Word: reformers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...retirement in 1962, has been toward activism. This view, complains Justice John Harlan, a Frankfurter man, "is that every major social ill in this country can find its cure in some constitutional 'principle' and that this court should 'take the lead' in promoting reform when other branches of government fail...
...attached some strongly worded reservations. Before an audience of educators, he defended his Viet Nam policies, and goaded his listeners with a taunt about their own troubles. "I'd be interested to know," said he, "how the pacification program is doing, how much progress you are making in reform, how things are doing in the outlying buildings, and whether you still hold the central administration offices...
Hardly any other institution in the world has been denounced, ridiculed and threatened with reform so often and so roundly as Britain's House of Lords. Harold Macmillan called it "a mausoleum." Winston Churchill went him several better, denouncing the Lords as "one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee." Plans to emasculate the upper house are just as common today as they were in Gilbert & Sullivan's lolanthe, in which the Lord Chancellor complained: "Ah, my lords, it is indeed painful to have to sit upon a woolsack which is stuffed with such thorns as these." Anachronistic...
Pressing the Attack. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, elated by the unexpectedly narrow defeat, nonetheless pressed the attack on their lordships. He sidetracked an interparty commission on reform of the House of Lords set up last December and promised early introduction of a government bill that would cut the Lords' delaying powers to perhaps three months. "Most of its members," he said scornfully, "sit by the right of succession from some near or distant ancestor...
...result of a reform passed by Harold Macmillan's Conservative government in 1958, there are now 143 life peers ennobled for merit whose titles will die with them. One likely feature of Wilson's bill: hereditary dukes and barons will be allowed to keep their titles and pass them on to their heirs, but only men and women elevated for distinguished service will be able to vote in the House of Lords...