A book review and commentary by Ray Smock I have written before about my great appreciation of and admiration for C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network created by Brian Lamb with the financial backing of the cable television industry. I like the people who run C-SPAN and I applaud C-SPAN’s mission. I made my first appearance on C-SPAN 30 years ago and this book review is not without a strong dose of bias in favor of C-SPAN, the book in question, and the interviewer Brian Lamb. C-SPAN has become an important part of American political culture since it first began broadcasting the floor sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979, expanding to two stations in 1986 with coverage of the Senate, and eventually adding C-SPAN 3, the American History TV channel, as well as C-SPAN radio. In 1979 only 3.5 million homes were wired for cable TV. Today C-SPAN reaches more than 100 million homes. Today all the interviews and events that C-SPAN has broadcast since 1987 are digitized an available online at the C-SPAN Video Library which includes both audio and video streaming. This amounts to more than 203,000 hours of broadcasting. This includes the entire collection almost 1,400 interviews conducted by Brian Lamb on his long running programs Booknotes and Q &A. By Ray Smock I never met Nelson Mandela, but I did see him shortly after he was released from his long prison term, when he spoke before a joint meeting of Congress on June 26, 1990. His passing sent me back to the journal I kept during my years as Historian of the House of Representatives to reflect on my eyewitness account of his speech before Congress. It was my good fortune to witness many great and historical moments on the floor of the House chamber. This one ranks in a category of its own. When Mandela was released from prison after 27 years behind bars for being a threat to the South African government, he was the most famous prisoner in the world and a moral force of great dimension, even from his cell. At the time of his release it was not clear if South Africa was headed toward mass violence and civil war, or if freeing Mandela would be the beginning of the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation where a white minority ruled a black majority. We know now that Mandela would lead his country toward reconciliation, not war, and that he would be elected president of South Africa in 1994. But when he appeared before Congress in 1990, none of us knew for sure how he would finally shape world history and the history of his nation. By Ray Smock
The Senate just changed the interpretation of one of its rules (Rule XXII) to reduce the number of votes necessary to invoke cloture and end certain filibusters from a supermajority down to a simple majority of 51 votes. This rule change, a precedent rather than an actual change in the language of the rule, supposedly makes it easier for the Democratic majority in the Senate to confirm the president’s nominees for the federal bench and for executive branch positions requiring Senate confirmation. Rule XXII was not changed in regard to bills before the Senate or for voting on nominees to the Supreme Court. The Senate website has information on the history of cloture and the filibuster. Senator Byrd’s name has come up frequently in the wake of the Senate’s action regarding Senate Rule XXII, citing his longstanding defense of minority rights and his earlier opposition to the so-called “Nuclear Option.” By Ray Smock
I highly recommend a recent podcast interview from Electric Politics with one of the nation’s leading experts on Congress and the Presidency, Dr. Louis Fisher, who discusses the current budget and national debt crisis. The Byrd Center also has an oral history interview of Fisher on our website that was conducted by the Senate Historian Emeritus, Dr. Richard A. Baker, a member of the Byrd Center’s board of trustees. Fisher’s own website contains an excellent variety of his writings on the Constitution, Congress, and the Presidency. If you are looking for good solid information on Constitutional issues, relations between Congress and the Presidency, war powers, the duties of Congress and the President related to the budget and other issues from one of the top professionals in the nation, you should know about Lou Fisher, his books, articles, congressional testimony, and interviews. By Ray Smock In Chris Matthews new book Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked, the author describes the battle between the Speaker and President Reagan over funding for the Contras, the Nicaraguan rebel forces, fighting the Sandinista government of that country. In 1986 the President was trying to get $100 million out of Congress for direct military aid to the Contras. Speaker O’Neill and the Democratic-controlled House were opposed to the funds and feared that the President was eager to launch a war in Nicaragua. In March the House rejected the military aid package, but this did not stop the President from continuing his efforts on behalf of the Contras. As Matthews tells the story, in June of 1986, Don Regan, President Reagan’s chief of staff, called Speaker O’Neill to request that the President be allowed to make an appearance before the House of Representatives, to make his case for the Contras. O’Neil refused, telling Regan that he was not opposed to informal discussions with House members, but that any formal appearance by the President had to be during a joint meeting of the House and Senate, as protocol demanded. By Ray Smock It was my good fortune during the nearly twelve years that I served as Historian of the House of Representatives to meet a lot of very interesting people and outstanding public servants from both political parties. One of those outstanding individuals, Speaker Tom Foley, died this past week and my thoughts turned back to his Speakership. I had no idea when I was hired in 1983 that I would be witnessing the end of a political era in the House and that the end of that era would also be the end of my career in the House. In the watershed congressional elections of 1994 the Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in forty years. My tenure there coincided with the Speakerships of Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts, Jim Wright of Texas, and Tom Foley of Washington. My office fell under the direct administrative control of the Speaker, even though I was not part of the political aspects of the Speaker’s duties. Tom Foley not only lost the Speakership in 1994 when Republicans gained control of the chamber and elected Newt Gingrich as Speaker, he also lost his election as a member of Congress from the state of Washington that year. The tide was turning against incumbents. The public was fed up with scandals that had wracked the House. Newt Gingrich had gone from an obscure back bencher to a prominent critic of everything that was wrong with the House and his message resonated with enough voters to usher in the “Gingrich Revolution.” It was a time of bitter partisanship. Politics was rapidly coarsening. It was not just a matter of defeating an opponent; the goal was to destroy the opponent. By Ray Smock
Background There have been 17 so-called shutdowns of the government since 1976 according to the Washington Post in a piece by Dylan Matthews that was updated September 25, 2013. The current crisis is the 18th. But not all shutdowns were created equal. Most were limited to a few days and did not involve shutting down all departments of government. The severity of the crisis depended on the scope of the shutdown as well as its duration. In some instances it is more useful to call them “spending gaps,” rather than shutdowns. By Ray Smock The Byrd Center for Legislative Studies will be exploring the current government shutdown and also looking into history for what happened in the last major shutdown, the one in 1995-96 that kept much of the government closed for 21 days. There are some interesting parallels but the two situations are also quite different in nature. The media, especially the Internet, is filled with much good information, but also a lot of speculation and downright misinformation and propaganda. Both political parties and a lot of special interests are spinning this serious challenge to our Constitution for their own benefit. We will try to use a critical eye on all sides of the issue, drawing from the Byrd Center archives and other sources to try to shed more light than fog on the problem confronting us all. If you have not looked at my Constitution Day address, you may want to start there because the shutdown was looming as I prepared this speech. I firmly believe in the important Constitutional role of Congress in our government. And, as Senator Byrd’s career attests, Congress works best when it follows its own rules, conducts business in regular order, and passes appropriations bills to keep the government operating. Any other considerations pale in importance to this fundamental job. I did an interview on the first day of the shutdown with Cecelia Mason of WV Public Radio, which was aired this morning. By Ray Smock
Senator Robert C. Byrd launched the Byrd Center’s annual Constitution Day Address nine years ago. The lecture series is named in honor of the late Tom E. Moses, a decorated veteran of World War II and a lifelong advocate of civil rights and human rights. In his inaugural speech in this series, Senator Byrd said, “Not a day has passed in the history of this great republic in which the Constitution has not been important.” This thought was on my mind as I drafted this year’s Constitution Day address. I could not help but be drawn to current events which reflect a growing constitutional crisis—one that may come to pass within weeks of Constitution Day, where Congress may actually shut down the government because a faction in the House is so opposed to the Affordable Healthcare Act and equally opposed to increasing the debt limit of the United States. |
Welcome to the Byrd Center Blog! We share content here including research from our archival collections, articles from our director, and information on upcoming events.
Categories
All
Archives
July 2023
|
Our Mission: |
The Byrd Center advances representative democracy by promoting a better understanding of the United States Congress and the Constitution through programs and research that engage citizens.
|
Copyright © Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education
|