Birch Bayh Quotes
You know I don't think we need the Republicans to steal family values from us.
The stranglehold that the Southern Democrats had held on civil rights legislation had been broken in 1968 by Lyndon Johnson and the other Democrats with key support from some liberal Republicans like Lindsay. However, the South felt politically betrayed. The Republican leadership, in what was one of the most brilliant political strategies in American history, played to the disaffected racist Southerners and welcomed into their party. Within the next 30 years virtually the entire South had gone Republican, and the Republican captured both houses of Congress and the Presidency with the South solidly Republican. At the time, Lindsay and some Republican leaders criticized bitterly about the party pandering to the worst racist elements of the nation. The “Party of Lincoln” had become the party of the segregationists, the racists, the hate groups of the country.
The Republicans had been badly beaten in the 2012 Presidential Election. Many attributed the loss to the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Republican ideas which had become more and more conservative in recent decades. Others, like Rubio, wanted to maintain the existing ideas which were very different from the Republican ideas earlier when they won more elections.
This was perceived as an attack on social conservatives and a particular sleight to Robert Bork who had previously used part of the phrase as a book title.
Birch Evans Bayh Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician who served as U.S. Senator from Indiana from 1963 to 1981. He was first elected to office in 1954, when he won election to the Indiana House of Representatives; in 1958, he was elected Speaker, the youngest person to hold that office in the state's history. In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate, narrowly defeating incumbent Republican Homer E. Capehart. Shortly after entering the Senate, he became Chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, and in that role authored two constitutional amendments: the twenty-fifth—which establishes procedures for an orderly transition of power in the case of the death, disability, or resignation of the President of the United States—and the twenty-sixth, which lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the United States. He is the only non–Founding Father to have authored two constitutional amendments. Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the Electoral College.
