I occasionally bring up the following facts to remind people that they can’t make lazy comparisons between what Franklin Roosevelt accomplished and what President Obama has accomplished. The following numbers are the caucus splits during FDR’s first eight years in office. The Democratic caucus includes minor parties like Wisconsin Progressive and Minnesota Farmer-Labor. The number listed is the high-water mark for each Congress.
73rd Congress (1933-34): (Senate 60-35, House 313-113)
74th Congress (1935-36): (Senate 75-21, House 332-103)
75th Congress (1937-38): (Senate 80-16, House 347-88)
76th Congress (1939-40): (Senate 73-23, House 258-177)
In FDR’s time, there were only 48 states and 96 senators. In a one hundred member Senate, the equivalent majorities would be:
73rd: 63 senators
74th: 78 senators
75th: 83 senators
76th: 76 senators
These numbers can be very deceptive. The South was almost 100% Democratic in these years, and they were both vicious segregationists and hostile to labor. For the most part, they were even more socially conservative than today’s Republican South. So, FDR did not have a free hand to do whatever he wanted even with huge Democratic majorities and a totally discredited opposition.
Still, imagine if all the southern Senators were still Democrats, and they were willing to work with the president rather than obstruct him at every turn. Imagine if the filibuster was reserved for only civil rights bills.
Imagine if the Republicans only had seventeen members of the Senate.
For another comparison, LBJ’s 89th Congress (1965-66) had 68 Democrats and 32 Republicans.
Doris Kern Goodwin gave a sly smile yesterday when she was asked if it were her suggestion to Obama to do the FDR loop in the speech as she is working on her next biography, about FDR.
Unfortunately just as we embrace the lessons of history and rely on it for substance, it is disturbing to see the Rep either embrace ignorance or willingly chase immorality.
Such an interesting and important speech Obama gave yesterday and yet Fox viewership probably are talking in coffee shops today wondering who the hell Rosevelt was and why he mattered.
I’m confused by your comment. Are you mixing up your Roosevelts?
yes, sorry, explanation more embarassing that mixup so I’ll just go to my room.
If you compare accomplishment to accomplishment, on the one hand you have a red-hot forged sword and on the other, you have a flaccid penis that forsook “hope” a long, long time ago.
I don’t know who is even bothering comparing the two any longer.
Right.
Because you want to miss the point.
Wow, referring to a man crippled by polio as “flaccid,” that’s classy…oh, I see, you were referring to President Obama instead. You sly devil, you.
Great stuff as always, so why don’t you crawl back under your bridge for the day? You’ve clearly peaked.
This comment says a whole hell of a lot more about you and your conception of politics than it does about presidential accomplishments.
I agree the comparisons to FDR are silly because the political situation is completely different today. I am more upset with Eric Holder not going after any criminals on Wall Street or the Administration not pulling some FDR Supreme Court moves against their political opponents and their obstructionists. More Recess appointments, eliminating partisan talk radio & Fox News, and getting rid of filibuster are just few ideas that come to mind.
“I am more upset with Eric Holder not going after any criminals on Wall Street…”
You know, like FDR’s Attorney General did. Oh, wait…
This has nothing to do with FDR. how many people has the DOJ indicted for Wall Street crimes? Their results have been lackluster. I can think of a few high profile cases of insider trading but that is about it.
Part of reason is some of their immoral deeds were not necessarily illegal or made retroactively legal, some cases are maybe too hard to prove, and there is stil a bunch of GW rot burrowed in DOJ too.
Sadly, Holder’s department is more likely to go after medical weed shops or online poke outlets than Wall Street crooks.
They did make Ex-Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo pay 67 million dollars in fines for his con but he is scott free with over 300 million dollars left to himself. That scumbag should be rotting in a jail cell for what he did to Americans and our economy.
Did you watch 60 minutes segment on Sunday? None of this was really too new.
Steve Kroft: Do you believe that there are people at Countrywide who belong behind bars?
Eileen Foster: Yes.
Kroft: Do you want to give me their names?
Foster: No.
Kroft: Would you give their names to a grand jury if you were asked?
Foster: Yes.
But Eileen Foster has never been asked – and never spoken to the Justice Department – even though she was Countrywide’s executive vice president in charge of fraud investigations. At the height of the housing bubble, Countrywide Financial was the largest mortgage lender in the country and the loans it made were among the worst, a third ending up in foreclosure or default, many because of mortgage fraud.
It was Foster’s job to monitor and investigate allegations of fraud against Countrywide employees and make sure they were reported to the board of directors and the Treasury Department.
Kroft: How much fraud was there at Countrywide?
Foster: From what I saw, the types of things I saw, it was– it appeared systemic. It, it wasn’t just one individual or two or three individuals, it was branches of individuals, it was regions of individuals.
Kroft: What you seem to be saying was it was just a way of doing business?
Foster: Yes.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57336042/prosecuting-wall-street/?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
“eliminating partisan talk radio & Fox News,”
Say what? You’re disappointed that President Obama has refused to exercise his godlike powers to eliminate that entire swath of the media?
SRSLY????????????????
Fox News is not the “media.” It is a 24/7 partisan organ of the GOP and 1% out to destroy Democrats. What has the administration’s response to Fox been? How about Clear Channels radio monopoly? Crickets. The President does an interview with Bill O at the Super Bowl and FOX gets to ask questions at press conferences. Anita Dunn made a comment once and then she went away.
No Republican president would allow an operation like Fox News to behave in this manner if the roles were reversed. Nixon would likely have them bugged by FBI or audited by IRS.
I used the wrong type of language in elimination. Maybe diminished or neutralized is better for my point. I do not see any counter punching from the Administration or elected Democrats towards their megaphone of liars.
FWIW, the “media” for most of the country’s history was filled with fiercely partisan organs—so much so that Fox News is unexceptional by the standards of say, 1900, or 1850, or 1800.
It’s only in the mid-20th century—with TV limited to a handful of stations and replacing afternoon newspapers, and newspapers achieving monopoly or oligopoly (i.e., 1-4 papers/city) status—that the journalistic norm of “objectivity” comes to the forefront.
With the proliferation of cable and satellite TV (and radio), and with the internet, the media environment today is more like that of the 19th century than of the 20th century.
We can debate whether that’s a good thing or not. But I don’t think it’s helpful to argue that because Fox News is partisan that it is therefore not part of the media.
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A number of FDR’s New Deal proposals were declared unconstitutional by the Hughes Supreme Court. Due to his 3rd and 4th term, FDR outlasted in the end all but two of the sitting judges. The make-up of the SC changed profoundly. FDR failed to complete the New Deal because the economy fell back into a self created recession.
Cross-posted from BooMan’s fp story – We’re Not Living in 1937
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."In 1933, these were the Southern Senators.
Alabama
Hugo Black
John H Bankhead II
Arkansas
Joseph Taylor Robinson
Hattie Carraway
Florida
Duncan U. Fletcher
Park Trammell
Georgia
Walter F. George
Richard B. Russell
Louisiana
Huey P. Long
John H. Overton
Mississippi
Pat Harrison
Hubert Stephens
North Carolina
Josiah William Bentley
Robert R. Reynolds
South Carolina
Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith
James F. Byrnes
Tennessee
Kenneth D. McKellar
Nathan Lynn Bachman
Texas
Morris Sheppard
Thomas T. Connally
Look up their bios to see how they stood on farmers and labor. It is a sure bet that publicly they defended segregation.
The changes in 1937 were:
Alabama was the same, but in August Hugo Black resigned to go to the Supreme Court; Dixie Bibb Graves was appointed to replace him; the special election elected Joseph Lister Hill.
In Arkansas, Joseph Taylor Robinson died in July; the special election elected John E. Miller
In Florida, the Senators were:
Charles Oscar Andrews
Claude Denson “Red” Pepper
Georgia was the same.
In Lousiana, Huey Long had been assassinated in 1935 and replaced by Allen Joseph Ellender
In Mississippi, Theodore Gilmore Bilbo was elected.
North Carolina was the same.
South Carolina was the same.
In Tennessee, Nathan Lynn Bachman died in April 1937, replaced by appointee George L. Berry; Arthur Thomas Stewart won the special election.
Texas was the same.
Outside of the issue of segregation, there was a growing progressive populism manifested mostly through appeals to farmers.
Olin D. Johnston shows that pro-labor elected officials were a consequence of the New Deal and WWII “prosperity”. And the experience of Claude Pepper shows how difficult it was for a progressive elected official to navigate the ins and outs of lefty politics in the World War II and postwar era.
The factions in Southern politics prior to 1960 were either personal networks, within-state regions, or between the planter-turned-industrialist elite and farmers. In the 1950s and 1960s, “progressive” applied to Southern politicians meant the pols who built better road, put up more money for public schools, and worked to bring good-paying jobs (generally by bribing out-of-state companies with tax breaks and assurances of cheap labor).
And let’s not forget that even with those insane majorities FDR never even attempted health care reform.
Also, the original social security act he passed gave nothing to Latinos and Blacks as agricultural and domestic workers were excluded. Also government employees, railroad employees, the self-employed, clergy, survivors and their dependents all got nothing. Also if you became disabled and couldn’t work you got nothing.
In addition, there was no cost of living adjustment and benefits were negligible.
LBJ with his insane majorities, and a 50 vote requirement in the senate never even attempted comprehensive health reform.
Instead we got medicaid for the poor. BUT, the original medicaid didn’t cover adults. Only children and their care-givers. And even today, if you’re single, and make over 700 dollars per month, you’re too wealthy to qualify for medicaid.
And of course we got Medicare, which originally didn’t cover the cost of prescription drugs, didn’t cover the cost of home health services, and didn’t offer anything if you beacme disabled.
In addition LBJ did nothing to regulate the insurance companies for those not on Medicaid or Medicare.
Obama on the other hand got comprehenisive reform through with a 60 vote requirement and much smaller majorities in congress. I’m shocked to this day it got through. Yes, there is no public option, but rescission and pre-existing condition horse shit is illegal. By law insurance companies must spend 85% of their revenue on actually providing health care, NOT LOBBYING. And it sets up highly regulated excahnges and sets aside about 400 billion dollars per year in subsidies to get insurance for people. Most importantly it defines as the default setting of the U.S. that health care is a right.
In fact, I find it a miracle that there even was a stimulus bill, or financial reform, or a DADT repeal.
If Obama had had a 50 vote requirement in the Seante, the entire wish-list of progressives probably would have been done. On the other hand, give LBJ, and FDR the same majorities Obama had AND subject them to a 60 vote requirement, and I suspect the New Deal and the Great Society wouldn’t exist.