NON BINDING RESOLUTIONS, the Iraq debate stalled in the Senate. The rock-solid plan to block Iraq War funding undermined.. talk of compromise measures and more non-binds, why in the early running it seems like the '06 Democrats can't get things together on what they were presumably elected to do: to end the war in Iraq. These first weeks are no doubt frustrating to rank-and file Democrats. But to historians of American politics, it should be little surprise. Opposition congresses elected in a midterm, in reaction to a President just don't seem to do well reversing the President's policies without getting the President to compromise, or until the Oval Office changes hands. Now that we've seen some early results of the 2006 Democrats we can compare them to two previous eras of newly found Democratic Congressional power: 1931 and 1891.
IT'S NOT ALL THAT COMMON for a Speaker to leave the podium and go down to the well of the House and make a speech, but that's just what John Nance Garner did.....
Speakers like to stay above the fray and merely preside over the body, speaking if at all through surrogates. In 1932, John Nance Garner, representative from Texas, was elected speaker in 1931 after a bad midterm for Republicans as people expressed their outrage over Herbert Hoover's handling of the Great Depression, in which national income this is the total amount of money Americans were making had fallen from 87 billion in 1929 to 56 billion in 1931.
But if people were expecting radical change, a cure to the depression. Garner and these new Democrats were not the ones to deliver it. They didn't know what to do, and they didn't want to do anything. The Democratic House just rubber stamped Hoover's weak baby steps to fight the Depression including the reconstuction finance, some mortgage help, and bans on banks getting involved in the stock market. Rather than presenting their own worldview, Democrats bought into Herbert Hoover's view that the depression was caused by a few scoundrels in Wall Street...the whole system didn't need to be changed and the government didn't need to be involved. And the best thing Congress could do was, blance the federal budget. To do this Garner would propose an idea, a national sales tax. This Democratic Speaker's proposal to save the nationhad come from of all people, Hoover's treasury secretary.
Garner's Democrats, who had been elevated from the oblivion that they had suffered throughout the prosperous 1920's, were now in the congressional majority, and they didn't want to blow it. Garner was eager to demonstrate that Democrats could be just as fiscally responsible as Republicans when given power. Garner's sales tax was a way to restore income to the fedral government. After all, not enough tax revenue was coming in and if course, the budget had to be balanced.
The problem was that the Average American didn't think a new tax on the items they bought was going to help them fight Depression, especially with the little income they now had. Rank-and-file members rebelled against Speaker Garners proposal. Rep. "Muley" Doughton of North Carolina and GOP Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia of New York challenged the speakers's plan. And Democrats of all stripes reported an avalanche of constituent mail opposing the new tax. When Garner and his leadership tried to pass the sales tax bil, these rebels blocked the measure with procedural tactics.
Garner handed his gavel off and descended to the House floor. He asked his Democrats not to dissapoint to rally in the face of national emergency. He insisted that Sound fiscal policy was a prerequisite for
recovery. With a dramatic flourish, he asked every member who supported the principle of a balanced budget to stand in their seats. No one remained seated.
It was quite a speech for a member of the party opposing the President to make. If we translate Garner's action into today's times, this would be as if Nancy Pelosi went down to the well of the House and demanding that the Democrats support the war on Iraq -- asking for a show of hands.
Garner had a reason for his actions. Garner wanted to be president, and in his reckoning being seen as fiscally responsible was good for that ambition. After his valiant fight for the national sales tax and his floor speech, editorials hailed Garner as a statesman, and even the Hoover White House had kind words for the speaker. Though he didn't get his bill, and to this day there is no national sales tax, Garner did become a leading candidate for the Democratic party's presidential nomination. He earned support from newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst -- a leading champion of the sales tax. In the summer of 1932, as the election got closer, Garner would reverse course somewhat and propose a public works program which he knew would increase the debt and which he also knew would never become law because of Hoover's veto. But Garner would not see the inside of the Oval Office. He would be bested by a better politician named Franklin Delano Roosevelt and would have to settle for Vice President. An office he woudl enjoy so little, that he would compare it to a"bucket of warm spit" But only when Roosevelt took office and Garner took his bucket (and helped get the New Deal programs passed) would any Federal economic answer to the Depression take place.
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FOURTY YEARS EARLIER, Garner's office was held by another Southerner. For the first time in history, the man commanding one the most powerful chamber of governement was a man who had at one time taken arms against it. Charles Kenneth Crisp was a former a confedrate soldier and in 1861 was captured by union troops and was a prisoner of war. But this was thirty years after that war, and Crisp had some qualities that propelled him to the top. Compared to the bulk of Southern Democrats, Charles Kenneth Crisp was more a populist than a conservative. He had campaigned for silver money, which many populists, especially in the west felt would spread wealth more evenly and cripple the grip of bankers. And he argued for regulation of railroads, for a repeal of high tarrifs. It looked like a Crisp-run Congress would mean action.
Not unlike the situation with the current Congress, there was a pretty clear sense of what elected the 52nd congress that Crisp would take over. There was no unpopular war but there was an unpopular tariff - the McKinley tariff. President Benjamin Harrison, who took the presidency away from Democrat Grover Cleveland, was in lock-step with the GOP Congress and used his first two years to pass partisan legislation. Many felt the tariff had increased the prices of goods - particularly the tin goods that merchants sold from town to town across America. Now there's some evidence that merchants inflated prices using the tariff as an excuse, but nonetheless it angered the electorate in 1890. Another issue that angered them was all the spending the Congress had done. The 51st called the first 'Billion Dollar Congress' becuase it spent so much money.
2006 was a tap on the shoulder compared to the kick-ass whupping that Republicans got 1890. The Republicans were pulverized. From having 332 seats in congress, the Republicans were left with 88 seats. The Democrats had a clear majority with 235 seats and 10 seats were won by the Farmers Alliance Party. The senate hower, had a slight Republcian majority. And then there was Benjamin Harrison's veto. Crisp and his federal allies wanted to repeal the McKinley tariff that had been passed in 1890, but were unable to pass legislation that would make it through the Senate.
Crisp settled for a policy of passing not one but a series of bills attacking the different elements of the McKinley tarrif bill but not repealing it. Republicans called them "pop-gun bills" because they did not address the problem over all but took small shots at it, timed to spread out the political embarrasment. And none of the bills made it out of the Senate. It was never necessary for Benjamin Harrison to veto tarrif Legislation - it never came to him.
On the spending side, it turned out that the Democrats didn't care to turn off the spiget. The appropriations by the 52nd congress were higher than the fifty first. Demcorats argued that they could not stop the disbursments which had been committed too, especially pension increases.
Yet any action they took would meet the threat of Benjamin Harrison's veto. And the McKinley's tarrif which they all were elected to repeal, was not touched until about four years after that election when in 1894, led by Representative William Wilson of Virginia and a golden-throated young whippersnapper named Williams Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, the House passed a measure to not only lower the tarrif, but to put on an income tax to raise money to replace the tarrif funds. It was an unheard of victory of populism in the Gilded Age. There was great excitement when the billed passed and Bryan and others carried Wilson out of the chamber like he was a winning football player. Now Benjamin Harrision was gone and Grover Cleveland, who wnated tarrifs lowered, was President. Not only would the tarrif bill get severly weakined in the senate with all kinds of protectionist amendment, but the income tax part woudl be ruled unconstitutiional by the archconservative Supreme Court that sat in the 1890's.
The 1891 Democrats and the 1931 Democrats both found out that change isn't as easy as it sounds. Garner and his Democrats reacted by trying to play along with Hoover to be seen as the good guys. Crisp settled for pop-gun measures for political rather than policy change. Neither Speaker and Neither Congress got the change that voters had asked for.
Maybe in 1890, maybe in 1930 and maybe in 2006 voters were asking for too much. There are a couple of considerations historically with the current situation when an opposition Congress seeks to reverse the course a President has set in action:
-A President still has a veto, and so Most Congresses elected in reaction to a President's unpopular actions have not been successful in change until the President either compromises, or someone else becomes President. In the case of Iraq, no compromise seems possible and it will be 2009 before another individual takes office.
-Control in the House changes faster than the Senate. No doubt if the whole Senate was up in 1890, or 1930, or 2006 change would be easier.
-Foreign Policy is a troubling area for Congress. The Constitution gives the President the immediate authority as Commander in Chief and allows Congress only oversight, the purse and ultimately impeachement.
-Being the Congress during a war is a lot like being in charge of a project that is controlled by an employee but all you can do is ask questions, cut their budget or ultimately go through a long, arduous process of firing the employee. It seems like the system the Framers have given us has Congressional Foreign Policy powers that are two weak or too strong to be useful in a system in which the executive has the minute to minute control and most importantly all of the secret information about developments.
-The power of the purse is the greatest power the Congress has. Yet no Congress has ever cut funding to military troops in the middle of the war In 1974, Congressional Demcorats de-funded aid to South Vietnam. And that action is a clear a precedent this Congress can follow. But the peace deal had been signed in 1973, and troops were not on the ground. Whigs never defunded the Mexican War, Republicans never defunded Korea. Spending limits were not put on Clinton, though some attempted. That is not to say that Pelosi's Democrats should leave cutting funds off the table. It is only to understand that they would be writing history, they would be the first Congress to do so.
On the other hand, this President is also acting in a historically abnormal way-- he not shown the kind of response to public opinion that Nixon or James Polk did in relation to opinion of the war. While Nixon was bellyaching about hippies, he was instituting a a slow 'honor able' withdrawal. While Polk also sought victory in Mexico, he was pursuing peace treaties to rap up the war within a year of its start. Iraq is different. We so no sign of winding down the conflict and in fact the surge has been proposed. Historic actions from one branch give cover to historic actions from another, and it would be in line with public opinion and with the clear mandate of the 2006 election for Democrats to start to put some restrictions on a President who is 2 years from a razor thin re-election and prusuing
an oppositie policy than most Americans want, without fully convincing Americans that it is of serious
national interest to pursue.
This would be a situation where it might not be so terrible for Congress to make history. In this Congress has the ability to take back some authority from an executive branch that has gotten stronger and stronger over the previous century. in a way America's founders certianly did not intend. The Pelosi Democrats could well begin actions whose precedence could go well beyond the Iraq War.