It's pretty well known that John McCain traveled to Memphis on the Martin Luther King holiday to mend fences with the African American community for his opposition in 1983 to creating a federal holiday in honor of Rev. Martin Luther King. McCain admitted he had been "slow ... to give greatness its due" before eventually supporting a similar Arizona state holiday.
"But," says Huffington Post, "while McCain is seeking amends for his King Day vote, he has refused to back down on another controversial decision he made that put him at sharp odds with the civil rights movement."
HuffPo further writes:
But while McCain is seeking amends for his King Day vote, he has refused to back down on another controversial decision he made that put him at sharp odds with the civil rights movement.
In 1990, McCain was one of the deciding votes in helping then-President George H.W. Bush sustain a veto against the relatively benign Civil Rights Act of 1990.
In doing so, the senator found himself at odds with majorities in both chambers of Congress, most senior African Americans within the Bush administration, and the Republican-led U.S. Civil Rights Commission. He also helped Bush became (sic) the first president ever to successfully veto a civil rights measure -- Andrew Johnson in 1866 and Ronald Reagan in 1988 both had vetoes overridden.
The act was a response to a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions made the year before. In those decisions, the court overturned a 1971 ruling that required employers to prove a "business necessity" for screening out minorities and women in its hiring practices. That burden of proof, the 1989 court said, should instead be placed on the plaintiff who alleged that his or her client had been unlawfully screened.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/11/mccains-other-controversi_n_96193.htmlMcCain can't seem to get it right even when he's trying to set things right. Just one more thing to keep in mind as we begin to enter the General Election. This how he felt in 1990 - just seven years after he'd cast a deciding vote against the MLK holiday - and how by seeing nothing wrong with it now, perpetuates his deficiency on civil rights issues.
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