Mordecai Richler Quotes

This is the justification of virtually all legislatures that exempt their members from general requirements of law or grant them special privileges. Occasionally, the justification is warranted; most often, not.

Despite having passed the House and a majority of the Senate favoring McCain’s bill, a filibuster was led by a few holdouts from his own party. Patiently, McCain assembled sufficient Senate support to break the filibuster.

The senator had broken with his own party on the issue of slavery in the territories.

Explaining his success as Majority Leader:

This is a classic statement from the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. Here he not only criticizes the most successful and popular program in American History, but he describes it as a criminal fraud and then claims that Social Security is the biggest threat to our democracy—a bigger threat than Al Qaeda and terrorism, a greater threat than global warming, a greater threat than the housing bubble and the Great Recession. The Tea Party blindness to the effect of these gross exaggerated and obviously false claims is fascinating. He seems totally sincere and yet it is hard for voters to believe that he actually has faith in what he says—although perhaps faith is all he has.

The Social Security law, most American’s favorite government program, had just been passed that year, and like the Affordable Health Care Act in the Obama administration, the Republicans were rabidly opposed to the program, and there was none of the collaboration with an objective to perfect and improve the legislative language. And like “Obama Care” and most very large new government initiatives, there were many problems that became clear once the program was started. Amazingly President Roosevelt was the first to tell the public and the press that the Social Security program will have many problems, but what does not work can be replaced by something else and the program would be improved. This was part of FDR’s basic approach to the Presidency. (See {631419}.) No politician in modern times would be able to say that or anything like it, and Mrs. Roosevelt’s quotation here, which she wrote for the entire country to see, most politicians and political scientists would agree that she was exactly right about new legislative initiative.

That 113th Congress was the most unproductive in history. It was so bad, that even the Senate Chaplain prayed for a change.

They were discussing the Civil Right Bill of 1964 which they all wanted to pass. See {605438} . However, they faced a filibuster from the Southern Senators who had always before used this tactic and blocked Civil Rights legislation. However, the President here committed himself to the one way to take most of the power out of the filibuster. Accept a shutdown of the Senate, give up the rest of the President’s legislative program but the filibuster blocks all legislation that the Southerners wanted like cotton and tobacco subsidies.

Johnson thought that he was 5 votes short to pass the Economic Opportunity Act to launch his War on Poverty. This quotation shows the master of Presidential vote getting in action. Jones came from a very conservative and racist district in Florida. In addition to the general conservative concern about the bill. White Southern racists were still angry about the Civil Rights Act that had just passed and saw the anti-poverty programs as another opportunity for the Federal Government to have racially integrated employment and training programs in the South. If Jones voted for the anti-poverty bill, he might well be defeated in the 1966 election. The President promised to appoint him as a Federal Judge—a lifetime appointment—if he were defeated. A potential problem was that there would not likely be a vacant judgeship open in Alabama. Johnson promised that he would create another judgeship for Jones if necessary—a judgeship that was not really needed. Jones was reelected and President Johnson did not have to create a new judgeship.

That particular Congress was the worst in American history in terms of passing legislation. Mainly there was philosophical gridlock between conservatives and liberals and worse between Tea Party Conservatives and mainstream conservatives. The Iraqi legislature was gridlocked religiously between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.