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Ah, it’s pathetically ignorant, perpetually re-elected NC U.S. Congresscritter Virginia Foxx opening her trap again to contribute batsh*ttery to the public discourse and historical record with the ludicrous claim on the House floor that the Republican party had a progressive record on civil rights and Congress passed legislation in the 1960s without much help from Dems. (Think Progress):
During a debate on the House floor today over designating 21 miles of the Molalla River as “wild and scenic,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who opposes the legislation, tried to claim a progressive environmental record for her party. “Actually, the GOP has been the leader in starting good environmental programs in this country,” said Foxx.
Foxx then extended her claims of the GOP’s progressive history to the issue of civil rights. “Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the ’60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle,” said Foxx. “They love to engage in revisionist history.”
Since she’s making the claim that Republicans are the party of civil rights, then she and her party should be ready to promote civil equality for LGBTs, no? Someone should challenge her on that point. Anyway, she was slapped down by Dennis Cardoza (D-CA):
CARDOZA: Today, what I’m hearing on the floor really takes the cake. The gentlelady from North Carolina, in her statement just now, indicated that the Republican GOP had passed the Civil Rights Act legislation with almost no help from the Democrats. I can’t believe my ears. It was the Kennedy and Johnson administration where we passed that Great Society legislation. It was over the objections of people like Jesse Helms from the gentlewoman’s state that we passed that civil rights legislation. John Lewis…
FOXX: Would, would the gentleman yield?
CARDOZA: No, I will not yield. John Lewis, a member of this House, was beaten on the Edmund Pettus bridge to get that civil rights legislation passed. Tell John Lewis that he wasn’t part of getting that legislation passed.
The fact of the matter is that, again, hat tip to Think Progress, this claim by wingnuts that the GOP was the real prime mover in civil rights legislation is a highly subjective reading of the numbers.
To support the claim that Republicans were actually the architects of civil rights, conservatives often point out that a “higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the civil-rights bill.” But this ignores the “distinct split between Northern and Southern politicians” on the issue. When this is taken into account, the facts show that “in both the North and the South, Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act at a higher rate than the Republicans.”
34 Comments
Ralph Cramdon to Virgina Fox NC…you’re a Laugh Riot…Hardy Har har harrrr
this lady is an Old Michele Bachmann
Someone really needs tostart slipping Prozac into the Jell-o in the GOP cafeteria.
Ummm, words escape me……except to say she really is just batsh*t insane, isn’t she?
Is it just me, or is she cock-eyed?Maybe it’s just a really bad picture, but she looks crazed.
Ah, the crazy never stops foaming out of Virginia Foxx’s mouth!She almost makes Michele Bachmann look like an amateur. Hopefully one day, she’ll get her “just reward” for her unbridled bigotry just like her BFF Marilyn Musgrave got last year.
I take it that meansthe Republicans who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were Republicans in the Lincoln Chafee model? You’ll have to forgive me as I was not born yet – my parents were just teenagers at the time. Unlike Foxx, who was 23 years old and should damn well remember it.
The majority of racists in congress…Probably were all Democrats at one point, the so-called Dixiecrats. Until they all CHOSE to become Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s.
I’d like to see the Black caucus smear her ignorance in morning speeches
Likely so…By now, the Republicans have pretty much repudiated any more progressive heritage, and are outright embarrassments to the legacies of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
lets see 95+% of AA voted Democrat in 200885% of Latin@ voted Democrat, and the overwhelming majority of all communities of POC the vast majority of Jews and LGBTs vote Democrat.
Yet Republicans are the champions of Civil Rights, how could so many of us (including the majority of women) get it so WRONG?
Funny how that snow storm of melanin-challenged old straight guys…..would care so much for us, and detest us so much at the same time.
She is about 150 years offThe modern US Republican Party was founded specifically as the anti-slavery party… in 1854. It effectively replaced the Whigs, which espoused a “neo-federalist” agenda that favored entrepenurs and the developing middle class, and was opposed by the Democratic Party, which was staunchly populist and pro-slavery.
Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican. He was elected Vice-President in 1900 and became President in September, 1901 when President McKinley died; he was then reelected in 1904. Roosevelt worked with Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, supported workers in a strike by the United Mine Workers and formalized the National Parks system (Yosemite in 1890, while head of the Civil Service Commission.)
Perhaps Representative Foxx was thinking of the 1860s?
Prozac?these idiots need to be doing the Haldol Shuffle.
my momma always saidIf you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut. I have stapled, and nailed my mouth shut so that I do not use really inappropriate and offensive words to describe how I feel about this woman who represents my state. Ms. Foxx, crack is whack, step away from the crack pipe and have a toddy.
But…she was too young to really remember them, wasn’t she?
Be preparedWe’ll be seeing a lot of this as boomers age more. Bear in mind, I’m solidly middle aged and I was born after the Civil Rights Act and Loving.
I’ve bumped into it a number of times with rightwingers. “Oh, WE’RE the civil rights champions. You liberals just want to keep everyone in welfare slavery. And WE don’t have an active Klansman.”
We have to keep telling the truth when they try for revision.
Wrong again ish. How do you maintain that perfect record.The Dixiecrats are as strong as ever, the only difference is that some are Democrats and a few are Republicans.
Bill Clinton is the Dixiecrat who gave us NAFTA, DOMA, the kind of deregulation that led to Depression levels of unemployment and DADT. He ordered the embargo of food, medicine and medical supplies that killed about half a million Iraqi children. Clinton is extremely right wing. (Hillary Clinton wasn’t from the South and didn’t start out as a Dixiecrat. She began as Goldwater supporter and graduated to membership in the ultraright christer-bigot Fellowship in the Senate.)
Byrd of West Virginia is another segregationist and racist who stayed in Democrat Party and is now their senior Senator. Byrd joined the KKK in 1942 and so impressed the other swine in his Klaven that they unanimously elected him Exalted Cyclops. I bet they got him an exalted hood too. During World War Two Byrd wrote to fellow Democrat Senator Theodore Bilbo
Needless to say Byrd filibustered with other Dixiecrats the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
George Smathers represented Florida in the Senate until 1969. He died in 2007, a lifelong racist and another Democrat who mysteriously became wealthy while a politician. Mississippi Senators James Eastland and John Stennis, who remained a senator until 1989, likewise remained loyal to the party of the KKK and the southern baptists. Ernest Hollings was a Democrat Senator until 2005. As Governor of South Carolina Stennis ordered the confederate rag flown next to the US national flag on the Statehouse.
Obama recently appointed another right wing religious Dixiecrat, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to run the DNC, helping Leah Daughtry to turn the Democrat Party even further right and cement it’s elations with right wing cults. Kaine ran a gay baiting campaign, opposes same sex marriage, opposes reproductive choice and like stem cell research.
Today most Dixiecrats are identified as Blue Doggies or are associated with Bill Clintons pro-war, pro-NAFTA, pro-zionist and pro-deregulation right wing, the DLC. And they now have a national base, not just a southern base. Anti choice Democrat Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich) who led the fight to defund abortions in the Democrats sell-out ‘heath care’ ‘reform’ that passed in the House is part of the Democrats nationwide party-wide right wing which is in coalition with their opposite numbers in the Republican Party.
In spite of ish’s misinformation, and even if they go by another name, the Dixiecrats are still deeply entrenched in both parties and they have the same politics in both parties.
Making stuff upDude, I know you think Democrats are always as bad as Republicans, but those people aren’t the people history calls Dixiecrats, who were the likes of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond.
Figures that someone with your idea of history would make stuff up. Stalinists like you have been doing that for years. Pretty easy to do after the fact.
How’s that congress in North Korea going? Say hi to Kim Jong Il for me.
And that’s the part of the story that the Virginia Jackals never tellYes, there is the bare, numerical case to be made that there were more congressional Republican votes on certain civil rights measures of the 1960s than there were Democratic votes.
Again, the Virginia
JackalsFoxxes of 2009 leave it at that – proving once again that, in the hands of christianists, even the truth can be a lie.What they never add to that bare numerical case:
(1) The Democrats who voted ‘no’ were from the South
(2) Thereafter, those Democrats who didn’t die first later became Republican (or ‘Democrats for Nixon’)
(3) The Republicans who voted ‘yes’ would today be tarred and feathered by the party leadership as ‘Scozzafavas’ (or ‘Chaffees’ or ‘Souters’) and be drummed out of the party
Then again, for Virginia
JackalFoxx, I’m sure that ‘Southern Strategy’ means ridding the South all undesirables – via (wink, wink) non-hate-crimes, like the (wink, wink) non-hate-crime that befell Matthew Shepard.reallly???It’s obvious that senility has taken over.
That pic you use needs to become her press release photo for all news outlets; it gives the reader fair warning of the puke they are about to read.
Re: 150 years offPerhaps Representative Foxx was thinking of the 1860s?
No, if that were the case, she would have been a pro-slavery Democrat in the 1860s
Actually, if Foxx went back even 20 yearsto the 1930′s and the 1940′s she’d be right.
Remember, the main opposition to civil rights in the 40′s were, yes, the Dixiecrats who controlled the committees in the Senate under FDR. I do believe that the Republicans actually put black civil rights into their 1944 platform in order to win back the black vote from FDR (and northern blacks went Democrat during the great Depression, Southern Blacks (when they could vote) were by and large Republican.
The Republicans were ready to use the desegration of the Armed Forces argument against Truman in the 1948 election. Then Truman went ahead and did it by executive order; though the strange coalition between northern blacks and Southern segregationists had already split up by this time.
The political history here is actually very fascinating. Condi Rice’s family, fo example, was a Republican family from the old school as was (I believe) Martin Luther King, Sr.
Apparently, Foxx is still living in 1940
CorrectionsJust a few corrections – Stennis was never governor of SC – he was a senator from Mississippi. Hollings was always a Democrat in the best sense of the word and retired in 2005. As SC governor he was active in insuring equality and desegregation of SC schools - He did the nutrition and poverty study in SC that was the impetus for the School Lunch, WIC and other nutrition programs for poor children, has always been pro-choice, and while rough in his language at times, he has never been a racist. He didn’t put the Confed flag up in SC- Edwards (Repub gov) did.
Byrd has admitted his racist past and has apologized for his KKK affiliation many times over -
Tim Kane is Catholic and thus religiously opposed abortion BUT he like many other Democratic Catholics, Biden, Kennedy etc has said many times (and his behavior shows it) – that no one has the right to use the law to impose their personal religious beliefs on the country.
Virginia Fox is a joke – and is one of the NC Repugs that needs defeating in 2010
Oh, Foxx is batsh*t crazyand all those old Dixiecrats are now Republicans (Richard Shelby may be a good example of this and, of course, there was ol’ Strom Thurmond)
But the history of how black Americans became a pillar of the Democratic coalition is fascinating and it even has some instructive lessons for our struggles with the Democrats.
People forget that King did not formerly endorse Kennedy in 1960 even after he was released from jail. I believe King, Sr. released a general letter of thanks or something like that but not an endorsement. The black community voted, like, 65-70% for Kennedy in 1960.
Of course, after the Civil Rights Act was passed and signed, 94% of the black community voted for LBJ.
Lesson here: Don’t give away the votes of your bloc for cheap. The black community made FDR work for those votes when he started to peel them away from the Republicans. Truman did the same thing.
There also were MAJOR changes in Democratic party after 68That’s when outreach to get women and POC as delegates, and get decisions out of the hands of old White male party bosses. More districts and states went to caucus systems, which benefitted coalitions of minority voices, youth, and women working together.
Foxx is logic-challengedAll you have to do is begin listing which Party had Black delegates, and Black candidates.
It wasn’t Republicans.
Exactly!And in 1972, teh gays came a calling!
we sure didIn MN we even had the head of the whole Democratic Party an openly gay man, and we had a beloved Black mayor of Minneapolis Sharron for two terms, who was great on both AIDS and gay rights.
Ish: all venom and no facts.. “…but those people aren’t the people history calls Dixiecrats” Says who? Bill Clinton, Smathers, Hollings, Eastland, Stennis were all rightwing Dixiecrats. Smathers, Hollings, Eastland, Stennis are all described as Dixiecrats in histories and reference sources. It’s incredible that you’d think you could get away with pretending that they’re not Dixiecrats.
Would you like to try to prove that some historian, any historian, denies that they’e Dixiecrats. (Southern apologists for racism and segregation don’t count of course, so don’t even try.) Would you like to try to prove that Democrats like the Clintons, Kaine and Stupak aren’t wretched right wingers who support the war, TARP and union busting? What about Obama? Pelosi? Reid?
Prove I’m wrong instead of doing your usual eerily competent imitation of Roy Cohn and accusing everyone who’s not an Obot of being a Stalinist, which is pretty silly in my case – I’m far to the left of the Stalinsts who infest the Democrat party.
Oh, and lest I forget, Democrats and Dixiecrats are Republicans in drag, or sheets and hood, as is so often the case.
I do have venomfor the sectarian and Stalinist left (and if you’re a Trot you can just add ridiculous navel-gazing to the list) of which you are a prime example that has through its irrelevance, dogmatism, and corruption jeopardized the future of this country by discrediting the idea of socialism.
If Sarah Palin and her ilk ever come to power in this country it will be people like you who destroyed the alternative by making it look foolish, just as surely as the KPD helped bring Germany to Nazism.
I’m not going to defend right-wing Democrats to you; contrary to what you imagine I’m not a fan of them. But I know when the battle lines are drawn, like they are today, that there is a different between Democrats and Republicans. The enemy is pointing a gun straight at us, and you can sit there in your politically correct corner shouting at people all you like.
Oh yeah, here. This about sums you up, Bill.
Fritz Hollingswas an honorable man. I’m sure that he is horrified by the a**hole DeMint.
Ish, you’ve always made it perfectly clear that you’re a hater. We know all about your hatefulness. And we know you’re an Obot. That’s not in question.
Every time you open your mouth you expose how little you know about history, politics and the LGBT movement for equality. As it turns out, you don’t know squat. All you really do know is how to hate those who expose you.
I didn’t ask you to defend right wing Democrats like Obama and Dixiecrats like Clinton and Eastland. You don’t have to be asked. You write fantasies and apologies for them without being asked and it’s really all you can do. I asked you to prove your embarrassing and preposterous ‘untruth” that Eastland and the rest aren’t Dixiecrats. You couldn’t so you cover yourself you replied that you didn’t have to defend them. You’re sinking deeper and deeper.
It’s Obots like you who constantly try to derail the fight for equlity because you fear it’ll get out of hand. That’s the only thing you’re right about.
Don’t you get tired of being constantly exposed and put down by us bad ole commie-anarcho-maoist-stalinist-trots?
Oh here’s another one…About your logical thought processes.
Now run along and play.
I’ll ask again. Don’t you get tired of being constantly exposed and trounced by us bad ole commie-anarcho-maoist-stalinist-trots?