In a blogpost entitled “Is comprehensive health care reform dead?” the always incisive and charming (especially when she’s, in my view, wrong) Megan McArdle makes the following good points:
But this is not 1932, and Obama is not FDR. FDR came into office with 20+% unemployment and a banking crisis that was wiping out peoples’ life savings every day. FDR also came into office with a trivial national debt, and a Federal government that consumed less than 4% of GDP. He had a lot of run room.
Maybe more importantly, he came into office without the kinds of institutional arrangements that made it politically difficult to pass his policies. There are a lot of these, but some highlights:
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There was no institution like the CBO to model the impact of his programs, and implacably report that they were going to cost huge amounts of money
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There was no vast fraternity of tax lawyers to help blunt the revenue enhancements from new taxes
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Discipline in the Senate and the House was much stronger
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Corporate lobbying was relatively weak, and interest group lobbying was in its infancy
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There was no existing infrastructure of programs with constituents fighting change
All true, with one exception. “Corporate lobbying was relatively weak”: yup, enormously weak by today’s standards. Washington lobbying had not become much of a profession by the early 1930s. Covington & Burling, for a long time Washington’s largest lobbying firm, was founded after Edward Burling came down from New York to work as a lawyer for government contractors during World War I and then decided to stay after the war, noting that there was considerable business to be done in Washington, and joined forces with former Eastern Shore of Maryland Congressman and judge Harry Covington. Dean Acheson in his memoirs notes that when he was a member of the firm in the 1930s and 1940s it had (as I recall) eight partners.
But there’s one thing exception. McArdle writes that “discipline in the Senate and the House was much stronger.” Here I think she’s uncharacteristically wrong. There were huge Democratic majorities after the 1932 elections, so discipline did not have to be very strong to pass anything. But more important, 1932 was the only election in the twentieth century in which a majority of members of the previous House were not elected to serve in the next House. In other words, in which there was more than 50% turnover in the House of Representatives.
This was true for two reasons. The first is that there was, in that depression year, a huge trend to the Democratic party. Places that had never voted Democratic (and some that never voted Democratic again) did so in 1932. Second, the House elected in 1932 was reapportioned for the first time in 20 years. The Constitution commands the Congress to reapportion the seats in the House of Representatives based on the results of the Census conducted by command of the Constitution every 10 years.
The 1920 Census was duly conducted, but when the results showed that a majority of Americans now lived in urban areas (defined at the time as places with 2,500 more people), successive Congresses refused to obey the Constitution and reapportion the seats among the states. Finally, at the prodding of our most statistic-minded of presidents, Herbert Hoover, Congress passed the law still in effect requiring that the 435 seats be automatically reapportioned among the states when the results of the Census were certified.
(There is nothing sacred about 435, a number any Congress could change by statute; it was the number of seats set in the reapportionment following the 1910 Census, and was exceeded when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union and granted single seats in the House in 1959 and 1960; the House for a moment had 436 and 437 members, then receded to 435 after the reapportionment following the 1960 Census.)
The Hoover law took effect automatically after the 1930 Census, effective for the Congress elected in 1932. This resulted in big increases in House members for states with large numbers of immigrants in 1910-30, like New York and Illinois, and decreases for interior states with low population growth, like Missouri and Iowa. In several states that lost House members the legislatures could not agree on redistricting plans, and all members therefrom were elected statewide at-large. But the increases in immigrant-heavy states and the at-large elections in interior states augmented what would have been even without these factors huge Democratic gains.
The House that Franklin Roosevelt faced in 1933 was the only House between 1899 and the present day in which a majority of members were freshmen. (Many years ago I actually went back and did the numbers; the fact that the 1898 election was the first in which a majority of House members were reelected tells you something interesting about the Progressive period, but I’ll save that for a later post.)
Not only was there not much of a Washington lobbying community; most House members had never had any contacts with a Washington lobbyist in their lives. Many of them were political accidents. Most of them had no experience serving on a committee, learning about its legislative ambit and acquainting themselves with its lobbying constituencies. Most of them were ready to follow, in a state of genuine economic emergency, an assertive and charismatic president of their own party, in the absence of any other guidance.
Megan McArdle’s point is that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed a political dominance in 1933 that no president since, including Obama, could hope to enjoy. My addendum just underlines and strengthens her argument. No president will ever again face a Congress as ready to follow a president and as unprepared to set a different course as the Congress Franklin Roosevelt called into special session in March 1933.
