Posted on 02/04/2014 7:03:15 AM PST by Kaslin
Henry Waxman and George Miller are retiring from the House and not running for re-election after 40 years as congressmen from southern and northern California.
Also retiring and not running for re-election is Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana will resign if, as expected, he is confirmed as ambassador to China. Both were first elected to the House in 1974 and were later elected to the Senate.
These four are just about the last members serving in Congress of the 75 Democrats first elected to the House in the Watergate year of 1974.
The only other members of the Class of 1974 are Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, one of only 17 Republican freshmen elected that year, and Congressman Rick Nolan, who retired from the House in 1980 but was elected again in 2012 after 32 years in the private sector.
Aside from these two outliers, the Class of 1974 is about to pass into history. What did it accomplish?
First, it changed the way the House of Representatives operates, starting from before its members took the oath of office and continuing to the present day.
Democrats had held majorities in the House for 20 years, but the liberal majority in the caucus was often stymied by the seniority system that allowed conservative Southerners to hold key chairmanships.
Beginning in 1974, the leadership allowed the Democratic caucus to vote up or down on chairmen against whom a certain number of signatures were gathered.
San Francisco's Phil Burton, who had shrewdly backed many '74ers, gathered a sufficient number of signatures for every chairman. Three were defeated by the newly enlarged caucus, including one, first elected in 1940, who addressed the freshmen as "boys and girls."
Election of committee chairmen became routine, and it meant that anyone seeking a chair had better have a voting record in line with the Democrats' liberal majority. For example, Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, first elected a month before Pearl Harbor, shifted suddenly from Right to Left.
Republicans did something similar when they won their House majority in 1994. Their 73 freshmen, shrewdly backed and mentored by Newt Gingrich, supported his move to have chairmen chosen by a leadership-dominated steering committee.
The result is that the Democratic Caucus became solidly liberal, and the Republican Conference (the two parties use different names) solidly conservative. The polarized House is in large part the product of the Classes of 1974 and 1994.
The change can be justified on neutral principles. Committees more closely resemble the legislature as a whole, which makes legislating more feasible -- and party leaders and members accountable to the voters.
The downside, in some critics' view, is that the election of chairmen also gave would-be chairmen motives to raise money for other members, very often from K Street lobbyists.
Many Class of 1974 members proved to be productive legislators. Waxman, who ousted a more senior chairman of a health subcommittee in 1978, sponsored bipartisan laws on generic drugs and orphan drugs (for rare diseases), forced expansion of Medicaid in the Reagan years, shaped the 1990 Clean Air Act and pushed Obamacare and cap-and-trade through the House in 2009-10.
Miller worked with John Boehner and Edward Kennedy on the Education Act of 2001. Harkin helped lead the bipartisan move to double funding for the National Institutes of Health over five years. Baucus led Senate Finance Democrats for 13 years.
The Class of 1974 also shifted the House and the congressional Democratic Party from hawkish to dovish. One of its first acts in March 1975 was to block funding for South Vietnam when it was under attack by the North. Saigon fell in April.
In the 1980s, the Democratic House kept pushing back on the Reagan foreign policy. In 2002, Nancy Pelosi, who holds the seat once held by Phil Burton, led most House Democrats to oppose the Iraq war resolution.
Pelosi says she is staying on, even as her ally Waxman and her consigliere, Miller, leave the House. The 201-member caucus she leads has more black and Hispanic members and fewer young doves and reformers than the 291-member caucus Waxman and Miller entered nearly 40 years ago.
Still, the Class of 1974 has left a mark on history -- though not as much as one Democrat who narrowly lost a House race that year, a 28-year-old Arkansan named Bill Clinton.
This is why we need a constitutional amendment to allow only one 6 year term for the House and Senate. No re-election. You serve and then you hand the keys over. So many things could be corrected by this.
Interesting read. Thanks for posting.
As long as we have the Establishment Turds running things in the House and the Senate, that’s not going to happen.
The goosesteppers in the electorate love electing psycho goosesteppers to political office. (and they’ll do it forever.)
IMHO
“The Class of 1974 also shifted the House and the congressional Democratic Party from hawkish to dovish. One of its first acts in March 1975 was to block funding for South Vietnam when it was under attack by the North. Saigon fell in April. “
And thus have the blood of millions on their hands.
All of the democrat rats leaving a sinking ship.I just hope their retirements go the same way.
One of its first acts in March 1975 was to block funding for South Vietnam when it was under attack by the North. Saigon fell in April. “
But our Republicans can’t block anything.
I don’t disagree with the idea of term limits.
My plan is 12 years - two 6-year terms in the Senate or six 2-year terms in the House.
Rightly or wrongly, a legislative body needs to have some institutional stability and history. With the kind of turnover that we’d see if everyone was restricted to six years, it would not be good for the nation.
Speaks volumes about the permanent political class.
Thank God..... it certainly took long enough!
I like your plan better. Frequent elections in the House were intended to keep representatives responsive to the people.
Thank you. Beat me to it. The Democrat Party has the murder of millions of poor Asians on its hands. But we’re the only ones who will ever say it out loud.
The Framers had enough experience with the electoral process to fear long, popularly derived terms.
The 17th Amendment did two horrible things. It introduced six year popular terms and kicked the states out of the senate. There was no way the government could tyrannize the states or people as long as the states appointed senators.
Those amendments from 101 years ago are why America 2014 is police state.
So long as we have the American people, nothing will change.
And if the D’s de-funded a war, why can’t the R’s de-fund bamacare?
well...at least they left the country better than they found it (extreme sarcasm)
Good riddance to all of them!
The only other members of the Class of 1974 are Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, one of only 17 Republican freshmen elected that year, and Congressman Rick Nolan, who retired from the House in 1980 but was elected again in 2012 after 32 years in the private sector.
Grassley was elected to the House in '74 of course, Senate in 1980. Damn that Nolan!!! I want em all gone!!!
Strange the way things work out. Unless we beat him (which is possible but not likely), Nolan, a guy who retired before I was born and whom most people forgot about, will be the last watergate baby left thanks to a 2012 comeback in a mostly different district.
If Grassley, a Republican, outlasts him that would be the ultimate irony.
I think I neglected to include you in this ping
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