-
2. President Carter and the Old CBC
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
32 Chapter 2 President Carter and the Old CBC I have a very interesting relationship with the Black Caucus. Sometimes we have been in harmony, sometimes I am not in complete agreement. —President Jimmy Carter1 Black legislators argued that they didn’t get what they wanted from the Carter administration, and some weren’t sorry to see him go. Carter was the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Lyndon B. Johnson . While Johnson endured the political turmoil caused by Blacks over their demands for civil rights and responded with major civil rights and voting rights legislation, Blacks were experiencing very tough times economically in the late 1970s. Black lawmakers wanted an equally aggressive response, such as full employment and a rebuilding of America’s cities. Furthermore , there were alarming trends belying the racial progress that had been achieved during the civil rights movement. Out-of-wedlock births in the Black community had increased, moving more Black families into poverty . Black members in the House had formed a group in 1969, but Black lawmakers felt that there was an illusion of Black political power. Racial gerrymandering in the country still was used to keep Blacks out of elective office. It took several decades of voting rights lawsuits and a strengthening of federal voting rights law in 1982 before there was a serious expansion of Black political power (Davidson and Grofman 1994). The legality of busing for school integration had been tested in the 1970s. Now affirmative action was being litigated. Carter, meanwhile, was a moderate Democrat, one who believed that America was headed in a conservative direction. He, in fact, lost his reelec- President Carter and the Old CBC • 33 tion bid to a staunch conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, in 1980. In retrospect, the Carter presidency was caught in the middle of an economic upheaval. Inflation was a major problem that dogged his administration— gas prices just shot up—as was the Iranian hostage crisis, which remained unresolved until after President Reagan took office. The data showing this combativeness from Black lawmakers in the Carter administration are seen in the CBC opposition to Carter’s budgets and their low presidential support measures. Black House members, all Democrats during this time, went along with the House majority on major legislation from 45 to 61 percent of the time. This chapter discusses first budgetary politics and the CBC under Carter, then the measures of presidential support, party unity, and House majority support as calculated by the author using CQ Almanac statistics from 1977 to 1980. The major policy battles in the Carter administration are described in more detail. The CBC held a tight, ideological posture during these years. Black Political Concerns during the Carter Presidency The trouble between Black lawmakers and President Carter began on the first day of his administration.The CBC strongly opposed his appointment of Griffin B. Bell to attorney general. Blacks were disturbed by southerners like Bell with histories in the South’s segregationist past. In addition to Bell, the president had nominated Irby Turner Jr. to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Irby was a Mississippian who had been a member of the Citizens’ Council, a prosegregation organization (Bruno 1977). Bell’s own opinion about the matter appeared too sanguine. He told a reporter that if “all candidates for federal office were judged by their racial stands of 30 years ago . . . ‘everybody in the South would be barred from office.’” He initially refused to resign from two Atlanta social clubs that had no Black or Jewish members (Alpern, Shannon, and Doyle 1977). Furthermore, during his Senate confirmation hearings Bell called himself a moderate. Carter himself had made headlines in 1976 and caused Black consternation when he used the words “ethnic purity” in a statement that he would not tamper with American neighborhoods during his campaign for president. The U.S. attorney general was at the front line of civil rights and voting rights enforcement. Black legislators had already experienced years of what they called enforcement delays from the Nixon-Ford administrations . Bell was as good as his word; he was a moderate. The Justice Depart- [35.172.193.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:44 GMT) 34 • concordance ment’s legal brief in the Bakke case sought the middle ground by stating that race can be used to overcome past discrimination, but that quotas such as the one used in the Bakke case are unconstitutional, and deprive Whites of their civil rights. The...