I apologize… I misinterpreted your reference. When you said the “firebrands at the end of the 1850’s” did not feel “that God had invested them with a mission to put the political party above the nation,” I mistakenly assumed the latter was an implication that the new Republican majority in the 104[sup]th[/sup] were all Christian zealots, à la Tom DeLay.
Well, as I said in the earlier post, I can’t really speak to this with any authority, not being a congressional scholar, but I suspect the truth of the matter would depend on your meaning when you use the word “partisan”. No doubt the Gingrich Republicans were passionate in the pursuit of their brand new agenda, but might they have just seemed partisan due to their newly-won, narrow majority? Were they really any more “partisan” than, say, McCormack’s 89[sup]th[/sup] Congress with a humongous 295-seat Democrat majority? It seems to me that at the time, LBJ’s Great Society was just as “partisan” an issue as the Contract With America later was, it’s just that the Republicans were in such a minority position in 1965 as to be virtually irrelevant. Am I wrong in thinking that partisanship becomes less noticeable as the size of the majority increases, and when the margins are razor-thin, partisanship is all there is?
I seems we agree, at the very least, on the unsavory flavor of today’s politics, and that applies to both sides of the aisle.
There were “progressive” Republicans who went along with many of the Great Society proposals and there were a number of Democrats who opposed either the whole set of proposals or significant portions of it. Prior to 1995, I think you will find a lot less “strict party line” votes throughout the history of Congress. (Not that they never occurred, but that the percentage of such votes and the tenor of the debates has very much changed in the last ten years.)
For example, when Medicare was created, the vote was not 295 - 140, but 313 - 117 (with 5 reps missing the vote or abstaining). Among the 117 Nays were several Democrats (more than offset by quite a few Republican Yeas) and the bill was brought to the floor with several changes that had been proposed by the ranking Republican on the Ways and Means committee.
I do not recall any event in those years that would be comparable to the calumny and outright hatred recently directed toward Senators McCain and Voinovich for suggesting that the the Congress not rush to judgment on issues favored by the White House.
I do not think that there is anything inherently Republican about the current situation, but I do think the current Congress is the most rabidly partisan in history (with, as noted, the exception of a brief period following the Civil War).
Thanks, Tom, for your cogency. I was over-thinking it, it seems. In trying to find a reason for rank political partisanship, I guess one doesn’t have to go much beyond the adjectives.
Now that you mention it, though, it does occur to me that what few congressional anecdotes I remember from Civics 101 do indeed coincide with your description of a kinder, gentler congress, or at least one which allowed for rational, though heated, discourse. I know it’s not talked about much these days, but it was Senate Republicans who helped break the Southern Democrat filibuster, led by a younger and much more lucid Senator Robert Byrd who threatened to block passage of the Omnibus Civil Rights Bill back in 1964. Even despite ideologues like Goldwater on the Republican side and Democrat Senator from Tennessee, Al Gore, Sr. and Democrat Senator from Arkansas, William Fullbright, a unified Congress managed to vote cloture over Byrd’s objections and do the right thing for the right reasons, none of which had anything to do with party affiliation.
Funny how times change and how history writes itself despite our feeble attempts to direct it.
This strikes me as being the same sort of situation as someone who steals a car versus someone who embezzles $10 million. One is probably going to state prison to serve time with rapists and murderers while people make jokes about dropping the soap. The other will go to a federal penitentiary with good oversight and tennis courts, where he’ll get multiple offers for a book deal, assuming he ever actually gets charged.
Whose crime was greater? Pretty much everyone will agree on that. Who will more likely serve time, and more of it? We all know that too. Is it fair? Nope. Is that the way it is? All too often, yes.
Bush has been able to get away with far more egregious things than Clinton because he’s either skirted the edge of the law or just has just had the law changed so he’s still inside the boundaries when he goes ahead and does what he wants to. That, to me, makes it pretty obvious that he plans to do wrong and plots to make sure that he doesn’t get in trouble for it. All the same, it means that he’s still, legally though not morally, in the right.
It may, or may not, have been ultimately admissible at trial. Ms. Jones alleged unwelcome advances; Mr. Clinton’s contact with Ms. Lewinsky was welcome.
However, for the purposes of the deposition, it was a material question.