I'm poring over old
Americans for Democratic Action voting records for a major overhaul of my election model project. I found this comment in the 1959 ADA rankings pamphlet (and remember, this is when the legendary pair of Rayburn and Johnson were running the show):
"...The Democrats pay lip service to the needs of the present but are unwilling to move much beyond the lines drawn by their most conservative members.
"At the end of the session the Congress had neither aired the issues nor written the record; and the question is how long Administration intransigence will continue to be answered by Democratic drift."
The pamphlet goes on to list how a number of liberal priorities (education, labor reform, civil rights) were man-handled and shredded to pieces by the Conservative Coalition (it's worth noting that in the 1950s there was a so-called "four party system" in Congress - liberal Republicans, conservative Republicans, Democrats, and Dixiecrats - and the liberal Republicans + the Democrats were often roughly balanced with the Conservative Coalition, which was an unofficial alliance between the conservative Republicans and the Dixiecrats).
Why haven't other people sat down and compared the effectiveness of the 108th Congress Democrats with the "do-nothing Democrats" of the 86th Congress?