It looks like the Republican National Committee's fact checkers went AWOL on RNC Chairman Michael Steele's speech at the NAACP centennial convention yesterday in New York. In both the published text and his actual remarks, Mr. Steele said,
... and the civil rights act was passed by a Republican congress over democrat [sic.]filibusters ...
When he says, ”
Republican congress,” Mr. Steele can mean only one thing: A congress controlled by Republicans, i.e., a Republican majority. He’s wrong, of course, as Democrats held lopsided majorities in both chambers when the 88th Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Democrats led the U.S. Senate in all but six years--and the House uninterrupted--from 1933 to 1981, from FDR to Reagan.
Should we be alarmed that the chairman of the Republican National Committee does not know this, and neither, apparently do his speech writers and fact checkers?
In the same quote Michael Steele and his speech writers flaunted Republican partisans' childish name calling habit, saying “democrat” party instead of "Democratic" party. Never mind the capitalization; it’s common courtesy to call others what they wish to be called, Mr. Steele.
It’s a historical fact that a small regional bloc of my party shamefully filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was introduced and shepherded through congress by a Democratic president and a Democratic majority leader, together with a heroic Republican minority leader whose name today graces the Everett McKinley Dirksen Senate Office Building. That's yesterday's news, however.
Fast forward 40 years to a couple of items in Mr. Steele’s own record on African American matters of which he should be ashamed:
When he was Maryland’s lieutenant governor, he abused the minority business enterprise program to benefit a close friend and advisor, shutting out genuinely qualified minority businesses in the process.
Then, when he was a U.S. Senate candidate, he and his ticket mate, former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich, played a racially insulting Election Day dirty trick so downright bizarre that its exposure effectively shuts out both of them from ever winning any elected office again.
If Mr. Steele genuinely wishes to take "the first baby step in many more baby steps to come" toward what he called "some miraculous breakthrough in GOP-NAACP relations" maybe he should start by confronting those two items from his own recent record.
- Steve Lebowitz, Annapolis
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