern Democrats and the bill likely would have died there if not for president Kennedy's fateful ride through Dealey Plaza. Once Lyndon Johnson was sworn in he twisted enough Democrat arms to finally move the bill to the house floor for a vote.

Republicans voted 80%-20% for the Civil Rights Act in both the house and senate. A very inconvenient historic fact that gets glossed over all too often or completely ignored altogether.

But you are trying to tell me that southern racists switched to the Republican party because of Republican support for the Civil Rights Act?
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None of that surprises me, though I didn't know the details about R voting patterns. LBJ was very much an arm twister, and the Rs at the time were to the left of where the Ds are today. I'm not suggesting that the south went R because the Rs supported the Civil Rights Act, but LBJ stated that the south would go R because the Ds pushed the Civil Rights Act, and the south did go R immediately afterwards. There is almost never direct causality in anything political, and there are counter examples to any inferred causality. However, since LBJ stated that X would happen as a result of Y, and X followed soon after Y, that view has to gain a certain credence (though technically, being a non-replicated chaotic system, it can always be wrong).