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Banned
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Originally Posted by djtestudo
I must have missed where "state's rights" became a synonym for "racism".
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The problem is that Reagan then, and republicans running for president, still to this day, have no sense of what it was like to live in the segregated south. Reagan showed no empathy and he exhibited no higher principle than to say or do anything to attract the votes of southern whites, many of who were conservative christians.
Reagan backed Goldwater in 1964, including Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights act, passed that year. Reagan had no interest in ending racial segregation, he stood in the way of ending it by any other method than decisions by individual states. That worked great.....even with Federal intervention, Georgia public schools, for example, remained segregated until summer, 1969.
Reagan came to NC at least twice, and criticized, both times, a school busing program in Charlotte that was seen locally as a success.....
You will see more evidence that the current republican administration has dismantled the DOJ civil rights enforcement division and the "wall" between civil service hiring and staffing, and the politically appointed employees, and have embarked on a mission that included exempting US Attorney appointees from senate oversight, in order to make prosecution of a non-existant voter "fraud problem", a top priority, with a clear intent to keep registration of voters and voting, itself....to a minimum when those registering or voting are deemed to be likely to vote against republicans.....
They're doing this because they recognize that they offer no platform to entice anyone not already aligned with their politics/policies to vote for their candidates.
It's criminal, and it needs to be exposed as what it is.....racist, classist, anti-constitutional, anti American:
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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/polit...gan90_2-6.html
THE REAGAN LEGACY
February 6, 2001
....I also think he had a brilliant political strategy. It was really quite simple. There was conservatism, tax cuts, anticommunism -- the kind of a Goldwater conservatism. Then he brought in his persona kind of a nostalgia for the pre-60s America, which sat very well with a lot of conservatives, and then he also brought with him a lot of antiblack populism, which is very popular, worked for him, kept his party together but I think was quite bad for the country.
JIM LEHRER: Antiblack populism what do you mean?
ROGER WILKINS: Well, every once in a while Reagan would just send out these laser beam signals that were crystal clear. His first speech in his campaign in 1980 was in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which nobody outside of Mississippi had ever heard of except for one thing and that was that three civil rights workers were killed there in 1964. Reagan said then I'm for states rights. If you say I'm for states rights in Mississippi, everybody knows what you're talking about. Some years later he went to Atlanta and he said Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine. Everybody knows what you're talking about then, too. He went to Charlotte, North Carolina, where the first federal court ordered the first bussing remedy and he said, I'm against bussing. So....
JIM LEHRER: So your point is that he believed this -- he wasn't in it for political reasons or he was --
ROGER WILKINS: I think he believed it. He opposed the Martin Luther King holiday, yeah. I think these were things... they worked for him.....
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-20-CBS-7.html
CBS Evening News for Monday, Apr 20, 1981
Headline: Charlotte / Busing
Abstract: (Studio) Report introduced
REPORTER: Dan Rather
(Charlotte, North Carolina) Success of busing for school desegregation here examined. [November 11, 1980, Ronald REAGAN - calls busing a failure.] Beginning of busing concept for United States recalled occurring here; details given. [1971 school board member Jane SCOTT - thinks city was committed to making it work.] [Civil rights attorney Julius CHAMBERS - praises leaders] Current situation outlined; carryover of busing into integration of neighborhoods noted. [William POE - thinks city has adjusted well.] Poe's opposition to busing 10 years ago recalled. [POE - praises program.] Continued hope of antibusing proponents discussed. [Senator Jesse HELMS - calls busing a folly.] [Dr. Carlton WATKINS - responds.]
REPORTER: Ed Rabel (WBTV file film)
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Quote:
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archive...84/100884a.htm
Remarks at a Reagan-Bush Rally in Charlotte, North Carolina
October 8, 1984
The President. Thank you all very much.
Audience. Reagan! Reagan! Reagan! ......
....They favor busing that takes innocent children out of the neighborhood school and makes them pawns in a social experiment that nobody wants. We've found out it failed. I don't call that compassion....
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Jun8.html
Schisms From Administration Lingered for Years
By Eric Pianin and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 9, 2004; Page A01
......No group may have chafed more at Reagan's policies and views than African Americans, who assailed the president for opposing racial quotas and for seeking to obtain a tax credit for Bob Jones University, a segregated southern school.
"For many Americans, this was a time best forgotten," said Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and a longtime civil rights activist. "He was a polarizing figure in black America. He was hostile to the generally accepted remedies for discrimination. His appointments were of people as equally hostile. I can't think of any Reagan policy that African Americans would embrace."
The former actor and California governor offended blacks when he kicked off his 1980 general election campaign by promoting "states rights" -- once southern code for segregation -- in Philadelphia, Miss., scene of the murder of three civil rights workers 16 years before. Early in his first term, Reagan ordered some of his toughest budget cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, aid to families with dependent children and other "means tested" programs that were critical to large numbers of lower-income black families. Until a public protest forced Reagan to back away, his Agriculture Department sought to cut the school lunch program and redefine ketchup and relish as vegetables.
Reagan had vowed to protect the "social safety net" of programs for the poor, the disabled and the elderly when he unveiled his economic recovery plan on Feb. 18, 1981. But two years later, White House budget director David A. Stockman said in an interview that the safety-net assurances were "just a spur-of-the-moment thing that the press office wanted to put out."
Isabel V. Sawhill, who oversaw a project examining the economic and social consequences of Reagan policies for the Urban Institute, said Reagan took office when major economic forces were producing growing income inequality. Although Reagan's policies were not the cause of income disparities between rich and poor, she said, they contributed to the trend through "tax cuts that were very tilted to the more affluent" and "cuts in programs for the less well off. Those did contribute to growing inequality."
There were other controversies:
Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 after they staged a work stoppage, and he appointed members of the National Labor Relations Board who were hostile to union organizing. His interior secretary, James G. Watt, and senior Environmental Protection Agency officials infuriated environmentalists by assaulting safeguards and aggressively attempting to open public lands in the West to private developers. Reagan, during his 1980 campaign, blamed trees for emitting 93 percent of the nation's nitrogen oxide pollution -- giving rise to jokes about "killer trees."
The combination of a huge "supply-side" tax cut, a historic military buildup and a painful two-year recession produced huge budget deficits and a near tripling of the national debt that haunted the country and policymakers for years and drained resources from social programs. And the administration showed indifference to an emerging AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. By the time Reagan delivered his first speech on the epidemic in May 1988 -- about eight months before he left office -- the disease had been diagnosed in more than 36,000 Americans, and 20,849 had died.
"Reaganomics" failed to reduce the deficit, but the combined policies of the administration and the Federal Reserve Board helped usher in the longest peacetime economic expansion since the end of World War II -- a nearly eight-year boom that made many people rich and left a pleasant "morning in America" memory in the minds of millions of voters.....
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Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...A80894DA484D81
ABROAD AT HOME; SHUCKS, IT'S ONLY THE LAW; [Op-Ed]
Lewis, Anthony. New York Times. Jan 21, 1982. pg. A.23
A three-judge Federal court, in an opinion by a distinguished judge, decides an important question of Federal law. The Supreme Court affirms the decision. Other courts follow it. The Federal Government incorporates it in rules, and three Presidents enforce them over a 10-year period.
Then a new President reverses the rules. He explains to a press conference that he did so because they had ''no basis in the law.'' That is what President Reagan said at his press conference Tuesday by way of explaining his decision to give tax exemptions to schools and colleges that discriminate against black Americans. The only thing more amazing than his explanation was the reaction of the reporters in the room. Nobody laughed.
Presidents say a good many foolish things, and I have heard them for 30 years. But I do not think I have heard anything more preposterous, lame, cynical or outrageous than what Ronald Reagan had to say about ''the law'' and racist schools.
''The Internal Revenue Service had actually formed a social law and was enforcing that social law,'' Mr. Reagan said. He was speaking of the I.R.S. rules, adopted during the Nixon Administration, against tax exemptions for discriminatory schools and colleges.
But the I.R.S. framed those rules in light of court decisions saying what the law was. The leading decision was by the late Harold Leventhal, the highly respected judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. He concluded: ''Racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption for charitable, educational institutions.''
Mr. Reagan denied that any racism was involved. He said he was opposed to discrimination ''at every fiber of my being.'' But there is no doubt that racism was the moving force in the attempt to reverse the rules against tax exemp-tions. Southern institutions that exclude or segregate blacks, notably some connected with fundamentalist churches, have been the voices demanding the change.
Representative Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, wrote the President urging him to act and got back his memo with a marginal note by Mr. Reagan saying ''I think we should''; Mr. Lott sent that to high Justice Department and Treasury officials. Another active figure was Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, a trustee of Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. Bob Jones and Goldsboro Christian Schools had tax cases that were the particular spur.
The President said his action had been ''misinterpreted.'' He did not really want to give tax exemptions to racist schools, he said. All along he had just wanted Congress to pass a statute with explicit language forbidding the exemptions, so ''that will be the law of the land.''
If you can believe that, you can believe anything. The Republican Party platform of 1980 called for an end to the tax rules ''against independent schools.'' Can anyone suppose that the platform drafters wanted Congress to put the rules into a statute? Is that what Trent Lott had in mind when he wrote Mr. Reagan and got his encour-aging reply? Yes, and goldfish can fly.
Even if Mr. Reagan's call for Congressional action were not the afterthought it so obviously was, it would have grave defects. What the President is actually doing is this: taking a long-settled area of the law, reversing it by executive fiat and then inviting Congress to restore the status quo.
The effect of such a tactic is to reverse the burden of changing the law - and that is a heavy burden under our system. Even if a majority in Congress wants a certain statute, there are many ways in committee and on the floor to prevent its enactment. And this is not the only case in which the Reagan Administration is using the tactic, ''interpreting'' long-established law effectively out of existence while saying blandly that Congress can act if it wishes.
The lawlessness of the whole affair is breathtaking. A President on his own motion upsets a decade of law. Then he says he will continue to apply the long-understood rules for a while in case Congress acts - but will go ahead and grant tax exemptions to the two institutions whose cases the Supreme Court had been about to decide, Bob Jones and Goldsboro Christian.
Tax exemptions were not the only legal subject treated in terms of fantasy at th is press conference. Mr. Reagan also sought to justify his big new c ampaign against leaks of information on Government policy by say ing, ''It is against the law for anyone to release this information.' ' No it isn't - not in the United States. Presidents cantry to silenc e their subordinates. But except for particular sensitive mat erial, there is no ''law'' forbidding disclosure of Government in formation.
If Richard Nixon had misrepresented the law in the same way, there would have been instant outrage. But Ronald Reagan gives us his aw shucks look, and we forgive him. There is just that nagging thought: is it really ''conservative'' to play fast and loose with the law?
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Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...AB0894DA484D81
REAGAN TAX EXEMPTION BILL ASSAILED
STUART TAYLOR Jr., Special to the New York Times. Feb 2, 1982. pg. A.18
The prospects of President Reagan's bill to deny tax exemptions to segregationist private schools were described as ''uncertain'' today by Senate Republicans and Democrats.
Before skeptical members of the Finance Committee, Deputy Attorney General Edward C. Schmults and Treasury Department officials urged approval of the proposed legislation. They contended that if Congress did not act, the Administration's interpretation of existing tax laws would force the Government to grant exemptions to schools that discriminate racially.
Copies of internal Justice and Treasury Department documents released late today by the Finance Committee disclosed that such an interpretation was a reversal of a position Mr. Schmults had supported in December.
At news conferences before the hearing, rep resentatives of ''Christian right'' schools called Mr. Reagan a ''hypocrite'' for proposing the legislation, while civil rights leaders and liberals in Congress asserted that the Administration' s tax law interpretationwas based on a bogus legal analysis. Policy Changed Jan. 8
The Administration decided Jan. 8 to grant the exemptions to private schools that practiced racial discrimination, revoking an 11-year-old policy initiated by the Nixon Administration. The move was immediately criticized by civil rights leaders and members of both parties in Congress, and four days later Mr. Reagan said he would rescind the change and submit a bill to bar such tax exemptions.
Senator Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, chairman of the Finance Committee, expressed puzzlement over the Administration's handling of the issue, and agreed with a statement by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, who said, ''The fate of this legislation is uncertain.''
The Administration proposal is opposed both by conservatives, who say segregationist schools should be granted tax exemptions, and by liberals and moderates, including Mr. Moynihan, who point to Federal court rulings that they say have established the illegality of the exemptions.
Mr. Dole said tax exemptions should be denied to segregated schools, but said he was not sure legislation was needed. Mississippi Lawmaker Writes
In testimony before the committee, Mr. Schmults acknowledged that he had acted on the issue after receiving a Reagan notation on a letter from Representative Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi.
In the Dec. 15 letter to Mr. Lott, which was released by the Finance Committee this afternoon, Mr. Schmults wrote that the Justice Department planned to argue in the Supreme Court that segregated schools were not legally entitled to tax exemptions.
The official's le tter stressed that this position had been consistently followed by four Administrations since 1970 and ''has been approved by two United States Courts of Appeals in three separate laws uits.''
<b>But Mr. Schmults received a letter dated Dec. 21 from Mr. Lott that stated, ''The position you report may well be out of line with the President's policy.'' Reagan Memomorandum Attached
Attached was a copy of the ''Presidential Log of Selected House Mail,'' on which Mr. Reagan had written, ''I think we should,'' next to a reference to Representative Lott's request for the Administration to ''intervene'' in the Supreme Court case. </b> Deputy Treasury Secretary R.T. McNamara received a similar letter from Mr. Lott.
The case concerned Bob Jones University in South Carolina and Goldsboro Christian Schools in North Carolina. Today, Mr. Schmults contended that the Justice Department's subsequent advice to the Treasury Department and the revenue service that segregationist schools were legally entitled to tax exemptions ''was made solely on the basis of objective legal analysis.''
The attacks on the Administration's position have continued. William Billings, President of the National Christian Action Coalition, called Mr. Reagan's proposal, ''The most dangerous piece of legislation ever considered affecting religious freedom,'' and vowed ''an all-out effort'' to defeat it.
Mr. Billings said his group was opposed to racial discrimination, but he contended that the Administration's bill would interfere with ''sincerely held religious beliefs.''
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Last edited by host; 05-06-2007 at 11:34 PM..
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