Lamar Alexander Quotes

After his presidency, Calvin Coolidge was approached to determine his interest in becoming the president of his alma mater, Amherst College:

Although Reagan vetoed some spending that he disapproved of, he wanted so much spending on his favorite programs that he not only never brought the budget under control but his spending created the largest deficit in American history -- until George W. Bush squandered the Clinton surplus and exceeded Regan’s spending greatly and left President Obama with the greatest budget deficit in world history and a collapsing economy. Ironically, despite the fact that Reagan ran up huge deficits for the time, he always verbally advocated balanced budgets and many people in the country were persuaded by Reagan of the importance of balanced budgets. It was President Clinton who balanced the budget and eliminated the Reagan deficits.

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.

There are many methods of voting in a legislative body. “Viva Voce” is Latin for “by Voice” and is often called a “Voice Vote”. Voting by ballot takes longer but had the advantage or disadvantage of secrecy. The theory was that if the New York Legislators could vote in a secret ballot, the lobbies and special interests would not be as influential since they would never know for sure—unless there were a unanimous vote—how any particular legislator voted. A further advantage is that Party Discipline could not be imposed and parties or “factions” as they were then called would be less powerful—a great concern of all the patriots who tended to distrust parties. The disadvantage was that the people who elected the legislator would never know how he voted. Note the frank admission that this was an “experiment”. Americans of the era realized that almost everything they were doing was a political experiment and this introduced a pragmatic force into structure and procedures of American politics.

Congress keeps passing rules to prevent overspending and unbalanced budgets. Then they cleverly find loopholes in their own rules or in cases like the Iraq War and Prescription Drug coverage, whoever controls the Congress decides to n spend the money but not count it as an expenditure so they will not spend more than the rules allow. Except that they do.

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.

The appropriations committee allocates the monitory appropriations of all the agencies and it is a large committee. The appropriations committee members read the reports of the committee with oversight over an agency and makes judgments about the appropriation size compared to what the agency committee has authorized. But with intelligence there is nothing of detail in the report so the appropriations committee have little or no idea of what they are appropriating money for. But the appropriations committee will not delegate the appropriation decision to the Intelligence Committee.

Casey frequently withheld information from Congress that he was legally required to report, did things without Congressional authorization and often lied in his testimony and reports to Congress.