Ralph Nader Quotes

The Chairmen of the Committees then had tremendous, almost unilateral power. The chairman reached seniority by being elected over and over and had little opposition. At the time they were almost all older Democratic Congressmen from the "Solid South", very conservative and still racists despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were outraged when a Freshmen member of Congress who rarely made a public statement, took on the most powerful members of the House and wanted to reform the Seniority. But Ms. Chisholm was a teacher in her professional life, and by challenging the seniority system and attracting the enmity of most of the Chairmen, the media and the public started to cover the dispute and Chisholm explained to America exactly how the system worked and how undemocratic and racist it was. Her effort put the Seniority System on the public agenda, and reforms evolved over the next decades." She was the first Black woman to be elected to Congress and was the first Black woman to actively campaign for the Presidency

Since Theodore Roosevelt, the Presidency has become stronger and Congress weaker. The original idea of the framers of the Constitution was to have three co-equal branches of government. However Gingrich was so partisan on this point that he lost most of his credibility and lost his position of leadership in the House. He was constantly asserting the power of the House against Democratic President Bill Clinton while he never had when Republican George W. Bush was President. His house impeached President Clinton on charges emanating from Clinton’s sexual foibles and effort to keep his predilections secret. This not only impeded government for a long time, but angered the public. In the end the Republican Controlled House could not even get a majority of the Republican controlled Senate to vote against Clinton, much less the super-majority the rules required. Ironically, by the second term of George W. Bush’s administration most members of Congress and the American public had thought the Presidency had gotten to powerful relative to Congress and Gingrich’s objective became a national one, but Gingrich himself had been discredited and was completely out of office.

See {622997} for more on Platt,

To Mises, “interventionism” is any government action that affects business and businessmen and women. In a large complex society, virtually every government action will benefit some more than others while harming some more than others. There are almost always winners and losers as a result of every government action. Most political philosophers see justice and fairness in benefitting the majority of people most of the time. However Mises and others observe that in a large complex society, in an absolute sense, politics and government can never be fair and just to all.

McLendon was representing the San Antonio Light and was in part defending the Texas minority leader. But as time would tell, LBJ would be the most powerful and influential speaker in Senate history, even at such a young age.

At the time the power and prestige of Congress relative to the Presidency , was much greater than it is today. It was McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, who began a 20th century trend which led to a reversal of the relationship between the Executive Branch and the Legislative.

Vidal, a staunch liberal held this view along with many ultra conservatives end extreme liberals. The constitution requires the Congress to declare war, but they have not done so for any of the wars since WWII. The President assumed the war power. And the only coherent budgets began.