Calvin Coolidge Quotes
Easier to control a Congress than a college faculty.
After his presidency, Calvin Coolidge was approached to determine his interest in becoming the president of his alma mater, Amherst College:
Calvin Coolidge, 1872-1933, 30th President of the United States (Republican), Quoted in Boller, Presidential Anecdotes, Oxford University Press, 1981
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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
Explaining why he did not accept the Vice Presidential nomination of his party:
This is a very important historical quotation because it clearly stated the left wing view of regulation. Large Business had been so unethical and illegal at the time that the majority of Americans and Congress, together with a Republican President, thought that it would be good to “weld” the growth and development of large companies to the Government. The right wing saw this as extreme Communism. Over time, when corporate greed and excesses had been controlled by government and was not as prevalent, the inhibition on growth and development of welding corporations to Government was recognized and a period of deregulation followed with most Americans not wanting to allow large companies to be completely deregulated and also not wanting them welded to the government. The extent of regulation has been the political contest with the extreme left and extreme right still holding to their ideological positions and sometimes paralyzing the middle as in the Obama administration.
Morris had it wrong. He perceived that the Senate could not be a check on the House or the President because to him, the Senate was the house of aristocrats and America really did not have aristocrats since there was no nobility so that there would be no difference between Representatives and Senators-–they both were drawn from the same egalitarian population. He missed however that the Senate, being elected by states, would represent a broader constituency than a member of the House, and because of this broader perspective, would come to see issues in nationalist and state terms while Representatives would perceive the same issues in local terms. Hence the two houses of Congress became effective checks on each other, and the Senate on the President because not of different social or economic class, but of broader and narrower perspectives. It was not what Senators were but what they would become once they were elected and had to be reelected.
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.
This Pinkney view prevailed in the original Constitution, but this practice was reversed by the 17th Amendment of 1913. The source for this statement is the notes of Alexander Hamilton.
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.
Calvin Coolidge was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 30th president of the United States from 1923 to 1929. A Republican lawyer from New England, born in Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of Massachusetts. His response to the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight and gave him a reputation as a man of decisive action. The next year, he was elected the 29th vice president of the United States, and he succeeded to the presidency upon the sudden death of Warren G. Harding in 1923. Elected in his own right in 1924, he gained a reputation as a small-government conservative and also as a man who said very little and had a rather dry sense of humor.
