Thread by @jonallendc

You’re trying to figure out this whole busing thing, whether you should care and what, if anything, it says about Joe Biden. I’ll try to help. 1/x

The first thing to understand is that Biden was, for a senator, a moderate on civil rights in the 1970s and 1980s. Like many of his fellow moderate Democrats, he had a mixed record then that is far to discriminatory side of how any senator would vote now. 2/x

The actual record and what Biden has presented since he started eyeballing the presidency for real 30+ years ago — right up through last night — are very different. 3/x

Now, let’s step back. When Biden is elected to the Senate in 1972 — before his 30th birthday — he beats a Republican, Cale Boggs, who was seen by segregationists in Delaware as too liberal on race. Biden benefited from the knocks on Boggs. 4/x

The political upheaval was happening all over border and southern states, where, for a period of years after the Johnson civil rights laws and their successors, civil rights moderates were turned out of office. 5/x

On a social level, the Brown v Board decision was nearly two decades old and some local school systems in various jurisdictions (not limited to the South) had used every tactic imaginable to prevent desegregation. 6/x

It can be hard to grasp now because segregation has been outlawed for so long, but back then there was a real difference between the courts banning segregated schools on the principle that separate was unequal and actually having black and white students learning side by side.7/x

Schools could and did have black classrooms with black teachers and white classrooms with white teachers, white floors and black floors, magnet programs, etc, designed to separate on race. Each tactic bought more time against liberals in Congress, state legislatures & SCOTUS 8/x

It can also be hard to understand if you haven’t actually suffered all the forms that discrimination takes (I certainly haven’t) just how brutal the fight over schools was — *IS TODAY* — so many years after Brown. But for purposes of last night’s debate ... 8/x

One way to think about the fight Biden was engaged in is to remember that school integration was at once among the most important civil rights and the one that was hardest for most racists to swallow. 10/x

Many civil rights didn’t actually require integration for most people, most of the time in any real way. Voting rights, fair credit laws, etc,, simply put black people on equal footing legally. They don’t require any interaction. 11/x

But schooling — now that’s different. A lot of white parents were willing to go to political war to keep schools segregated. The victors of so many local and state races were men who stood in schoolhouse doors and screamed bloody murder about federal intervention in states 12/x

One of the easiest ways to make sure your kid doesn’t go to an integrated school is to live in an area where all the kids are the same race. Unless someone comes along and says they will bus kids to achieve integration. 13/x

This is basically the world Biden enters in the Senate. After 20 years of shenanigans — including busing black kids hours to white neighborhoods to drive down the popularity of busing in the black community but not busing white kids — push is really coming to shove 14/x

The courts are leading the way on busing, which is, as Biden has said, not very popular in a lot of places. It turns out that when upholding the Constitution and popularity come in conflict, the courts tend to choose the former and Congress tends to choose the latter. x/x

Three things to keep in mind for the rest of the thread:

1) This wasn’t about busing
2) Biden didn’t just block busing
3) Biden has spent a long time obfuscating on his record — including last night, when he said things that were at least very misleading 16/x

Much of what the Senate did in the 1970s and early 1980s on the topic was to block federal funds from being used to enforce local school- busing plans. At the time, Biden said busing was a “bankrupt concept” and he argued, as he did last night, that federal gov overstepped 17/x

if and when it involved itself in the busing matter. This was the same argument used by the segregationist senators Biden talked about last week. They and their forebears used it before busing to oppose every federal effort to end discrimination dating back to the Civil War. 18/x

It was surprising last night that Biden argued he wasn’t against busing but simply against the federal government compelling it. 20/x

Surprising because Biden was absolutely against busing back then AND because he articulated the segregationists’ argument against it in 2019! So his answer was both misleading and jaw-droppingly anachronistic. But there’s more — of course there’s more. X/X

Remember when I said this wasn’t about busing. The first key to understanding that it wasn’t just about busing for Biden is the states’ rights argument he made then and last night. The second key is that Biden’s own big amendment on the topic had nothing to do with busing. 21/x

With some states and cities putting up full resistance to integration, the federal government looked at ways to accelerate the process. Biden moved swiftly to try to prevent the Ford administration from withholding federal funds for schools that didn’t integrate classrooms. x/x

His amendment didn’t have the word “busing” in it. Busing was irrelevant to it. But then as now, Biden talks about his efforts in that arena under the umbrella of “busing.” x/x

The obvious benefit of that is that busing was unpopular then and remains so. Most whites never liked the idea and, at least in part because the burden of travel mostly fell on black children, it was, as Biden notes, controversial in the black community. x/x

Even on the Senate floor, Biden and his allies talked about the classroom amendment as a busing issue. But the bigger benefit to calling it busing is that the nomenclature masked the intent: even in schools without busing, black and white could be kept separate. x/x

The Supreme Court, overturning the Plessy v Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal” in the 1954 Brown case, had ruled that distinct black and white education would be necessarily unequal. That is, for black kids to get a fair shot, they couldn’t be in separate schools. x/x

Enter Kamala Harris. 27/x

Harris was born 10 YEARS AFTER the Brown decision and told the story last night of being bused as part of an early wave of integrators. In Washington, Biden was fighting to make it harder for her and people who looked like her to get the same education as white kids. 28/x

In some ways, the conflict between them on the debate stage last night was LESS dramatic than it could have been. 28/x

In DC, a young senator who thinks of himself as pretty progressive on civil rights decides, in a time of great racial tumult, that the right course for America is to allow for two separate systems for black and white students to continue in places that resist integration. 29/x

He’s in an interesting spot suddenly — aligned with the segregationists who hold power in his caucus and on the committees he wants to serve on. For years — two generations — he tells liberals he’s disgusted by the segregationists’ ideology, which has the benefit of truth. x/x

If one believes separate is inherently unequal — and that people of color have been on the losing end of that inequality — then the story Harris told last night is the story of how but for the grace of ZIP code she would have been an invisible victim of Biden’s use of power x/x.

This is how bad the past 10 days or so have been for Biden from the perspective of a Democratic primary (which is different than a general election): He unraveled his own 40-plus-year narrative on “busing” bit by bit until he realized he needed to stop talking. x/x

It starts with Biden telling donors a theoretically win-win story: he got along with segregationists even though he disagreed with them. Message: I can work with folks and I’m a good progressive.

The problem is that it wasn’t really true. x/x

Sure, it was true in the sense that they were ugly bigots who believed in white supremacy and Biden is not. But he agreed with them on the civil rights issues before Congress for nearly a decade. And he made the argument that federal government didn’t belong in their states. x/x

But, you know, it’s 2019 and that was like the Nixon-Carter-Ford-Reagan era and Biden’s been a real civil rights champion since then. So, maybe not such a big deal, right? Oh yeah, and if Obama thinks he should be VP twice, how can Biden have a race problem?

x/x

There are two elements to his story that are hard to square: he brought up the segregationists on his own so that he could use them to mislead about his record and then he misled about whether he opposed busing during Thursday’s debate. x/x

And there is one element that is impossible to understand in the context of a modern Democratic primary: He laid out his at-the-time thinking as an objection to federal intervention in school integration by busing. But he also said he wasn’t against busing. So it was all ...x/x

about the federal intervention on civil rights. That would help explain his 1975 amendment on desegregating classrooms. It would also put him at odds with basic party orthodoxy on the need for federal protection of minority rights — and in these cases, the rights of children. x/x

I asked several aides last night whether Biden’s views on federal power in this area have changed and did not get a responsive answer. It’s hard to remember back to last Tuesday, but he’s the one who raised the issue — and that tendency to self-inflict may he worst problem -30-