Word: 85th
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DOLITTLE would have loved the do-little 85th Congress, First Session. Domestic necessity pushed the 85th, after much hemming and hawing, into passing the first U.S. civil rights bill since Reconstruction. International tension pulled it, after much doodling and dawdling, into approving President Eisenhower's Middle East doctrine. Beyond these two significant accomplishments, the 85th Congress was a true Pushmi-Pullyu: it had trouble making up its mind, leaped in opposite directions after its two heads, and ended up hardly anywhere...
...Pushmi-Pullyu 85th was a political creature in a political jungle. Its Democratic majority, realizing it had little to worry about from a Republican President prohibited by the Constitution from running again, used this year's session to prepare for Election Year 1958-and beyond that, 1960. The Eisenhower and Old Guard branches of the Republican Party were already fighting over the 1960 successorship. Even the individual leaders of the Senate-Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson and California Republican William Knowland-were moving ahead with their own personal plans for the White House in '60. Against such strong political...
...Thus the 85th Congress was shaped almost entirely by partisan politics...
BUDGET CUTS: The 85th Congress went on a budget spree...
...began, ironically, when Republican Treasury Secretary George Humphrey made his famous observation last January that continued big budgets would lead to a hair-curling depression. President Eisenhower helped it along by inviting Congress to try cutting his budget. Senate Leader Johnson, undisputed mastermind of the 85th, accepted the Republican invitation and turned it into a Democratic party...