Word: congress
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Republicans know they need to demonstrate that they can accomplish something in Congress. This is why G.O.P. moderates have finally begun to crawl into the light. That much was evident last week in the challenge to the 10% across-the-board tax cut being promoted by Kasich. It's no surprise that Democrats are calling it a giveaway that betrays Social Security, but Kasich's plan is also being rejected by 11 moderates from his own party. Led by Connecticut's Nancy Johnson, they introduced a package of targeted tax cuts that would cost less than a third...
...impeachment of Andrew Johnson, even though it failed, left a wounded presidency. Congress became, in the words of a promising young political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, "the central and predominant power of the system": Woodrow Wilson went on to call his influential 1885 book Congressional Government. Presidential leadership languished in the more than 30 years between Lincoln's assassination in 1865 and the (accidental) accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House in 1901. These years of a diminished presidency led James Bryce to write the famous chapter in The American Commonwealth (1888) titled "Why Great...
...particular, the impeachment has given new energy to a far-reaching, and largely unnoticed, structural change in the American polity: the institutionalization of the prosecutorial culture. This rests on two laws Congress passed in 1978 in a well-intentioned but misguided effort to immunize the republic against another Watergate...
...second statute is the Inspector General Act, which gives autonomy to the inspectors general of Executive departments and agencies, enables them to effectively abridge due process in their investigations, and makes them more answerable to Congress than to their nominal superiors. They too do their dirty work without serious accountability...
...reveal malversation in government. But what these laws have in fact done is to create a fourth branch of government--powerful, unaccountable and wonderfully designed to make it hard to recruit people for public service and easy to intimidate them once they are serving. A priority for the 106th Congress should be the dismemberment of these institutional manifestations of our prosecutorial culture. Abolishing the fourth branch of government would benefit future Republican as well as Democratic administrations...