When Rand Paul of Kentucky followed up his victory in the May 18, 2010, Republican U.S. Senate primary by saying that he had some reservations about the philosophical underpinnings of the Civil Rights Act, it prompted criticism from across the ideological spectrum.
"I like the Civil Rights Act in a sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains," Paul said in an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. "I abhor racism. I think it's a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant. But at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. There's 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act. One deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that."
...On ABC's This Week, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele -- his party's first African-American chairman -- made a point of arguing that his party had been on the forefront of civil rights when the landmark act Rand was referring to was passed in 1964, as well as the Voting Rights Act that passed the following year.
"Our party has always had a strong view on this issue," Steele told ABC's Jake Tapper. "We fought very hard in the '60s to get the civil rights bill passed as well as the voting rights bill."
We decided to see whether Steele was correct.
The Civil Rights Act -- which is best known for barring discrimination in public accommodations -- passed the House on Feb. 10, 1964 by a margin of 290-130. When broken down by party, 61 percent of Democratic lawmakers voted for the bill (152 yeas and 96 nays), and a full 80 percent of the Republican caucus supported it (138 yeas and 34 nays).
When the Senate passed the measure on June 19, 1964, -- nine days after supporters mustered enough votes to end the longest filibuster in Senate history -- the margin was 73-27. Better than two-thirds of Senate Democrats supported the measure on final passage (46 yeas, 21 nays), but an even stronger 82 percent of Republicans supported it (27 yeas, 6 nays).
...When the Voting Rights Act hit the floor in 1965, the vote results mirrored those of the Civil Rights Act. In the House, the measure passed by a 333-85 margin, with 78 percent of Democrats backing it (221 yeas and 61 nays) and 82 percent of Republicans backing it (112 yeas to 24 nays).
In the Senate, the measure passed by a 77-19 vote, with 73 percent of Democrats and 94 percent of Republicans supporting the bill.
...To be sure, Republican support was not unanimous. Most notably, the party's 1964 presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, voted against the Civil Rights Act and stuck to that position during the campaign (which he lost to Johnson in a landslide). And Yale University political scientist David Mayhew notes that the large Republican vote totals for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were not replicated in other key civil rights battles, such as an earlier one relating to fair employment practices in 1949 and 1950 and a subsequent one on fair housing in 1966.
But on the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the most notable factor affecting how Republicans voted was pragmatism, said Bert Rockman, a political scientist at Purdue University. "The Republicans of that era deserve credit, lots of it, but less in a partisan way than in a now long-lost art form – forging a consensus around critical national problems."
Back to Steele's quote: "We fought very hard in the '60s to get the civil rights bill passed as well as the voting rights bill."
The degree of Republican support for the two bills actually exceeded the degree of Democratic support, and it's also fair to say that Republicans took leading roles in both measures, even though they had far fewer seats, and thus less power, at the time.
Both of these factors are enough to earn Steele a rating of True.