2014 Election

2014 Election, Congress, Egan, Idaho Politics, Tamarack, Thatcher

The Shutdown

Posted on by christian

0930-government-shutdown-most-important-ever_full_380The late Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill loved to remind colleagues  that “all politics is local,” and Tip’s truism is just about all you need to know about the true cause of the current stalemate in Washington, D.C. The handful of Republicans in the U.S. House aided, and abetted by a handful in the Senate, who have precipitated the first government shutdown in 19 years are playing almost exclusively to the conservative folks back home who have helped them along the GOP path to power.

The GOP faction that hates government and condemns any accommodation with the other side has little need to worry about how badly their tactics are playing with the vast majority of Americans, even among those coveted independents, because the shutdown caucus doesn’t care because they don’t have to care. As the Associated Press has noted: “Heavily gerrymandered districts make many House Democrats and Republicans virtual shoo-ins for re-election, insulating them from everything but the views in their slice of the country. That means some lawmakers can be greeted as heroes back home even if nationally the budget standoff comes to be viewed with scorn.”

“After every census and reapportionment, the blue districts get bluer and the red districts get redder,” said former Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, using the colorful terms for liberal and conservative districts. “It’s against their electoral interests,” he said, for lawmakers from such districts to move toward the center rather than feed “red meat” to their most ideological constituents.

LaTourette, an ally of Speaker John Boehner is correct, but there is also a false equivalence to his argument. The most ideological Republicans, and many of the voters who sent them to Washington, are driven by what conservative writer Rod Dreher calls a desire to tear down rather than a desire, as members of the loyal opposition, to suggest alternatives and develop a genuinely appealing policy agenda. Democrats, say what you will about their programs, aren’t into hostage negotiations and most buy into the party’s broad policy agenda.

“When I think of the Republican Party,” Dreher writes, “I don’t think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. They have confused prudence — the queen of virtues, and the cardinal virtue of conservative politics — with weakness.”

Idaho is a case study in the politics of government by GOP primary voters. The state’s First District Congressman Raul Labrador is generally regarded as a leader of the House faction that has essentially taken control of the national Republican Party and forced Speaker Boehner to march in front of the cameras every day and condemn the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – and generally carry the scalding water of the Tea Party. Labrador, you’ll  remember, was one of the insurgents in the House who came within a few votes earlier this year of kicking Boehner from the Speaker’s Office to the back benches.

Idaho’s Second District Congressman Mike Simpson, a serious legislator, Boehner ally and a seasoned politician not generally given over to political stunts, has, like Boehner, had to go mostly along with the insurgents in order to steel himself against what appears to be an increasingly serious primary challenge; a challenge financed by the same folks who have staked the next Congressional election on bringing the country – again – to the edge of a financial cliff all in the interest of holding hostage President Obama’s health care legislation.

But here is the political irony: the stakes of what is unfolding in Washington may be enormously high for national Republicans, for the economy, for the hundreds of thousands of government workers furloughed and for millions of Americans who are just beginning to feel the effects of a government that has ceased to function in any way that is normal, but there is little or no political consequence for Republicans like Labrador who are electorally secure in their ultra-safe districts. The Republicans who might face the wrath of voters next year are those GOP members like Simpson who haven’t slavishly steeped in the Tea Party’s hot broth of disdain, bordering on hatred for Obama and all that he stands for.

All politics is local and if your district is red enough you can take comfort in marching lock step off a cliff with the folks back home who dislike and distrust Obama so much that the Internet is alive with the rumor that somehow, someway the foreign-born, Muslim socialist in the White House will find a way to circumvent the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution and engineer a third term for himself. There is even a website devoted to Obama 2016. The amendment limiting a president to two terms was proposed, by the way, in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s four terms as president and was ratified in 1951, but no matter. The fear and loathing on the far right of the GOP is such that no conspiracy is too outrageous for Tea Party adherents not to worry.

As the New York Times notes today, “Republican elders worry that the tactics of [Texas Sen. Ted] Cruz and his allies in the House are reinforcing the party’s image as obstructionist, and benefiting Mr. Obama at a time when his standing with the public is sliding. A New York Times/CBS poll last week found that 49 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s job performance.

“The story people see now is President Obama sinking like a rock for months, and the only thing holding him up are the Republicans,” lamented Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi who previously led the Republican National Committee. “We have to get to the best resolution we can under the Obama administration, and then focus on some other things.”

Good advice, not likely to be taken.

With the government shutdown and their demands about Obamacare, “Republicans are setting a precedent which, if followed, would make America ungovernable,” notes the Economist in an editorial. “Voters have seen fit to give their party control of one arm of government—the House of Representatives—while handing the Democrats the White House and the Senate. If a party with such a modest electoral mandate threatens to shut down government unless the other side repeals a law it does not like, apparently settled legislation will always be vulnerable to repeal by the minority. Washington will be permanently paralysed and America condemned to chronic uncertainty.

“It gets worse. Later this month the federal government will reach its legal borrowing limit, known as the ‘debt ceiling.’ Unless Congress raises that ceiling, Uncle Sam will soon be unable to pay all his bills. In other words, unless the two parties can work together, America will have to choose which of its obligations not to honour. It could slash spending so deeply that it causes a recession. Or it could default on its debts, which would be even worse, and unimaginably more harmful than a mere government shutdown. No one in Washington is that crazy, surely?”

We’ll see.

2014 Election, Baucus, Tamarack, U.S. Senate

Primary Challenges Can Work

Posted on by christian

97589403Wyoming Republican Sen. Mike Enzi must be taking comfort from the reports that virtually all of his Senate GOP colleagues have publicly said they are backing him in what may prove to be the highest profile party primary in 2014. But even with all that institutional support history should tell Enzi that a challenge from a well-known opponent in a party primary is actually a pretty well-worn path to a Senate seat.

Politico reported over the weekend that many Senate Republicans are dismayed by the primary challenge that Liz Cheney, the very political daughter of the former Vice President, has mounted against Enzi. Typical was the comment of Utah’s Orrin Hatch who knows something about a primary challenge from the right. “I don’t know why in the world she’s doing this,” Hatch said of Liz Cheney. Hatch says Enzi is “honest and decent, hard-working; he’s got very important positions in the Senate. He’s highly respected. And these are all things that would cause anybody to say: ‘Why would anybody run against him?’”

The answer to Hatch’s question is simple: primary challenges, more often than you might think, work for the challenger. In the last two cycles incumbent Republicans lost in Indiana and Utah and a Democratic incumbent lost in Pennsylvania. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost her GOP primary and survived by the skin of her teeth by mounting a rare write-in campaign. Looking even farther back in Senate history in virtually every election cycle since the 1930’s an incumbent Senator has lost a renomination battle.

Consider these politicians who started their path to a Senate career by beating an incumbent in their own party: Howard Baker, Ernest Hollings, Lloyd Bentsen, Bill Bradley, Max Baucus, Sam Nunn, Jesse Helms and John Glenn. Just since the 1960’s all those household name Senators beat a incumbent in a party primary.

By all accounts Liz Cheney faces an uphill battle in Wyoming, a state she claims as home now after living on the east coast most of her life. Carpetbaggers generally are about as welcome in Wyoming as they were during post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South. Limited polling so far shows that Cheney has lots of ground to make up and, while she has announced a group of campaign advisers – all old Cheney family friends – GOP office holders in Wyoming are mostly backing Enzi. Nonetheless, with Senate history as a guide, Cheney’s challenge may not be all that farfetched.

Case in point – Idaho Senate races in the 1930’s and 1940’s. In 1932, Jame P. Pope, the then-Mayor of Boise and a progressive Democrat, was swept into the Senate as part of the Franklin Roosevelt-inspired landslide. Pope built a generally liberal record in the Senate during the New Deal era, but never developed deep ties to the grassroots of the Democratic Party in Idaho. (Yes, Idaho actually had a robust Democratic Party in the 1930’s.) Eastern Idaho Democratic Congressman D. Worth Clark, a member of the prominent Clark family that produced two Idaho governors and Bethine Church, the very political wife and partner of Sen. Frank Church, challenged Pope in the 1938 Democratic primary and won. Clark, considerably more conservative than Pope, went on to serve one term in the Senate, his career most remembered for his anti-FDR, non-interventionist foreign policy views and his leadership of an ill-considered Senate “investigation” of Hollywood’s use of movies to push the United States into support of Britain during the early days of World War II.

In 1944, Clark was challenged in the Democratic primary by a country music entertainer and perennial candidate Glen H. Taylor. Taylor, perhaps the most liberal politician to ever represent Idaho in Congress, won the primary and the general election and served a single term in the Senate. Taylor ran on the Progressive Party ticket for vice president in 1948 as Henry Wallace’s running mate, was attacked as a Communist sympathizer and eventually lost the Democratic nomination in 1950 to the man he had defeated six years earlier – D. Worth Clark. Clark in turn lost the general election that year and effectively ended his political career.

There are many other examples of incumbents – often very prominent incumbents – who lost primary challenges. J. William Fulbright in Arkansas, at the time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lost in 1974 to then-Gov. Dale Bumpers. Fulbright, by the way, launched his own Senate career in 1944 by beating an incumbent – Sen. Hattie Caraway. Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler, one of the most prominent politicians of his day, lost a Democratic primary in 1946. The heir to the Wisconsin political dynasty began by his father, Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., lost a Republican primary in 1946 to a guy named Joe McCarthy.

Primary challenges to Senate incumbents aren’t particularly rare and they are frequently successful, particularly when the challenger has, as Liz Cheney surely does, a well-known name or family connection, displays more star power than the incumbent and makes the case that new blood can be more effective than seniority.

In almost every case I’ve mentioned the party of the incumbent Senator was divided or torn by controversy at the time of the successful challenge. Both Wheeler in Montana and young Bob LaFollette in Wisconsin had gotten badly out of step with their party base, for example. This year in Wyoming Sen. Enzi seems less obviously out of step with his party base, but Enzi would be well advised to go to school on the playbook used by Utah’s Hatch to turn back a Tea Party-inspired challenge in 2012. Hatch started early with his tacking to the right, raised a bucket load of money and carefully avoided face-to-face encounters with his younger opponent. Enzi hasn’t started particularly early, isn’t known as a great fundraiser and, while coming across as a salt-of-the-earth type guy may look old and out of touch one-on-one with the media-savvy Cheney.

Still, the former vice president’s daughter needs a realistic rationale for her candidacy that appeals to the Wyoming Republican primary voter to go along along with the star power that she is trying to project. If she finds the right combination she may contribute to the long history of a Senate incumbent getting knocked off in their own party primary. This will be a fascinating race.

 

 

 

2014 Election, Baucus, Clinton, Film, Montana, Schweitzer, Tamarack, U.S. Senate

No Coincidence

Posted on by christian

120424_brian_schweitzer_605_apThe abrupt and very surprising announcement last Saturday that former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer would take a pass on seeking the open U.S. Senate seat in Big Sky Country seems proof once again of what ought to be the Number One rule in politics. It’s often said that the fundamental rule in politics is to “secure your base,” but Schweitzer’s decision, sending shock waves from Washington to Wibaux, reinforces the belief that the real Number One rule in politics is that there are never any coincidences.

Consider the timeline.

On July 10, 2013 Politico, the Bible of conventional political wisdom inside the Beltway, ran a tough piece on Schweitzer under the headline “Brian Schweitzer’s Challenge: Montana Democrats.” The story made a point of detailing the bombastic Schweitzer’s less than warm relationships with fellow Democrats, including retiring senior Sen. Max Baucus and recently re-elected Sen. Jon Tester.

“Interviews with nearly two dozen Montana Democrats paint a picture of Schweitzer as a polarizing politician,” Politico’s Manu Raju wrote. “His allies adore him, calling him an affable and popular figure incredibly loyal to his friends, who had enormous political successes as governor and would stop at nothing to achieve his objectives.

“His critics describe him as a hot-tempered, spiteful and go-it-alone politician — eager to boost his own image while holding little regard for helping the team, something few forget in a small state like Montana.”

The story quoted one unnamed Montana Democrat as saying Schweitzer “doesn’t do anything if it doesn’t benefit him…he’s an incredibly self-serving politician.”

Added another: “He’s the most vindictive politician I’ve ever been in contact with.”

Meanwhile, conservative bloggers were zeroing in on Schweitzer with one comparing his frequent flights of colorful rhetoric – he recently said he wasn’t “crazy enough” to be in the U.S. House or “senile” enough to be in the Senate – to the disastrous campaign of Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin in 2012. Other Republicans suggested they had done the opposition research on the man with the bolo-tie and found, as one said, “a lot of rust under the hood.”

Then last Saturday morning Schweitzer, who went almost instantly from a sure-fire contender to hold the Baucus seat for Democrats to a non-candidate, told the Associated Press that he would stay in Montana. “I love Montana. I want to be here. There are all kinds of people that think I should be in the U.S. Senate,” Schweitzer told AP. “But I never wanted to be in the U.S. Senate. I kicked the tires. I walked to the edge and looked over.”

The surprise announcement came as Montana Democrats were gathering in convention. Schweitzer did no real follow up with the media. His advisers had nothing to say. The national media reported that the decision not to run was a blow – as it is – to national Democrats. Then Sunday, the day after Schweitzer’s surprise announcement, the Great Falls Tribune published a lengthy piece, a piece that had been hinted as in the political pipeline earlier in the week, that raised numerous questions about Schweitzer’s connections with shadowy “dark money” groups that are closely associated with some of the former governor’s aides and close political friends. The “dark money” connections are particularly sensitive in Montana, a state that has a long and proud tradition of limiting corporate money in politics and a state that unsuccessfully challenged the awful Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that took the chains off corporate money.

As a friend in Montana says Schweitzer is staying on Montana’s Georgetown Lake rather than head for Georgetown on the Potomac. But there is always more to the story.

Brian Schweitzer had a political gift, the gift of making yourself a unique “brand.” The bolo-tie, the dog at his heels, the finger wagging, blue jeans swagger. He was gifted, perhaps too much, with the quick one liner. He won many fights, but almost always by brawling and bluster and with elements of fear and favor. In politics always making yourself the “bride at every wedding” and the “corpse at every funeral,” as Alice Roosevelt famously said of her father Teddy, exacts a steep price. Brain Schweitzer may have found the truth of another rule of politics: your friends die and your enemies accumulate.

Schweitzer may genuinely want to stay on Georgetown Lake in beautiful Montana or, if you believe in no coincidence, he may have found that his personal political brand had finally reached its “sell by date” and would simply not survive another round of intense scrutiny. Politics is always about personality. People like you or they don’t. They respect you or not. Rarely do they dislike you and fear you and also hope that you succeed.

“It’s always all about Brian,” another Montana Democrat told Politico. “That I think is the root for every problem.” No coincidence.

 

2014 Election, Baseball, Baucus, Politics, Tamarack, U.S. Senate

M.A.D. Men

Posted on by christian

You have to hand it to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – the guy knows how to go for the political throat. Mild mannered he is not. McConnell plays the political game like his home state Louisville Cardinals played basketball on their way to winning the NCAA national championship – full court pressure, sharp elbows, give no quarter and when the opponent is down dispatch them quickly so that there is no chance – none – that they’ll get back in the contest.

As he prepares for a Senate race in 2014 McConnell’s dismal approval numbers back home find him in familiar form – on the attack. First McConnell dispatched the one candidate, the actress Ashley Judd, who he probably should have dreamed about running against. For a few weeks earlier this year the national press, always a soft touch for a sweet talking celebrity, built up Kentucky-native Judd as though she were the second coming of Hillary Clinton. With perfect hindsight the political novice was never a serious threat to the toughest guy in the Senate, but McConnell and his operatives wasted not a minute labeling Judd a “Hollywood liberal” completely out of touch with Kentucky. Judd helped the labeling effort by acknowledging at one point in her non-campaign campaign that she and her husband “winter in Scotland. We’re smart like that.” Not surprisingly that line did not play all that well in Paducah, especially among the people who do winter there.

Still, before Ashley admitted the obvious and backed of from challenging McConnell – she’s smart like that – the Senator was plotting an offensive that would not merely leave the young woman battered and beaten in the bluegrass, but permanently disabled as a political pretender. McConnell and his advisers plotted defining Judd as “emotionally unbalanced” and, frankly, more than a little strange with off-beat ideas about religion and other subjects.

Standby. Cue the secret tape.

Mother Jones magazine, the same folks who turned up the infamous Mitt Romney 47% video, published a recording of McConnell and his campaign strategists plotting, as the Senate’s top Republican said, to play “whac-a-mole” with the young woman who might be his opponent.

“If I could interject,” McConnell says early in the leaked recording, “I assume most of you have played the game Whac-A-Mole? [Laughter.] This is the Whac-A-Mole period of the campaign…when anybody sticks their head up, do them out…”

When a tape of the “Whac-an-Ashley” session leaked, apparently at the hands of a Democratic Political Action Committee in Kentucky dedicated to doing to McConnell what he does to others, the Senator “maxed out” on the political rhetoric scale. As the Washington Post noted the Senator or his advisers invoked Nixon-style dirty tricks, the awful politics of the “political left” and even Hitler’s Gestapo. Whew. No mention of Castro? Or Hugo Chavez?

What McConnell (and many other politicians) and their opponents are doing with increasing frequency, and this would include the ham-handed “Progress Kentucky” group that apparently made and leaked the tape of the Senator’s “whac-a-mole” session, is a political update of the nuclear weapons strategy known as “mutually assured destruction.” The MAD theory holds that no sane person will use a nuclear weapon if they know with certainty that their enemy will react in kind. Both sides avoid the ultimate, well, whack because the stakes involved are just too dangerous.

McConnell’s strategy – again, not knew to him – is an update, a variation on MAD – nuke the other side before they even become a candidate. After all you don’t need to worry about the other sides missiles when the other side has no missiles.

No longer is it enough in our politics to defeat an opponent they must be “destroyed” or at a minimum “whacked.” Such a strategy is particularly effective when employed against a novice candidate, or candidate wannabee, like the young Ms. Judd. Before they know what has hit them they are effectively disqualified as a viable candidate. We can date the rise of modern “whac-a-mole” politics to the 1980 election when, for the first time on a national scale a new invention, the political action committee (PAC), made its appearance. Formed for the express purpose of attacking, wounding and ultimately destroying candidates these down-and-dirty operations both coarsened our politics and made the nuke ’em strategy particularly popular with incumbents. The idea that campaigns before 1980 tended to be most local and statewide affairs seems positively quaint today.

If you wonder why the U.S. Senate has become a daily snake pit of hyper-partisanship where a lack of trust prevents serious work on the nation’s serious business, revisit those 1980 campaigns. Four-term incumbent Sen. Frank Church of Idaho was the prime target of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) that year and Church had been in NCPAC’s sights for months. NCPAC’s scummy director Terry Dolan boasted that “By 1980 there will be people voting against Church without remembering why.” He was right. Church lost re-election that year at the hands of a fundamentally dishonest campaign. The same kind of attacks took George McGovern, Birch Bayh, John Culver, Gaylord Nelson, nine Democrats in total, from the Senate in the same cycle. As the late Dave Broder wrote at the time the 1980 election “certainly had all the appearance of an era ending – and a new one beginning.”

Candidates learned from the ’80 election that political survival is best assured with a “first strike” of such overpowering force that the opponent is effectively destroyed. It is the rare candidate these days who find the character attacks – the whacking – so distasteful that they won’t go there, so McConnell is far from alone in embracing this new era. He may be the new era’s most skilled practitioner, however. In the Kentucky Senator’s case the nuke ’em approach also has the benefit of making his campaign about small things rather than big things . Who wants to talk about Afghanistan or the budget when you can talk about Gestapo tactics and unbalanced potential opponents? So far McConnell has mostly succeeded in making this small story about the fact that his secret “whac-a-mole” meeting was secretly taped rather than about the substance of what was on the tape. In fairness to McConnell the Progress Kentucky PAC is clearly trying to pull on him what NCPAC pulled in 1980. They’re just not very good at it. Still, a pox on all the houses.

I know, I know, politics ain’t bean bag. Sharp elbows and unfair attacks are as old as the Republic. A young Lyndon Johnson once tried out on an aide a particularly scurrilous line of attack he was considering using against an opponent. The aide protested that the attack simply wasn’t true, but Johnson just smiled and said, “let him deny it.” Still, even LBJ eventually learned that there is more to politics that winning at all cost. Gleefully destroying opponents doesn’t do a lot for their reputation or yours.

Mitch McConnell is very good at the sharp elbows part of politics and, as he girds for a sixth term, clearly very good at winning elections. You shouldn’t put any smart money on the most unpopular man in the Senate losing next year. At the same time McConnell is proof of the truth contained in the old axiom that skills required for winning elections are not usually the skills needed to govern effectively. The history books will likely remember him for resisting every type of control on money in politics and for famously saying that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Disqualifying Ashley Judd won’t get you a chapter in Profiles in Courage and scorched earth politics – whether from a Mitch McConnell or the sleazy PAC out to get him – ultimately only feed the dysfunction of a Senate and a political system in need of real leaders rather than guys who spend their days plotting how to whack moles.

 

2014 Election, Al Gore, Borah, Bush, Christie, Church, Economy, Nebraska, Theodore Roosevelt, Wall Street

Bigness

Posted on by christian

An Old Notion Relevant Again

On the downhill side of the Gilded Age in American political and business life – that would have been in the late 1800’s – progressive reformers from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Louis Brandeis found fault with the idea and reality of a concentration of economic power.

Brandeis, a great legal advocate before he went on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916, described the threat of economic concentration by a single, simple word “bigness.” Brandeis entitled one of his greatest works, published in 1913, Other People’s Money and one chapter in that book was called “The Curse of Bigness.”

“Size, we are told, is not a crime,” Brandeis wrote, “But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it was attained or the uses to which it is put. And it is size attained by combination, instead of natural growth, which has contributed so largely to our financial concentration.”

Today it is almost an article of faith that “bigger is better,” but the early 20th Century focus on means and uses of economic concentration are just as relevant today as when Woodrow Wilson was in the White House.

Our political and regulatory system seems unable to address the “too big to fail” syndrome and the human abuses that can follow. Much of corporate America seems one big merger followed by another and meanwhile, Walmart, one of the biggest of the bigs, seems to be engulfed by a major foreign bribery scandal in Mexico, Rupert Murdoch’s vast media empire is now defending its political clout in Great Britain as Murdoch execs fend off criminal charges for violating privacy. Criminal charges have been leveled against a BP engineer involved in the Gulf oil spill. You could go on, but the situation is clear – too big to fail can also be too good to be true.

Idaho Sen. Frank Church – he served in the Senate from 1957-1981 – is remembered today primarily for his headline generating investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970’s, but Church always considered another of his Senate investigations equally, if not more, important. As chairman of a subcommittee on multinational corporations in 1973, Church delved deeply into the practices, some of them corrupt, of some of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world.

Church’s work cast light on International Telephone & Telegraph’s involvement in the fall and murder of Chilean President Salvador Allende and Lockheed was exposed for its role in a bribery scandal in Japan. Lockheed’s CEO at the time admitted to spending millions on bribes to foreign officials and a Japanese prime minister went to jail in the resulting scandal. The entire chain of events led to passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 1977, the U.S. law that Walmart may find itself on the wrong side of today.

Frank Church discovered in that long ago investigation that human nature, driven by an imperative to constantly expand and concentrate economic power has its dark side. In such a world corners get trimmed, ends justify means and we experience an Enron or we end up bailing out a financial institution that can only justify its continued existence because it’s too big to fail.

A thinking man’s conservative, New York Times columnist David Brooks, had a fascinating column this week in which, in a way, he came at this bigness issue from a novel angle. Brooks’ point was that a blind focus on destroying the competition – Brandeis might have termed it how businesses become always bigger – is the flip side of a lack of innovation. When the focus is on constantly and relentlessly growing, creativity goes begging. The need to be bigger inevitably trumps everything, including finding a better way to make a widget.

Brandeis argued a hundred years ago – his was the age of Standard Oil and the House of Morgan – that eventually bigness, that which “is attendant of excessive size,” is inefficient. Eventually, he wrote, “Decentralization will begin. The liberated smaller units will find no difficulty in financing their needs without bowing the knee to money lords. And a long step will have been taken toward attainment of the New Freedom [a reference to Wilson-era reforms in banking and business.]

It may well be in this age of globalization with a bank in Rhode Island tied to the fate of a housing development in Ireland that there is no going back from bigness, but there may be more than nostalgia in longing for a simpler, smaller time.

Frank Church, a liberal Democrat, helped expose the evils of bigness and concentrated power in the 1970’s, just as his role model in the Senate, William E. Borah, had done in the 1930’s. Borah, a Republican progressive, hated bigness, monopoly and concentration of power. He championed small business and decentralization and once said, “When you have destroyed small business, you have destroyed our towns and our country life, and you have guaranteed and made permanent the concentration of economic power, [which in turn ensures] the concentration of political power.  Monopoly and bureaucracy are twin whelps from the same kennel.”

I don’t know about you, but I long for a political leader willing to call bluff on concentrated power. Bigger isn’t always better, it may just be bigger.

 

2014 Election, 2016 Election, Andrus, Borah, FDR, Prostate Cancer, Supreme Court, Wheeler

FDR’s Great Blunder

Posted on by christian

As Court Showdown Looms, an Anniversary of Note

Two years ago in his State of the Union address, Barack Obama called out the Supreme Court of the United States for its ruling in the Citizens United case involving campaign financing.

With most members of the Roberts Court looking on from their seats in the well of the House of Representatives, Obama told the country that the Court had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections.”

With perhaps the exception of his reference to “foreign corporations” – it’s hard to tell the source of much of the new money flooding campaigns – Obama explained exactly what has happened in the subsequent two years. And predictably, the president was roundly criticized in the aftermath of the speech for an “unprecedented attack on the Court. Justice Samuel Alito, one of the five judges in the majority in Citizens, could be seen mouthing the words “not true.”

In retrospect, not only was the president right on the substance of his criticism of the Court – Obama did teach at one of the country’s great law schools – but he had the guts to deliver his critique right to the faces of those in the black robes who hold so much sway over the policy and priorities of American life. It was hardly an unprecedented attack, either, particularly in the context of an anniversary of, what I would argue, was a defining moment in the evolution of the modern U.S. Supreme Court.

Just over 75 years ago – February 5, 1937 to be precise – the president to whom Obama is so often compared and contrasted, Franklin D. Roosevelt, took a decidedly different tack with the high court he took issue with. FDR didn’t just criticize the justices, although he certainly did criticize, he attempted – and came reasonably close to succeeding – to fundamentally remaking the Court in his more liberal image. Roosevelt’s “court packing scheme,” as it quickly became known, turned out to be his greatest single blunder as president. It also presented the country with the greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

Now, with the Supreme Court poised to hear, in unusual detail, the arguments for and against Obama’s health insurance reform initiative – the Affordable Care Act – it’s worth reflecting on the history of the court over the last 75 years and considering what might have been and what has become.

The normally surefooted Franklin Roosevelt made misstep after misstep with his plan to enlarge the Court in 1937 and when his efforts at a judicial power grab finally ended he reaped the political whirlwind. Never before, after the court packing fiasco, would Roosevelt command a working majority in the Congress for his domestic agenda. With one ill-considered move, FDR squandered his massive 1936 re-election mandate – Democrats held 76 seats in the Senate after that election – he shattered the myth that he was politically invincible and, it seems, Roosevelt forever took off the policy table any effort by any president to “reform” the nation’s highest court.

Roosevelt’s tools in attempting to enlarge the Court were secrecy and subterfuge and each got him in trouble. With the encouragement of his Attorney General, Homer Cummings, FDR hatched a secret scheme to add one additional justice to the Supreme Court for each justice over 70 who refused to retire. He consulted with no one on the idea except his politically tone deaf attorney general and then sprung the idea on unsuspecting Congressional allies. They were first stunned and then outraged.

Roosevelt compounded his “born in secrecy” problem by dissembling about the real reasons behind his proposal. Clearly he wanted to liberalize a court that had come to be dominated by former corporate lawyers and Republican appointees, but he let Cummings peddle the fiction that he was trying to improve the Court’s efficiency. The “nine old men” on the Court had fallen behind in their work, it was alleged. That argument never gained traction and simply wasn’t true.

Had Congress adopted his audacious idea, Roosevelt could have immediately added six new justices to the Supreme Court, as well as a slew of other federal judges. The Supreme Court would have gone from nine members to 15 and, of course, the president would have the chance to appoint justices who held out the prospect of liberalizing the Court that had shot down so many of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives.

[On one particularly Black Monday in May 1935, the Court struck down three important New Deal initiatives, including much of the centerpiece of Roosvelt’s domestic agenda – the National Industrial Recovery Act.]

In a rare rebuff for Roosevelt, the Congress simply wouldn’t buy his court packing. Republicans, of course, rebelled, but so did many Democrats. Montana liberal Burton K. Wheeler, a fierce foe of concentrated power in government or the economy, was chosen to lead the Senate opponents of FDR. Ironically, Wheeler had been among the very first to encourage Roosevelt to seek the presidency having publicly done so in 1930. By 1937 Wheeler had enough of what he saw as Roosevelt’s accumulation of personal power and made common cause with Republicans like Idaho’s William E. Borah and Oregon’s Charles L. McNary to battle the president.

As the battle was fully joined in the summer of 1937, Wheeler collaborated with Justice Louis Brandeis, ironically the greatest liberal on the Court, to obtain a letter from the patrician Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes’ letter, quickly drafted over the weekend prior to Wheeler’s Senate committee testimony, completely demolished FDR”s argument that the Court was behind in its work.

Borah further complicated Roosevelt’s plans when he prevailed upon his neighbor, Justice Willis Van Devanter, one of the most conservative members of the Court, to strategically announce his retirement to coincide with the release of the Hughes letter. The combination was a classic political one-two punch, but Roosevelt still refused to compromise or fold.

The American Bar Association opposed Roosevelt, as did most of the nation’s editorial pages. Still, through the hot summer of 1937, Roosevelt soldiered on with his proposal, driving an ever deeper wedge into the Democratic Party. Roosevelt was offered a compromise. If he backed off, one or two additional members of the Court would quickly retire and he could have his more liberal appointees. He refused. Seeking another route to compromise, some senators suggested the president might get two or three new seats rather than six. He refused.

Even the 10-8 vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee against the president’s bill – the committee was dominated, of course, by Democrats – failed to move the president. Incidentally, Borah wrote much of the committee report; a report that has been characterized as one of the harshest denouncements of a presidential initiative in the history of the Senate.

Ultimately, it took a dramatic Senate tragedy to bring an end to Franklin Roosevelt’s biggest blunder. FDR’s loyal lieutenant, Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, while no fan of the court packing plan, still believed that loyalty to “the boss” demanded that he try to get something passed in the Senate. Robinson worked himself into a lather debating the court bill and managing the president’s expectations and in the stifling mid-July heat in Washington – the days before central air conditioning – the Majority Leader grew red in the face, announced he was done for the day and stormed off the Senate floor.

Senator Royal Copeland of New York, a physician, had warned Robinson that he was working too hard and that no bill was worth killing himself over. Robinson retreated to his apartment close to the Supreme Court building to rest. On the morning of July 14, 1937, his maid found the gruff, but much respected and well-liked Senate leader, dressed in his pajamas and slumped on his bathroom floor. Robinson was dead of heart attack. Nearby he had dropped his copy of the Congressional Record. Robinson had been reading the debate over the court bill.

Joe T’s death stunned the Capitol, in part because it was an open secret that FDR had promised the loyal Robinson the first vacancy on the Court, even though as a conservative southern Democrat Robinson was unlikely to become a liberalizing force on the Court. Senators took to calling Robinson, Mr. Justice, as they anticipated that any day FDR would name Joe to the high court.

Roosevelt hesitated. Had he made that appointment it might well have paved the way for a compromise on the court bill, or at least presented the president with a face saving exit strategy. But Roosevelt took no action and, with Robinson dead, hard feelings toward the president grew even worse in the Senate. Wheeler even went so far as to claim God himself seemed opposed to packing the court.

On the train that carried most of Robinson’s colleagues back from his funeral in Little Rock, Vice President John Nance Garner counted noses for the White House. When ol’ Cactus Jack arrived back in Washington he went directly to see Roosevelt and told him that he was beaten. The Senate when it voted, Garner said, would defeat Roosevelt’s plan to expand the Court. FDR was stunned. He continued until that moment to think that he could work his will on the Congress as he had so many times before. He reluctantly asked Garner to negotiate the best exit possible.

Garner went to Wheeler’s office in what is now the Russell Senate Office Building and told the Montanan that he “could write his own ticket” with regard to the court bill. As legend has it, the two old pols had a drink of bourbon and decided that the bill would be recommitted to the Judiciary Committee, in effect killing the proposal. Seventy senators eventually voted to recommit the court bill and Roosevelt had lost an epic battle over the Supreme Court. The whole contest had lasted for a mean 168 days.

Had FDR been willing to compromise, even a little, he might have modestly enlarged the Supreme Court in 1937 and we can only speculate as to what the long-term impact of that political act might have been. It seems safe to conclude that had a political compromise over the makeup of the Court occurred we would think somewhat differently about the Supreme Court today.

Roosevelt would later argue that he lost a battle over the Court, but eventually won a war and there is truth in that statement. Alabama Sen. Hugo Black was soon appointed to fill Van Devanter’s seat. Black, it was widely noted, had supported the court packing legislation and opposed the vote to recommit in the Senate. Black turned out to be one of the Court’s great liberals and a staunch defender of civil liberties. In time, Roosevelt also appointed Justices like William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter, who helped define American jurisprudence until the time of the Ford Administration.

Perhaps in an even more important way, Roosevelt’s efforts to expand the Supreme Court 75 years ago removed any possibility that any president could realistically hope to change the court simply because he disagreed with its rulings. It’s unthinkable today that a Roosevelt-like idea could be seriously considered. Instead, the fights over the direction and role of the Supreme Court are fought out each and ever time a president nominates a new justice. These confirmation fights, increasingly nasty and partisan, are still no where near as nasty as the 75 year ago fight over whether the Supreme Court would be fundamentally changed.

The great historian William Leuchtenberg has written: “FDR’s [court proposal] generated an intensity of response unmatched by any legislative controversy of this century, except possibly the fight over joining the League of Nations. Southern Democrats feared that an expanded liberal Court would give rights to blacks; progressives saw an assault on the branch responsible for protecting civil liberties; moderates who had always mistrusted Roosevelt now had proof of his treachery.”

It wasn’t as if Roosevelt hadn’t been warned. At one point Wheeler told the president that with many Americans the “Supreme Court is a religion,” and, Wheeler said, it is never smart to get in the middle of a religious fight.

This much seems certain, when the current Supreme Court issues its decision on the health insurance reform law later this summer there will, no matter how the decision goes, both glee and gloom. Still, when the smoke clears, the country, the Congress and the president will accept the verdict of the Court. Some folks, grumbling all the way, will not like the verdict, but just like the controversial decision that ended the 2000 election – Bush v. Gore – we’ll grumble and move on.

We don’t always like what we hear from the pulpit at church, but Burt Wheeler had it right in 1937. The Court may not always be right, but we accept the higher authority nevertheless.

In a way, we can thank Franklin Roosevelt and his furious fight exactly 75 years ago for that now enduring feature of American political life.

 

2014 Election, 2016 Election, American Presidents, Andrus, Borah, Campaign Finance, FDR, Health Care, Obama, Supreme Court

2012 Wildcard

Posted on by christian

Elections and the Court

When the Obama Justice Department announced last week that it had asked the United States Supreme Court for an expedited review of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – Obamacare, health care reform, etc. – the government’s lawyers confidentially predicted that the current court would uphold the law. In making that claim the Justice Department cited several precedents in our history where the Supreme Court has reviewed and upheld once controversial laws that have now become established features of American life.

“Throughout history,” the Department said in a statement, “there have been similar challenges to other landmark legislation, such as the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and all of those challenges failed. We believe the challenges to the Affordable Care Act — like the one in the 11th Circuit — will also ultimately fail and that the Supreme Court will uphold the law.”

The Justice Department release represents more than a little wishful thinking and an even larger dose of selective historical memory. At least once before, in a case that has some striking parallels to what is unfolding with the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court considered and struck down major provisions of a Democratic administration’s domestic agenda. It happened in 1935 and the political fallout, the subsequent election campaign and the president’s policy response produced the greatest Constitutional confrontations since the Civil War.

Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) into law on June 16, 1933. The law created, among other things, the National Recovery Administration, symbolized by the “blue eagle” that appeared on signs in store windows, in propaganda-like newsreels and in vast demonstrations staged in major U.S. cities.

The NIRA granted to the president vast powers – unprecedented really – to promulgate industrial codes of fair competition. The effect was to form industrial cartels that were not suppose to engage in price fixing, but came very close to doing just that, as well as turning the capitalist concept of competition on its head.

The code provision had been controversial, particularly in the Senate, where some legislators who abhorred “monopoly” – senators like Borah of Idaho and Wheeler of Montana – were concerned the law essentially did violence to the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law on the book since 1890.

The NIRA also established rights to collective bargaining, regulated working conditions and some wages and, in a separate section, created the Public Works Administration (PWA), the major infrastructure investment vehicle of the New Deal.

There were many problems administering the complex NIRA and the inevitable legal challenges began almost immediately. Eventually on May 27, 1935, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled major parts of the NIRA unconstitutional. Roosevelt was stunned and outraged, even though FDR’s Justice Department, like Barack Obama’s Justice Department with the health care legislation, had tried to pick the case and the timing to take the issue to the nation’s highest court.

Writing for a united Court, that like today’s Court frequently found itself sharply divided between conservatives and liberals, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, zeroed in on Constitutional problems with two features of the law that FDR considered the centerpiece of the domestic agenda he hoped would lift the economy out of the Great Depression. Like the arguments around the Affordable Care Act, the issue in 1935 was the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

As Hughes wrote, “If the commerce clause were construed to reach all enterprises and transactions which could be said to have an indirect effect upon interstate commerce, the federal authority would embrace practically all the activities of the people, and the authority of the State over its domestic concerns would exist only by sufferance of the Federal Government.” Sounds a lot like the arguments over the health care bill’s individual mandate provision.

The ruling in the Schechter Poultry Corporation case that brought down the NIRA is today generally considered a very narrow 1930’s interpretation of the Commerce Clause and FDR certainly thought so. He famously complained to a room full of reporters gathered in his office that the Supreme Court had adopted a “horse and buggy” view of the nation’s economy and particularly of interstate commerce. The Commerce Clause is at the heart of the ACA debate because critics charge a central federal government has no business mandating that individuals must purchase health insurance. We’ll see. 

It would be unfair to stretch the parallels between 1935 and 2011 too far and it is possible the Supreme Court my opt for an artful dodge to avoid deciding the health care case before next year’s election. It is also true that we live in vastly different times, although the politics around the Great Depression feel a good deal like the politics around the Great Recession.

Since 1935, the Court has vastly expanded our understanding of what constitutes interstate commerce and the ruling Roosevelt disliked so much came more than a year before he sought re-election to a second term. Barack Obama, by contrast, may get his ruling on the Affordable Care Act smack dab in the middle of his re-election effort and, while the NIRA was controversial it had little of the polarizing political impact of health care.

After his initial “horse and buggy” zinger had been delivered, Roosevelt generally avoided mentioning the Court, while he privately seethed about the “nine old men” who had dismantled his handiwork in the midst of a national economic crisis. Once safety re-elected in 1936 Roosevelt came down on the Court with a ton of bricks, serving up his ill-fated plan to “pack the court” by adding up to six new justices who would presumably liberalize a reactionary court. The Congress refused to go along with such an overreach and Roosevelt suffered a massive defeat right on the heels of winning a second term in a landslide.

One way or the other, Obama looks to get his chance to be pleased or disappointed by the Supreme Court in the middle of a high stakes campaign season. Most Court analysts say they count four votes in favor of upholding the controversial law and four against. Obama may think about issuing a quick invitation for a golf game to Justice Anthony Kennedy. By all accounts he’ll decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act.

There is one more historical footnote related to the 1935 case that, if he’s thought about it, might well give former law professor Obama some political heartburn. In 1935 the most liberal member of the Supreme Court was the venerated Justice Louis Brandeis, who history records as one of the all-time great justices. Roosevelt was stunned when the man he called “Isaiah” ruled against him.

Robing up before the Court delivered its decision on the NIRA, Justice Brandeis told Roosevelt aide Tommy Corcoran, “This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything.”

 

2014 Election, Borah, Giffords, Humanities

The Importance of Being Borah

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borahA Senator Worth Remembering

I’ll be speaking on Wednesday night at the Main Boise Library on the life and career of Idaho’s longest serving U.S. Senator, William E. Borah. That’s him, third from the right, in a photo taken in Sandpoint. I’m going to guess is was in the middle-1920’s.

The Borah talk is one I have put together as part of the Idaho Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau. I’ll talk about Borah’s career and lasting importance, but also about his view of the Senate in our form of government. Borah was a progressive Republican, somewhat in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, but he was also fiercely independent and more than willing to buck his own party.

I’ve been reading and writing about Borah for a long time. In fact, I began his journey into blogland more than a year ago with a piece on his approach to Supreme Court appointments. I continue to find him a fascinating character. And, of course, there is that business with Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

The Library event is a 7:00 pm in the Main Auditorium. Staff at the Boise Library have also created a great Borah bibliography of books, articles and writings about the man known as “the Lion of Idaho.”

 

2014 Election, Borah, Egan, Idaho Politics

Room for a Borah?

Posted on by christian

BorahToo Independent for Today’s GOP

Arguably William Edgar Borah – the Lion of Idaho – is the most famous and influential politician Idaho has ever produced. He served longer in the U.S. Senate than anyone from Idaho ever has, was a genuine international figure and regularly confounded what he called “the old guard” in the GOP because of his independence.

One wonders what Bill Borah would have thought of some planks in the Idaho GOP platform adopted last weekend in Idaho Falls? I wonder how many of the delegates know, or care, that Borah fought hard for, indeed was the floor sponsor of, the Constitutional amendment – the 17th Amendment – that changed the way U.S. Senators are elected. Idaho Republicans are now on record favoring repeal of Borah’s handiwork and returning to the pre-1913 days when state legislators elected Senators.

Borah was never a party regular. A reporter made the observation in the early 1930’s that there were four distinct political factions in the United States – Republicans, Democrats, Progressives and William E. Borah.

While Borah never broke openly with the national party, he did refuse to endorse William Howard Taft in 1912 – Borah was close to Theodore Roosevelt – and he couldn’t bring himself to back Alfred Landon in 1936. Pressed by GOP leaders to make a series of radio talks to help Landon, the Kansas governor, in his uphill fight against Franklin Roosevelt, Borah refused. His biographer, Marian McKenna, wrote that “he warned Republican leaders that if they force him to take a stand publicly…he would let it be known that he preferred Roosevelt.”

Borah might have trouble with the “loyalty oath” Idaho Republicans now say will be required of GOP candidates. I doubt he would have approved of the party’s effort to encourage long-time GOP local official Vern Bisterfeldt to withdraw as the party’s candidate for Ada County Commissioner because of his past support for some Democratic candidates. In 1912 Borah challenged state GOP leaders to read him out of the party if they could. They couldn’t.

As to the 17th Amendment – the direct election of U.S. Senators – I think it not an overstatement to say that Idaho’s most famous Republican would have been appalled that modern day GOP adherents would openly call for its repeal.

McKenna wrote in her 1961 biography about Borah’s leadership on the issue: “It was an excellent public service, but few know or remember Borah’s part in it. The fight had been long, cutting across party lines and pitting conservatives against progressives. Borah found this groping of the electorate toward a truer and more efficient democracy most heartening.”

Asked years later if the change in how Senators are elected had improved the Senate, Borah had no doubt. He trusted the popular will. “What judgment is so swift, so sure and so remorseless,” he said, “as the judgment of the American people?”

There were two principle reasons Borah favored the election reform, one very personal another moral. He knew that his Senate career would likely be a short one if he couldn’t appeal directly to the voters and he was genuinely disgusted by the corruption involved when legislators elected Senators.

One of the most celebrated corruption cases involved William Andrews Clark of Montana, but Borah was more familiar with a corrupt 1909 Illinois election involving William Lorimer. As exposed by the Chicago Tribune, Lorimer won his Senate seat thanks to a $100,000 slush fund gathered by Illinois business interests who used the cash to bribe state legislators. The Senate eventually declared Lorimer’s election invalid and Borah used the case to press for his reform.

In the 1930’s, Borah remained fiercely independent and above his party. He supported much of Roosevelt’s New Deal, made common cause with Democrats – Montana’s Burton K. Wheeler, a Progressive Democrat, was a close friend and collaborator – and lamented the GOP drift to the right. In his one rather half-hearted run for the White House in 1936, Borah told a campaign crowd: “If those now in control [of the Republican Party] would wake up some morning and find that I had been nominated for President they would groan, roll over and die.”

McKenna summed up his individualism this way: “He was really an independent with a mystic loyalty to the party which never seemed to live up to the ideals he conceived for it. He was a Republican by inheritance and a Democrat by inclination. He tried to stand for the best in the two parties and was inevitably accused of straddling…it took courage for him to wage an unending battle against the old guard in the party which he really loved.”

Mark Twain once said that, “in religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.”

Perhaps political party platforms should be seen in the same light, and, of course, Democrats come up with crazy notions and put them in their platforms, too. Still, some of the positions Idaho Republicans now endorse ignore some of the the country’s history, not to mention the history of the most famous Republican Idaho ever produced.

2014 Election, Borah

The Lion of Idaho – Part II

Posted on by christian

BorahBorah: A Power in the Senate

Seventy years after his death, William E. Borah has become a shadowy historic figure in his adopted state of Idaho. During the nearly 33 years he spent in the United States Senate, however, Borah – called the Lion of Idaho – was a hugely influential figure in American politics, even though some of his contemporaries lamented his unwillingness, at times, to assume an even larger role.

Borah was a creature of the Senate and his times and the Senate was a different place in the first decades of the 20th Century than it has become today. Many senators tended to see themselves more as national representatives rather than home state advocates and the Senate was, in many respects, the ultimate political platform; a place to make a national reputation and a long career. Borah did both.

Some interesting details of Borah’s long career:

Borah never got along particularly well with President Calvin Coolidge, even though both were Republicans. One story has Borah being asked to the White House in 1924 where Coolidge was hoping to entice the Idahoan’s support in that year’s presidential election. Coolidge asked whether Borah would consider a place on the national ticket, to which the Senator reportedly replied, “Which place, Mr. President?” Borah ultimately rejected overtures to become vice president and refused to make the nominating speech at the GOP convention for Silent Cal.

Borah exercised great influence over a long period of time on appointments to the Supreme Court. In 1932, he played a pivotal role in convincing Herbert Hoover to nominate Benjamin Cardozo to the Court. Cardozo is now widely considered one of the greatest justices.

In 1937, Borah played a huge, behind the scenes role in derailing Franklin Roosevelt’s scheme to “pack” the Supreme Court by adding as many as six new justices. At a critical moment, Borah prevailed upon elderly Justice Willis Van Devanter, one of the Court’s staunch conservatives and a neighbor of Borah’s, to tender his resignation. The move, quietly engineered in personal conversation, helped undermine FDR’s plans by presenting the president with chance to appoint a liberal to the court.

At a time when the charge of being “soft on communism” was every bit as damaging as it was in more recent times, Borah was an early and long-time advocate for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution took place in 1917 and the United States did not extend formal diplomatic recognition until 1933. Borah called for recognition in the early 1920’s.

Borah’s reputation for independence and bipartisanship was greatly respected. In 1924, Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a Democrat, was indicted on corruption charges. Many in the Senate saw the indictment as nothing more than a trumped up charge aimed at intimidating Wheeler who was conducting a high profile investigation of the Justice Department and corrupt Attorney General Harry Daugherty. Borah lead a bipartisan Senate investigation of the charges against Wheeler and concluded he was not guilty of anything except looking into Daugherty’s shady dealings. With little dissent, the Senate adopted the carefully crafted report. Wheeler was later also found not guilty by a Montana jury and Borah and Wheeler cemented a lifetime friendship. When it appeared that Borah might face a tough re-election in Idaho in 1936, and that the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt would help Borah’s challenger, Wheeler publicly repudiated FDR’s meddling in Borah’s race and pledged to campaign for his Republican friend. Talk about bipartisanship.

In 1932, a well-known Washington reporter, Ray Tucker, published what became a very popular political book with the unforgettable title – Sons of the Wild Jackass. The title was a reference to a remark that New Hampshire Republican Senator George Moses had made when referring to the independent, progressive element in American politics. It was not meant as a compliment. Tucker’s book contained chapter length profiles of 15 of the “jackasses,” including Borah.

Tucker’s opening sentence regarding Borah is perhaps the best single description of the great Idaho senator. “There are four distinct political factions in the United States,” Tucker wrote, “Republicans, Democrats, Progressives and William Edgar Borah of Idaho.”

William E. Borah served longer in Washington, D.C. than any other Idahoan. He chaired the powerful Foreign Relations Committee for eight years, a role that made him an international figure. He dominated state politics, not by heading a political machine, but by the power of his personality and his carefully cultivated reputation for integrity and independence.