Word: litmus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hustings. Not until Congress feels more pressure from voters to close loopholes than it does from special interests to create them will tax reform succeed. By throwing his immense prestige behind the cause, Reagan may have elevated tax reform from the empty promise of party platforms to a true litmus test for congressional candidates. Conceivably, both parties could even find themselves competing for the high ground of reform, engaging in a refreshing contest over which is better able to resist the special-interest pressures that created all the loopholes and complexities in the first place...
...outcry from others was sharp. Said Senator Howard Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat: "With some U.S. Senators, being a conservative is not enough. You must come up to their standard of being an extreme right-wing ideologue." Added Senator Joseph Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat: "The notion of an ideological litmus test is repugnant." Even Judiciary Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond, a conservative Republican, found the letter unacceptable. He announced that henceforth all members must confine their questioning of nominees to confirmation hearings...
...papal teaching." Father Charles Curran of the Catholic University of America doubts that the ban is based on good reasoning, concluding that "faith and reason cannot contradict one another." Curran and McCormick think that the Pope may crack down on dissident priests and make the birth control issue a litmus test in appointments of bishops and seminary professors...
Political appetite came upon him slowly, then faster. His demands began with a first "litmus test"-that runoff primaries, South and North, be abolished because such contests gave blacks less of a chance of winning than they would have had in a free-for-all involving divided whites. In June he demanded that the rules of the Democratic Party established as recently as 1982 be discarded to give him a share of delegates proportionate to the number of those who had voted for him; the Democrats compromised, setting up at his insistence a "fairness" commission to supervise, patrol and probably...
...have to do to save themselves if threatened with a lawsuit. The clubs would rush to declare their opposition to "women's issues" and thus show that the admission of women would change their organizational character. Otherwise, the final clubs--like the Jaycees--would flunk the Supreme Court's litmus test for discrimination...