As temperatures rise, both metaphorically and actually, and an increasing percentage of Americans believe that our political discourse is uncivil and that the differences between us are not reconcilable, people are starting to wonder how we started on the present path. E. J. Dionne blames it on Newt Gingrich. Others blame it on the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas or Robert Bork.
I think it started with the confirmation hearings of John Tower. John Tower was a long-time senator from Texas whom George H. W. Bush nominated to be his Secretary of Defense shortly after he was elected to the presidency. Senate Democrats loathed John Tower.
He was a Republican who had taken a seat that had been held by Democrats since Reconstruction and that they had believed belonged to them by right. By most accounts he was not a nice guy. He drank too much, chased women, and was a nasty political infighter. He was rejected by the Senate 47-53 on a straight party line vote—hard to justify as anything other than political retribution. It was the first time the Senate had ever rejected a newly-elected president’s nominee to the his cabinet.
Some say that Tower’s repudiation by the Senate was retribution for the Newt Gingrich-engineered ouster of Jim Wright as House Speaker but 1) there’s pretty good evidence that Wright was dirty; 2) it was the House, which has had dirty political infighting since there has been a House; and 3) the House never rejected Wright—he resigned. Jim Wright’s ethics investigation did lay down a marker for increasing Congressional partisanship and there are some that attribute George H. W. Bush’s election to the scandal surrounding Jim Wright. I think that’s a stretch.
The campaign against Jim Wright wasn’t shocking. The bitterness of the campaign against John Tower in the theretofore collegial Senate was.
Nah, it started with Adams vs Jefferson. If we had better records it wouldnt surprise me if we found a nasty campaign or two at the House level before those two went at it.
Steve
Cain & Able