The current congressional leaders gathered last week not to honor Johnson — or any of the legislative leaders who actually passed the landmark law — but to award a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal to The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, whose crusade helped create the climate that made the bill possible. In his life, racial tensions helped make King such a polarizing figure that both Johnson and John F. Kennedy worried about seeming too close to him, but in martyrdom and myth, he is the only politically safe ground on which present day leaders could unite.
Yes, Reid paid tribute to the bill’s Republican floor leader, Thomas Kuchel of California (though he mispronounced his name as KEE-chul, not KEE-kul). And Boehner invoked the crucial role played by his fellow Ohio Republican, Rep. William McCulloch, in helping Kennedy and Johnson pass the bill, but the very next day, Boehner betrayed McCulloch’s bipartisan legacy by announcing his intention to sue Obama for usurping congressional powers.
“The Republican Party today doesn’t really honor its past,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.” “The Republican Party that had been ceased to be sometime in the 1980s, and the modern party — the radical conservative party — not only has little or no interest in honoring its history, it is actively hostile to it.”
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