There's a reason Nancy Pelosi didn't call the vote on Obamacare in February 2009. She didn't have the votes and it took her more than a year to get them.
If she had insisted on trying to push it through "because it was the right thing to do," it would have crashed and burned. Instead, she pushed and pulled and cajoled and knocked heads and got that bill through by the skin of its teeth a year later. And it only needed one floor vote, because she knew exactly when to call it and when she called it, it passed. https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212124477
Timing is everything.
And Congress had nothing to do with with blacks attending the same schools as whites. That was the result of a Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 - a case that was the culmination of more than years of careful planning, painstaking strategizing and numerous previous cases. Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall mapped out this strategy, knowing it would take decades - and took much heat from people demanding that they moved faster and attack Plessy v. Ferguson head on. But they knew that, if they tried to overturn Plessy without the proper foundation, it would be upheld and further cemented into law for decades, if not centuries. I discuss it more in depth here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212115426
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