Democrats, who are within reach of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster in the Senate, would also face high expectations, especially from the party’s more liberal quarters, that could be difficult to meet even with enhanced numbers in the Senate as well as the House. And they would be at risk of overreaching, a tendency that has deeply damaged both parties in similar situations in the past.
Similar situations in the past? What situations would those be? If he’s looking for a time when the Senate had a three-fifths supermajority and the House and the Presidency were controlled by the same party well then the authors even provide you with a little chart so you can see when similar times have happened before going back to 1900. They would be: Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidency and then The New Deal and The Great Society and also Carter’s few years, most of which are widely understood to be great successes, especially The New Deal and The Great Society. Unless of course you consider Social Security and Civil Rights to be overreaching.
And if he thinks that Carter had political problems because his congress was just too powerful, that’s extremely short-sighted — willfully so.
Sometimes I think the New York Times likes to make crap up every now and then just to see if you’re paying attention. But more likely, they’ve just bought into the bullshit conventional wisdom that Democrats mustn’t be be too partisan or too dominant or too progressive, despite the fact that the times when Democrats have been at their most partisan, most dominating, and most progressive are the most celebrated times in our country’s history. Someone’s overreaching here, but I don’t think it’s congress.
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