Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

He was discussing “Stand Your Ground Laws” which were enacted to solve one problem, but then effected many other things negatively. The law, once passed, is the law regardless of whether it has adverse consequences that the legislators never anticipated. This is one of the reasons that drafting legislation is such a difficult skill.

The compromise that was a budget cut that would reduce services to the poor and unemployed but did not have even people earning more than $1 million a year paying a penny in additional taxes.

Johnson was an incompetent scientist who had developed a method for “squaring a circle” which was in reality totally invalid. It involved the mathematical number Pi which is an infinite decimal but Johnson wanted it to be a fixed number. He persuaded members of the legislature that things would be better in the state if the value of Pi would be fixed by law. So a bill was introduced to make Pi equal to 3.2. Professor C. A. Waldo was horrified that the state would even attempt to legislate what is a mathematical phenomenon. However, Pi was long known to be an infinite decimal with no finite fixed number that can ever be accurate. There were religious and other legislative objections to the notion of an infinite number and one that was not defined as the common man could use it. Hence the proposed legislation. Even if there were a fixed decimal legislated for Pi, 3.2 was definitely in error. For hundreds of years mathematicians the world over had calculated PI to a number of decimal places and the 3.{596032} (commonly in use) was much closer. Professor Waldo persuaded the legislature to abandon their attempt to legislate science and mathematics, and this advice was generally heeded in the United States until some of the states with few scientists and few highly educated citizens began to ban the teaching of evolution. Science and mathematics do not lend themselves to politics and legislation, and still governments often try to legislate science and technology but rarely do it well and without error. The one exception is the setting of standards for units of weights and measurement where consensus is what is important and there is no scientifically right solution. For example, the standard length of a yard can be set at any distance as long as all agree to use that distance. Here government helps a great deal to forge and document the standard.

In general, there are so many versions of a bill as it goes through the Congressional process, that the members of Congress do not read each and every draft. Some do not read any of the drafts and leave it to the Committee; others trust their staffs or their party leadership. More often they trust the lobbyists who donate to their campaigns. Sometimes, the bills are so large—many thousands of pages that the members of Congress lose track of all the aspects of the proposed law and only read a few sections in which they may have participated in debate. Often, the only people who read the entire bill are the lobbyists and one or two of committee staff.

In the struggle for political power, this is often forgotten. During the Barak Administration, the President proposed measures that had been introduced and supported by his Republican opponents earlier. But they then not only failed to support them but often filibustered in the Senate to block them. The Democrats failed to support some of their ideas when President Eisenhower introduced them.

Johnson had proposed an extremely strong civil rights bill. Most Washington insiders assumed that he would gain favor amongst fair minded whites and Blacks for making the attempt, but then he would compromise with the Southerners, and water down the bill to something that had little or no teeth. His staff were trying to learn from Johnson, which aspects of the bill he was willing to compromise on assuming that the President could never get Congress to pass the bill in its original form. They were really surprised at the President’s answer and assumed that he could not do it. They were more surprised when he did drive the bill through Congress without any substantive compromises. It was the most powerful and effective Civil Rights legislation passed since Reconstruction a century earlier.

See {619801} for a similar view.

Miller was the Chairman of the House Committee that wrote the bill. The Act allowed women and other workers who were the victims of wage discrimination to sue the discriminating employers even after the statute of limitations and run out provided that they victim had no knowledge of the discrimination. Lilly Ledbetter was a Goodyear Supervisor who was for years paid far less than the male supervisors doing the same work. But the company kept it secret and Ms. Ledbetter didn’t find out until the statute of limitations had said she could no longer sue. The Lilly Ledbetter Act corrected that injustice. President Obama observed that discrimination in pay affects not only the woman or other worker, but also the entire family which might therefor not be able to obtain health care, education or care for elderly parents. At the time that this quotation was made, white women in America who were working full time were earning only 77 percent of what men earned. For minority women, the proportion is even less. As bad as that was, it was an improvement over the situation when the equal pay act was passed 50 years before. Then women earned only 53 percent of what a man did.

This is a very important historical and political quotation. The first clause shows us that earmarks and private bills for the benefit of individuals and their commercial enterprises are not a new form of corruption; they have existed ever since there have been legislatures.

The most important aspect of this quotation is the SECOND clause. Very frequently, this is quoted alone without the context of the first clause. Taken alone, the meaning seems to be that the more corrupt governments pass the most laws, and there is an implication that fewer laws mean less corruption. This interpretation fits perfectly with the conservative ideology of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that believed that the smaller the government, the better; the fewer the laws passed, the better. However with the context of the first clause, we see that what Tacitus was criticizing the legislature that passed many earmarks and bills benefitting special interests. The more of these that were passed, the more corruption he argued. So he did not object to laws per se. He was not opining on the relationship between the number of laws and a corrupt government if the laws are for general benefit and not for special interests. Out of context, it might appear that Tacitus was supporting the small government, conservative philosophy. In context, he is arguing against earmarks and special interest legislation and supports what we call “good government” which has been bipartisan in America with parts of each party agreeing with Tacitus and other parts of each party trying to pass earmarks and special interest legislation.

Things were difficult then, but no where near as bad as in 2008-2012 period where the minority Republicans had more filibusters than all other Senates since the nation began, and their stated purpose was to be sure that no legislation could pass for which President Barack Obama might get credit.