Following an awkward, earnest speech to an audience at Howard University, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) insisted several times that he did not oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"I've never been against the Civil Rights Act, ever," Paul told a questioner, following what was the first speech by a Republican legislator at the historically black university in decades. "This was on tape," the questioner responded.
That's true. It is on tape. Here it is:
In 2010, during an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal flagged by ThinkProgress, Paul made it very clear that he opposed a key part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination on the basis of race in "places of public accommodation," such as privately owned businesses that are open to the public. Here's the transcript:
PAUL: I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I'm all in favor of that.INTERVIEWER: But?PAUL: You had to ask me the "but." I don't like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that's most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.
If federal civil rights laws only outlawed segregation in "anything that gets any public funding," the state would still be called upon to enforce racism by enforcing the property rights of business owners who did not want to serve people on the basis of skin color (or religion, or national origin). Only by extending the ban on discrimination to all places of public accommodation, including privately owned businesses, could freedom against discrimination actually be upheld. Paul elaborated later in the interview when he said that he "became emotional" reading the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.
INTERVIEWER: But under your philosophy, it would be okay for Dr. King not to be served at the counter at Woolworths?PAUL: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part—and this is the hard part about believing in freedom—is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example—you have to, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things and uh, we're here at the bastion of newspaperdom, I'm sure you believe in the First Amendment so you understand that people can say bad things. It's the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we're civilized people, we publicly criticize that, and don't belong to those groups, or don't associate with those people.
So Paul made it quite clear in 2010 that he didn't believe in federal law banning discrimination in privately owned businesses that are open to the public. At Howard, Paul seemed to be saying he never opposed the Civil Rights Act in its entirety, but he certainly opposed a key part of it that completely reshaped American society. Supporting the right of white business owners not to serve blacks may be the "hard part of freedom" for someone, but not for anyone who looks like Rand Paul.
Paul got a warm reception from the Howard audience for some of his positions on foreign policy and the war on drugs. But in what seems like a tacit acknowledgement that his past position on a piece of historic civil rights legislation is embarrassing, Paul fibbed about what that position actually was.
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Tea party titan Rand Paul, visiting Howard University on Wednesday, told students that he had been called “either brave or crazy to be here” at the historically black college.
Probably some of each: brave, because he’s trying to sell himself and fellow Republicans to African Americans, a singularly resistant demographic; and crazy, because he based his pitch on revised history and airbrushed facts — and the Howard kids weren’t fooled.
“No Republican questions or disputes civil rights,” the senator from Kentucky proclaimed. “I’ve never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act.”
Howzat?
See "Republican Party Is Full Of Racists, Colin Powell's Chief Of Staff" http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/10/republican-party-is-full-of-racists.html
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Tea party titan Rand Paul, visiting Howard University on Wednesday, told students that he had been called “either brave or crazy to be here” at the historically black college.
Probably some of each: brave, because he’s trying to sell himself and fellow Republicans to African Americans, a singularly resistant demographic; and crazy, because he based his pitch on revised history and airbrushed facts — and the Howard kids weren’t fooled.
“No Republican questions or disputes civil rights,” the senator from Kentucky proclaimed. “I’ve never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act.”
Howzat?
As a candidate in 2010, Paul questioned the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act’s Title II, which prohibits private discrimination. “I don’t want to be associated with those people,” he said whenMSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked him about private businesses that refuse to serve black customers, “but I also don’t want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that’s one of the things freedom requires.”
Asked by the moderator to explain his claim that he never spoke out against the Civil Rights Act, Paul provided the creative rationale that he was talking “about the ramifications of certain portions of the Civil Rights Act beyond race, as are now being applied to smoking, menus, listing calories and things on menus and guns.”
Paul acknowledged that his wooing of African Americans “is an uphill battle,” and his hour with the students confirmed this. Talking about the Republicans’ historical support for civil rights, he said: “I’ll give you one example. The first, one of the African American U.S. senators was a guy named, uh, I’m blanking on his name, from Massachusetts — ”
“Edward Brooke!” several in the audience called out.
“Edwin Brookes,” Paul repeated.
The students broke out in hysterics. The laughter had barely subsided when Paul posed a question. “If I were to have said, ‘Who do you think the founders of the NAACP are?’ . . . would everybody in here know they were all Republicans?”
“Yes,” several could be heard grumbling. “Of course they would,” one woman informed him.
Paul dug himself in deeper. “I don’t know what you know,” he said.
They knew enough to be suspicious of his central argument: that Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party is the same Republican Party that now dominates the South. This analysis glossed over the civil rights era, when Democrats and Republicans essentially switched sides as southern Dixiecrats left for the GOP.
“Democrats in Louisville were led by Courier-Journal Editor Henry Watterson and were implacably opposed to blacks voting,” Paul argued. Watterson died in 1921. “Meanwhile,” he continued, “Kentucky’s Democrat-controlled legislature voted against the 13th, the 14th and the 15th amendments.” In the 1860s.
A student questioner sought clarification. “Are we discussing the Republican Party of the 19th century?” he asked, to applause. “Or are we discussing the post-1968 Republican Party?”
“The argument I’m trying to make is we haven’t changed,” Paul proposed.
The Howard students weren’t hostile to the senator as much as indifferent. Campus police swarmed outside the hall and erected barricades, although they proved unnecessary. Doors opened an hour early, but seats didn’t fill up until the last minute, and many spent their time texting and fanning themselves in the overheated hall.
Paul elicited a few chuckles when he requested that the school newspaper go with the headline, “A Republican came to Howard, but he came in peace.” But he got only silence when he ad-libbed a joke about how his Civil Rights Act comments in 2010 didn’t “go so well for me.”
“My hope is that you will hear me out,” Paul asked, and all appeared to — except for senior Brian Menifee, who raised a hand-lettered banner announcing that “Howard University Doesn’t Support White Supremacy.” Police threw him out roughly, and other students cheered.
But Paul got no cheers for most of his ideas: criticizing Democrats’ “unlimited federal assistance,” calling private-school choice “the civil rights issue of our day” and saying that “there are Republicans who don’t clamor for war.” He did better with his proposal to repeal mandatory minimum sentences, but he drew boos when he defended voter-ID laws.
“I come to Howard,” Paul said, “to say I want a government that leaves you alone.” He argued that “objective evidence shows that big government is not a friend to African Americans.”
Freshman Keenan Glover disagreed. “I want a government that’s going to help me,” he said. “I want a government that’s going to help me pay for my college education.”
“We can disagree,” the senator said, then upgraded his pessimism. “Probably, we’re going to end up disagreeing.”
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Rand Paul at Howard:'Big government not a friend to African Americans'
Libertarian-leaning conservative senator cites cases of Obama and Bush in call for end to minimum sentencing for drug use
Rand Paul is seen by many as a potential Republican candidate for president in 2016. Photograph: Mark Lyons/EPA
The firebrand conservative senator Rand Paul evoked the reported youthful drug use of George W Bush and Barack Obama in a pitch to young black students on Wednesday.
In part of a speech delivered at Howard University, a predominantly black college near Washington DC, Paul argued for a repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, arguing that being jailed for some non-violent drug crimes ruined lives. In order to make his point, he teed up a story about two young American men – one of them white, rich and privileged and one of them mixed-race and from a single parent household. "Both of them were said to have used illegal drugs," he said.
Paul went on: "Now you might think I'm about to tell you a story about racism in America, where the rich kid gets off and the black kid goes to jail. It could well be, and often is, but that is not this story. In this story both young men were extraordinarily lucky. Both young men were not caught. They weren't imprisoned. Instead they both went on to become presidents of the United States. Barack Obama and George Bush were lucky."
In his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, Obama confessed that as a young man he smoked "weed" and had taken "maybe a little blow" – common slang for cocaine. Journalists and authors have repeatedly raised allegations that Bush used cocaine when he was a young man known for a hard-partying lifestyle. Bush has skirted the question. Asked about the rumours in 1994, in Texas, he replied: "What I did as a kid? I don't think it's relevant."
The libertarian-leaning Paul used both men as an example of how tough laws on drug issues can blight lives – a particular problem among some poor black American communities, where incarceration rates are high. "We should stand and loudly proclaim enough is enough. We should not have laws that ruin the lives of young men and women who have committed no violence," he said, pointing out that he had submitted a law to repeal federal mandatory minimum sentences.
Paul's speech at Howard comes as the Republican party is seeking to broaden its appeal to minority voters after Mitt Romney's decisive defeat by Obama in 2012. That loss has provoked a fierce internal debatebetween those who say that the GOP has to shift its policies to broaden its appeal, and those who say that it just has to sell its core conservative message more effectively.
The Kentucky senator acknowledged the party's challenge in persuading black Americans to vote for it. "Some have said that I'm either brave or crazy to be here today," he said. "My hope is that you will hear me out, that you will see me for who I am, not the caricature sometimes presented by political opponents."
The Tea Party favourite, who has inherited the libertarian followers who once flocked to his father Ron Paul's banner, then outlined how the history of the Republican party had frequently coincided with the civil rights struggles of black Americans. He also addressed the long-standing controversy of previous comments he made, in which he criticised portions of the historic 1963 Civil Rights Act. Paul has said repeatedly that parts of the act that forced private businesses to serve all races equally were an infringement of the free market best left outside the control of federal law.
"No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act," he said. "The dispute, if there is one, has always been about how much of the remedy should come under federal or state or private purview."
Paul has rapidly emerged as one of the leading lights of the Republican right wing as it comes to terms with defeat in 2012 and looks forward to the 2014 mid-term elections. His name is frequently mentioned as a likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. At Howard, Paul stuck to his central anti-government, anti-big spending, anti-tax political beliefs.
"I would argue that the objective evidence shows that big government is not a friend to African Americans," he said. But he also spoke out against a bellicose US foreign policy and criticised military intervention abroad. "I want you to know that all Republicans do not clamour for war," he said.
The speech can be seen in the context of Paul's attempts to reach out to non-traditional areas of Republican support. It also comes after a well-received speech that he gave to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce last month. In that speech, Paul used Spanish phrases, quoted famous Latin American authors and made a clear pitch for the fast-growing Hispanic demographic that many experts believe is vital to future electoral success in America.
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