Biden's withdrawal from the race has echoes of LBJ

Arriving at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, Monday President Biden hopes to revisit the mountaintop of LBJ’s greatest achievement: passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Biden will be commemorating the landmark legislation, which took effect 60 years ago this month, outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, gender or national origin.

The zenith of the civil rights movement, at least to that time, the 1964 act ended the “Jim Crow” era of legal segregation and the denial of public accommodations. It had passed the House in February of that year and been subjected to months of filibuster in the Senate, much like predecessor civil rights bills had been in 1957 and 1960, when Johnson was Senate majority leader.

Those bills had been watered down to accommodate segregationist Southern senators in Johnson’s own Democratic Party. But in 1964, LBJ was in the White House and he had a more unified party and better support from Senate Republicans. After 60 days of debate, the necessary two-thirds of majority required for cloture in that era was achieved. Nine days later, the bill was passed by a vote of 73-27.

In originally scheduling Biden’s visit to Austin, the White House surely intended to highlight that milestone and the Democratic Party’s commitment to it.

But much of the coverage of today’s Austin event is likely to highlight another link between Biden and LBJ. Both men brought an end to their presidencies by declining the nomination of their party for another term. And unlike incumbent presidents who declined to seek a term they could have pursued (Harry S Truman in 1952, Calvin Coolidge in 1928, Theodore Roosevelt in 1908), Biden and LBJ did not take themselves out of the