Republicans’ Majority Status Echoes History

MARGARET WARNER:

The situation President Bush enjoys today with his party in control of both Houses of Congress has been more the norm than the exception for over 100 years.

Fifteen of the nineteen presidents since 1900 have enjoyed that political luxury for all, or at least part, of their term.

Only four presidents in that time– Republicans Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush– had to contend throughout their time in the White House with the opposition party controlling one or both Houses of Congress.

So what does history tell us about the opportunities and pitfalls of one party rule, and how can an opposition party best operate in those times?

For that we turn to: Presidential historian Michael Beschloss; Richard Norton Smith, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum; and Ellen Fitzpatrick, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Welcome to you all.

Richard, let's start with the presidents who have enjoyed this luxury. Which ones have been able to use it really to advantage, to use this one-party control to advantage and advance their agenda, and what has it taken for them to do so?

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

Well, the greatest luxury of all is not just to have a majority, but to come into office in an election that is also a repudiation of the opposition.

The classic example is 1932, when Americans, who really were weary of the Great Depression and wearier of Herbert Hoover, basically turned him and his party and business and everything it represented out of office and turned the presidency and Congress emphatically over to Franklin Roosevelt.

FDR had a mandate and he put it to good use, famously in the first 100 days of his presidency when he ran through with a compliant Congress one bill after another, which really began to redefine whole relationship of the federal government to the economy and indeed of average Americans to the government.

MARGARET WARNER:

The New Deal that really reshaped government for at least 50 years.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

Absolutely.

MARGARET WARNER:

Now, Ellen, who else you would pick out in terms of presidents who've enjoyed that luxury and used it to great advantage.

ELLEN FITZPATRICK:

I think in addition to Roosevelt, the most compelling example is really Lyndon Johnson, who came into office after assuming the presidency upon Kennedy's assassination in a landslide victory, with a very clear vision of what he wanted to do in the office.

It's not enough simply to have a unified government. You have to have something you want to do badly and an activist vision of the presidency itself, and Johnson had that.

And he, too, like Roosevelt, reshaped American society and politics in that term of office.

MARGARET WARNER:

Michael, if you look at the historical examples, and of course there are less distinguished ones or less activists ones, what would you… what parallels you would draw between the position George W. Bush is in today and so much of these presidents who had a one-party control?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

Well, in a way– and I almost feel I should turn in my historian's guild card for saying this– but here's a case where history may not tell us that much, because yes we're absolutely right that Roosevelt had great ambitions for the New Deal. Johnson sure did with the Great Society in 1965, civil rights and health care and so on.

So this is a president, President Bush who has ambitions like this, but he has got two things that those presidents didn't have: One is this is a congress, House and Senate, where there's conflict of a kind we have rarely seen in American history before.

This is not the majority and minority leader at the end of the day going home and having a drink together. This is going to be really very fierce combat.

But more than that, Roosevelt and Johnson had to deal with parties that may have seemed as if they controlled Congress, but Roosevelt had a Democratic Party that was largely southern Democrats, many of them who opposed what had he was trying to do; same thing with Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

George bush doesn't have that. The Republican Party and the House and Senate is a much more consistently George W. Bush party.

MARGARET WARNER:

Do you agree with that Richard, the idea of one party control? These parties are much more ideologically unified and with greater discipline than they were in the past.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

That is absolutely true. The parallel of the '30s and '20s, the Republicans controlled the White House and nominally controlled Congress.

You had presidents like Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover who won three landslide elections, but you had a Republican Party that was already beginning to split with an agricultural wing, a progressive wing if you will, a lot of people in the Midwest and the West who are not happy with what they saw as stand pat conservatism.

For a long time in this country, there have been a lot of people who said politics would be more rational if we had a liberal party and a conservative party.

And I think it's pretty clear that we are much closer to having exactly that than at any time in the last thirty, forty, fifty years.

It has consequences and one of them is that it does lead to much more ideological unity, and to some degree it gives a president, as Michael said, it gives him weapons that an FDR or a Coolidge didn't have.

MARGARET WARNER:

So Ellen, what are the pitfalls? What does history teach us have been the pitfalls and problems that come with one party control?

ELLEN FITZPATRICK:

Well, I think one of the most compelling pitfalls that these presidents have faced is the danger of overreaching, of promising too much. The expectation when you're free, ostensibly, of gridlock is that something is going to happen.

And this is one of the damning things that Roosevelt was able to say about his predecessors' administration: Nothing happened but words.

So if nothing happens, then you control not only both Houses of Congress but potentially the Judiciary as well, which I think is something usual in the current situation that we're facing, if this doesn't get realized in some way, then there is a serious problem of explanation. You had this power why didn't you use it?

MARGARET WARNER:

What other examples you would give, Michael, of pitfalls of one party control?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

Hubris. Lyndon Johnson in 1965 figured that he controlled the house and Senate. He did get a lot of bills through; it also led him to make very bad mistakes like the escalation of the war in Vietnam that he might not have made if there were a little bit more of a discipline of a narrower majority in Congress.

But one thing Johnson was aware of and that was that he knew if he pushed his people in the Congress too hard, they'd begin to rebel.

And he figured when he came in this 1965 with this big majority, he'd have about six months to get all this stuff through and after that they would begin rebel, and he was right on target.

By the beginning of the fall, people in the House and Senate Democrats were saying the president is pushing us too hard. He's making us vote for bills that are going to give us a lot of trouble in our home districts and Johnson was never so powerful again.

MARGARET WARNER:

Richard, wouldn't you say FDR also had a classic case of overstepping?

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

He did. I mean, the greatest politician, along with Lincoln, whoever sat in the White House, and yet he dramatically illustrated the limits of even his political genius.

He had carried all but two states in 1936. He bestrode the scene like the proverbial colossus. Only one target remained, and that was the nine old men of the Supreme Court who had been consistently striking down elements of his New Deal program.

And so FDR, in a too clever by half stratagem, came up with a program, in effect, to pack the court. He would appoint a new justice for every sitting justice who was 70 years old.

They would obviously be supportive of the new deal. There was only one problem: The American people had as much if not more veneration for the Supreme Court than they did for the man who sat in the White House.

And in the end his own party provided the margin of defeat. Roosevelt was forced to retreat.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

That's exactly right and that's the difference between then and now. The biggest opponent of court packing, as Richard is describing, in 1937 was Roosevelt's own vice president, John Nance Garner. I don't think Vice President Cheney is going to be opposing too many of George W. Bush's bills in Congress.

MARGARET WARNER:

So Ellen, now let's talk about the plight of an opposition party in these times when the president has one party control. Historically which ones have been, "successful" and by what definition? Is it thwarting the president? Is it using it to redefine your own party? What has it been?

ELLEN FITZPATRICK:

Well, I think it's a terrible mistake to simply take the tack of being an obstructionist, and that does not work.

If you look again at the example of Roosevelt and you look at the example of LBJ, in both cases the minority party, in part in response to the extraordinary historical moment historical moment in the case of Roosevelt, the Great Depression, responded to his legislative program and support… there was bipartisan support.

He also had very large majorities, at least in that first election. And in the case of LBJ, he would not have been able to enact many of the programs of the great society without the cooperation of liberal Republicans.

It was conservative southern Democrats that, in part, really endangered his program. And so cooperation rather than obstructionism is an important way to go.

But more importantly I think the opposition party really needs to watch and wait. And this is what the Republicans did so efficiently in the 1960s.

The whole story of the rise of American conservatism in the late '60s and through to the '70s to the Reagan Revolution is a story about capturing the constituency of the other party by building on discomfort with what the current administration is doing.

MARGARET WARNER:

Pick up on that theme, Richard, about an opposition party using the time productively.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

Well, I'd like to agree with Ellen. She has laid out the statesman-like route and there is no doubt that the Republicans after the disaster of '64 put a lot of effort, including a lot of intellectual effort as well with nuts and bolts reorganizing, into rethinking what it meant to be a Republican.

But look at the more recent past. Look at Bill Clinton's first term. It's very difficult to argue that the Republicans from a purely strategic objective did not succeed by thwarting, for example, President Clinton proposed a national health care plan.

In fact you could argue it's a combination of all of the things we have been talking about– a little bit of hubris from a new president who believed, quite understandably, that he had a substantial mandate to take the country in a different direction, offset by a Republican minority that was absolutely determined to dig in its heels and prevent, as they put it, the takeover of one- seventh of the American economy.

And by 1994, guess what? It was the Republicans with their Contract for America that were taking on both… taking over both Houses of Congress for the first time 40 years.

MARGARET WARNER:

What where did you come down on this, Michael, about what defines a successful opposition party?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

Yeah, I think Richard is not giving enough credit to the Republicans in 1994, because they not only thwarted Clinton and they not only sort of campaigned against him with that contract, they laid out a principled list of things that they would do if they were put in office.

So people weren't just saying "I don't like Clinton let's vote for the Republicans." They were saying, "because of that Contract for America let's put in an alternative point of view" and that's what great opposition parties do, as they did in the 1960s.

But you know, often times opposition parties, much as it pains them at times, you know, do have to cooperate and contribute that way too.

Edward Dirksen, the Republicans in the Senate in the 1960s, cooperated with Johnson on a lot of things like civil rights. Dirksen once said I stick by my principles and one of my biggest principles is flexibility. He really demonstrated that.

MARGARET WARNER:

And the… go ahead Ellen.

ELLEN FITZPATRICK:

We wouldn't be looking, I don't think, at the electoral map blue and red states we have today had the Republican Party and the conservatives within it not succeeded dramatically in exploiting the divisions of the 1960s to redraw party allegiances, to capture what had been traditionally Democratic strongholds and exploit the discomfort with the economic problems that occurred, with the race riots that had occurred in the 1960s.

There was a significant backlash against the Great Society that has had enormous and far reaching impact on the political landscape that we still inhabit today.

MARGARET WARNER:

And yet, Richard, in this current climate and in the highly disciplined nature of the Hill that we have just been discussing, isn't it compared to history very difficult for on the opposition party to even get a hearing to even present the alternative?

RICHARD NORTON SMITH:

Well, I think they could get… they could get a hearing, they can present an alternative. They'll have their half hour after the state of the union address.

They have the same mass communications that anyone else does. What is harder, I think much harder now in this polarized community, is for the opposition to be statesmen-like.

You think of what Lyndon Johnson did in the beginning of Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower talked about modern Republicanism, and it was conservatives in his own party who were really his about biggest foes.

He didn't want to repeal the New Deal, he wanted to expand, for example, Social Security. The only way he was able to do it was with the votes of Democrats led by Lyndon Johnson. It's very hard to imagine that kind of dynamic coming into play in this atmosphere.

MARGARET WARNER:

Richard, Ellen, Michael, thank you, and Happy Thanksgiving.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS:

Happy Thanksgiving, Margaret.

ELLEN FITZPATRICK:

Thank you, same to you.