Mike Mansfield Quotes
When President Johnson was Majority Leader he ran things the way he wanted them. Now I am Majority Leader and will run things the way I want them
Mike Mansfield, 1903-2001, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, U.S. Senator (Democrat, MT), Senate Majority Leader, Response to a lobbyist who pointed out to the Leader that the President had wanted a different schedule for taking up the Civil Rights Bill 1964
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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
After his presidency, Calvin Coolidge was approached to determine his interest in becoming the president of his alma mater, Amherst College:
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.
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.
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.
See {622517}, {630714} , and {625924} for other quotes on Congressional courage.
Michael Joseph Mansfield was an American politician and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a US Representative (1943–1953) and a US Senator (1953–1977) from Montana. He was the longest-serving Senate Majority Leader and served from 1961 to 1977. During his tenure, he shepherded Great Society programs through the Senate.
