“The Lessons Of November 1963”: People Come And Go, Strong Institutions Endure
Most of us who were alive 51 years ago remember exactly what we were doing the moment we heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. That day in Dallas significantly changed my perspective on the presidency and American institutions.
I had just returned to my desk at the then-U.S. Civil Service Commission when I noticed that Shirley, our office secretary, was crying. She told me why. Nothing could have prepared us for that weekend in November 1963.
How do you get your head around the news that the president of the United States has been assassinated? Killed in broad daylight on a Dallas street. A president we looked up to, the titular head of an almost mystical family who was leading us into a New Frontier. Gone. Without any warning, gone.
That afternoon, sitting in front of a TV screen and holding my firstborn, 18-month-old Rob, I joined the rest of the nation and cried. It was the first of many tear-filled moments that stretched over several days.
The scenes, the heart-wrenching scenes: the night arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, the funeral procession to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the burial ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
That period of mourning was interrupted by a shocking scene in the basement of the Dallas police station: the entire nation an eyewitness to Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder by Jack Ruby.
More had happened, however, than I realized at the time.
The assassination changed expectations.
The dynamism and beauty that had come to be called the New Frontier ended. John F. Kennedy died in Dallas. But the American presidency did not die with him. The president’s heart stopped, but the nation’s never missed a beat.
At 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, the 35th president of the United States was assassinated. At 2:38 p.m. CST, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States, an oath of office administered by a federal judge under the authority of the Constitution.
U.S. armed forces worldwide continued their daily troop counts, assembled in units of varying sizes, policed their surroundings, cleaned weapons and trained. The Army’s day continued to end with “Taps.”
The lights stayed on at the Capitol.
Government carried on.
That was the lesson of five decades ago: People — revered and reviled, weak and powerful — come and go. Strong institutions endure.
America remained on course in the midst of that tragedy at Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.
Nov. 22, 1963, teaches us that no political figure is indispensable in this country. No one person carries the nation. And it was no time for partisan politics.
That lesson needs to be borne in mind today.
What kept us on course in ’63 was respect for law and a reliance on a regular order that requires abiding by established rules and procedures, starting with the Constitution.
If ever there were a time when political encroachment or power grabs by the opposition could have developed, it was following the sudden death of a president. That did not happen.
In retrospect, we witnessed the fulfillment of George Washington’s wish for America during that sorrow-filled weekend 51 years ago. The country remained on a path which “gain[ed] time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.”
And today? What of today’s capital? “Government shutdown,” “legacy of lawlessness,” “obstructionism,” “gridlock,” “impeachment”?
W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” comes to mind:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; . . .
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Pages, The Washington Post, November 22, 2014
“When The Pot Calls The Kettle Lazy”: Thanks To Boehner’s ‘Leadership’, Capitol Hill Has Set New Benchmarks For Ineptitude
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) hosted a lively press conference with Capitol Hill reporters yesterday – the “boner” joke won’t be forgotten anytime soon – but there was something in his opening statement that was so audacious, I’m surprised it was largely ignored.
“You know, back in 2012 the president chose politics over governing. He took the year off, got little done, and this year I’m beginning to see the same pattern of behavior. We’ve seen more and more that the president has no interest in doing the big things that he got elected to do.”
Boehner added that President Obama intends to “pack it in for the year” and “just wait for the election.”
There’s hypocritical rhetoric. There’s breathtaking hypocritical rhetoric. Then there’s rhetoric so hypocritical that it ruptures the space-time continuum.
Reasonable people can debate the merits of competing proposals or policy strategies, but for Speaker Boehner to suggest President Obama is uninterested in governing, lacks ambition, and intends to do nothing for the rest of the 2014 is so head-spinning that it’s genuinely alarming Boehner was able to say the words out loud without laughing hysterically.
Let’s briefly review reality in case it still matters. John Boehner claimed the Speaker’s gavel three years ago, and since that time, he’s racked up zero major legislative accomplishments. While Obama has at times been desperate to get something, anything, done with this Congress, Boehner has tried and failed to lead House Republicans towards anything resembling governing.
The result has been the least productive Congress since clerks started keeping track several generations ago. Thanks to Boehner’s “leadership,” Capitol Hill is establishing new benchmarks for ineptitude, giving the “do-nothing Congress” phrase an updated definition to reflect levels of ineffectiveness few thought possible before 2011.
And yet the Speaker wants to complain that Obama “got little done” after Republicans took control of the House majority.
As for the president having “no interest” in doing “big things,” this is the exact opposite of our version of reality. Obama it appears is preoccupied with doing big things – the Speaker should have listened a little closer to the State of the Union address being delivered a few feet in front of him – while Boehner has said it’s time for Americans to start expecting less. Indeed, House Republicans leaders have been quite explicit on this point, saying the GOP does not like and does not want big policy breakthroughs.
Finally, the very idea that the president intends to coast through the rest of 2014 without doing any actual work buries the needle on the Irony-o-meter because it’s House Republicans who’ve already announced, more than once, that they intend to coast through the rest of 2014 without doing any actual work.
We’ve become all too familiar with the GOP’s reliance on the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” game, but this is ridiculous.
I have no idea whether Boehner actually believes what he said yesterday. But whether the rest of us should believe his comments is clear.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 28, 2014
“How To Stop Government”: A Republican Field Guide To Obstructionist Techniques
In a recent Pew Poll, 80 percent of respondents said the president and Republican leaders were not working together to address important issues — and, by a two-to-one margin, said the G.O.P. was more to blame for gridlock.
Despite their minority status in the Senate, the people on the right side of the aisle have managed to muck up the works. Their obstructionist repertoire is so extensive that you almost need a field guide to their delaying techniques.
Here’s a start on that guide.
Filibuster Abuse: The practice of halting Senate deliberation is an old one, practiced by both parties, but the current Republican caucus has taken it to new heights. They have filibustered an unprecedented number of President Obama’s nominees. The District Court for Washington, D.C., perhaps the most important appeals court in the land, has four of its 11 seats vacant. The last time the Senate confirmed a judge was in 2006. The Republicans have filibustered all of Mr. Obama’s nominees because Republicans simply don’t want him to appoint any judges to a currently conservative court, which rules on appeals involving federal regulatory agencies, and which has exclusive jurisdiction over national security matters.
Boycotting: Also known as taking your marbles and going home, the most recent example came on Thursday, when Republicans refused to attend a meeting of the Environment and Public Works Committee, thereby blocking the nomination of Gina McCarthy as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. They claimed they were not completely satisfied with her answers to the more than 1,000 questions they dumped on her in the confirmation process. In addition to stymying Mr. Obama, holding up her nomination has the great virtue of hamstringing the E.P.A., which the right thinks shouldn’t exist in the first place. And that leads us to the next G.O.P. tactic:
Denial of services: Some government agencies require a certain number of members, or a permanent chief, to operate. If the Republicans don’t like those agencies, they simply make sure those positions never get filled. For instance, the National Labor Relations Board, which Republicans loathe because it protects workers, requires a quorum to take action. So the Republicans refused to confirm Mr. Obama’s nominees. Then they held fake pro-forma sessions during their vacations to try to prevent him from making recess appointments. He did that anyway and the Republican-packed D.C. appeals court (see above) ruled that the appointments were illegitimate — which could invalidate scores of decisions. The Republicans are playing this same trick with the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in response to the wildly reckless actions that led to the financial collapse of 2008.
Investigate again and again and again: When Darrell Issa, took over the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform after the G.O.P. won the House majority in 2010, he said he wanted to hold “seven hearings a week times 40 weeks.” His supposed reason was that Mr. Obama is “corrupt.” That’s a frequent Republican talking point, but it’s so obviously ridiculous that I wonder if they actually believe it. In any case, the real reason is that endless “investigative” hearings cause trouble and distract administration officials from their actual jobs. The hearings on Benghazi, for example, have revealed none of the impeachable offenses that Republicans claimed would come to light. They have kept Congress and the administration focused on what happened in Libya eight months ago, which was awful, rather than on what is happening there today, which is awful.
Refuse to negotiate: Republicans in Congress used to complain that the Senate Democrats hadn’t produced a budget in the last four years. But recently the Democrats did just that. So the Republicans abandoned their old talking point and are now refusing to form a conference committee to reconcile the Senate budget with the House budget.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, May 10, 2013
“Seriously? You’re Going To Block A Tax Cut?”: The Only One Relevant Question For Republicans To Ask
The Republicans are trying hard to make it look like they’re the ones driving the Fiscal Cliff negotiations, but Wall Street isn’t buying it.
No matter how many times House Speaker John Boehner says the Democrats’ opening offer is ridiculous, for example, the more clued-in pundits (Politico’s Ben White, for example) and investors stick to their guns:
The Democrats have won. Taxes on the highest earning Americans are going up.
Given the reality of the situation, in fact, the only real question for Republicans is this:
Seriously? You’re going to block a tax cut?
Because if the Republicans really do refuse to come to the table in the next month, that’s exactly what they will be doing.
On January 1, by law, tax rates are going to go up and government spending is going to get cut.
The Republicans can’t stop that from happening by being obstructionist. They can only stop it by compromising.
The Obama Administration’s proposal cuts taxes for all but the highest earning Americans.
If the Republicans “just say no” to that proposal, they will be rejecting a tax cut.
Given that the main economic plank of the Republican party is still cutting taxes, there’s no way they’re going to do that.
So you can go ahead and tune out the many media appearances of John Boehner, et al. This one’s over. There’s no way the Republicans are going to block a tax cut.
By: Henry Blodgett, Business Insider, December 2, 2012
“No, We Can’t All Get Along”: As Long As There Are Republicans, It Really Doesn’t Matter If We Do
Mitt Romney seems to have decided to run an entire presidential campaign on quibbling semantic arguments, which is certainly a novel approach, but not one I’d recommend for future candidates. It’s not that every campaign doesn’t spend way too much time complaining about the words their opponent says, but he really has taken it to a totally different level; every day seems to bring a new expression of feigned outrage at something Barack Obama said.
Over at MSNBC’s “Lean Forward” blog, I have a new piece about one of these inane back-and-forths that happened last week, when Obama said he learned you couldn’t change Washington from the inside, and Romney got really peeved and promised he would change it from the inside. My point was essentially that if I hear one more pundit talk about the good old days when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would argue during the day, then share a beer and bellow some old Irish sea shanties in the evening, I think I’m going to lose it:
Let’s look at the biggest accomplishment of Barack Obama’s first term, the passage of the Affordable Care Act. In that Univision interview, Obama tried to describe this as a triumph of change from the outside, as the American people exerted pressure on their representatives. But that’s not really what happened. There was some outside organizing, but it probably didn’t carry the day. The reform that one president after another failed to accomplish didn’t happen because Barack Obama and his supporters changed Washington. It happened because Obama wrestled with Washington, struggled with it, and finally overcame roadblocks both institutional (the filibuster) and personal (the narcissistic cynicism of characters like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson). And today, almost everything about those processes remains the same. If Obama tries to do something else as ambitious in his second term, it’ll be just as difficult.
What matters isn’t whether Washington was transformed, but that because of Obama’s health care victory, 30 million more Americans will have health insurance, and that starting in 2014 none of us will be denied coverage because of our pre-existing conditions, and all of the other positive results of the ACA. If you’re the parent of a child with leukemia who can now get insurance, that’s change you can believe in.
Guess what: if Barack Obama wins a second term, things are going to be just as unfriendly as they were during the first term. Yes, Barack Obama failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together, just like George W. Bush failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together and Bill Clinton failed in his promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together. But while it would certainly be nice if everybody could get along, in the end that’s about one-zillionth as important as what they do or don’t do for the public.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 25, 2012
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