Our country has changed,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts on June 25, 2013, when five of the nine Supreme Court Justices dismantled the historic Voting Rights Act.

President Lyndon B. Johnson hands pen to civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the the signing of the Voting Rights Act in August,1965
Image: CNN

Roberts is correct in at least one respect: Today’s Republican Party is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln, as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens reminded us again in a recent article in The New York Review of Books. Stevens, a lifelong Republican appointed to the court by Gerald Ford, attacked Roberts and his Republican colleagues for usurping the authority of Congress which had overwhelmingly renewed the act in 2006.

But 48 years ago this week, the Republican Party supported the cause of voting rights. On August 6, 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he gave the second pen he used to Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate Minority Leader. Dirksen deserved the honor because he was a major architect of the act. In fact, the bill was written in Dirksen’s office as he sat next to Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. Later, insiders joked that the bill should be called “Dirksenbach.”

More from Gary May @ CNN

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