Guest Blog by John Broesamle: James Madison, Joe Biden, and the New Deal Gene

Readers may recall that in a previous blog I noted that not only Republicans, but some moderate Democrats, found the Build Back Better Act overly expansive. At the same time, some progressives, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have chafed under the restraining influence of their moderate colleagues. I invited my friend, John Broesamle, a distinguished political historian, to share the historical perspective with which he views President Biden’s ambitious proposal. I anticipate that in a subsequent blog, John and I will explore jointly some of the interesting questions raised by his analysis.

James Madison, Joe Biden and the New Deal Gene

In late November, an essay in the New York Times by the political scientist Greg Weiner caused a stir. Titled “There Is Another Democrat A.O.C. Should Be Mad At,” Weiner’s piece identified this figure as James Madison, one of the founders of the Democratic Party. “Madison’s Constitution,” Weiner writes, “was built to thwart exactly what Democrats have been attempting: a race against time to impose vast policies with narrow majorities.” Weiner correctly points out that “Madison believed that one important function of the Constitution was to ensure sustained consensus before popular majorities could prevail.” So, what is Joe Biden’s legislative hurry all about?

Answering that question tells the half of the story that Weiner overlooks. Biden’s administration carries the do-big-things gene of the New Deal. Across from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office hangs a large portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the same time, Biden is struggling with an American democratic process that has become too balky to meet the expectations that Madison himself laid out for it.

Let’s begin by placing James Madison in his own time and context. Madison has been called the Father of the Constitution. Adopted in 1788, the Constitution–with all its checks and balances–was indeed intended to make governmental change as measured and deliberate as possible, like the workings of an eighteenth-century clock. Apportioning House seats according to population, the document crucially stipulated that every state, large or small, would have two senators, as against Madison’s desire for proportionality in both houses. Population, in short, did not count in the upper chamber.

Subsequent to the framing, the kind of brazen gerrymandering common today materialized after 1812. And, appearing in the mid-1830s (around the time of Madison’s death), the modern, organized Senate filibuster found its champion in John C. Calhoun. Along with proportional representation, Madison had believed in simple-majority voting in Congress–fifty percent plus one. The idea of requiring supermajorities in the Senate, except for a handful of actions (overriding presidential vetoes, ratifying treaties) would have been anathema to him. But the United States Senate wrote its own rules, and Senator Calhoun quite simply did not believe in majoritarian democracy. The filibuster was designed to provide the South with a standing veto on behalf of its own interests, including slavery.

Starting out, then, the laws and practices that regulated American governance then, were less democratic than Madison wanted. Later, they established an increasingly dense obstacle course for certain kinds of presidential and congressional action. For instance, the constitutional provision allocating two senators to each state gave Southern states like Alabama and Mississippi as many senators as New York or California. Combined with the filibuster, that eventually allowed the South to achieve a Calhounian veto over civil rights legislation. Any president who wanted to advance a civil rights bill in the first half of the twentieth century could just forget about it. 

Beginning in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal produced a climactic rejection of Madisonian gradualism. The economy had collapsed, and many, including FDR, feared American democracy might go next. Roosevelt could count on huge Democratic congressional majorities and could ground his actions on a broad Madisonian consensus that people wanted prosperity back. The specific methods were left to him–and they proved to be vast. The New Deal was a lot messier at the time than it appears today; history has blanketed it with a false image of orderliness. New Dealers later completely disagreed about how much of the program was preplanned and how much was improvised. A lot of the New Deal was simply experimental. James Madison would have been nonplussed by the way in which the utterly critical Emergency Banking Relief Act of 1933 was adopted, merely five days after FDR’s inauguration. It passed the House by acclamation after just thirty-eight minutes of debate, and without the members getting copies in advance. The Social Security Act of 1935 passed only after Southerners in Congress stripped out eligibility for millions of African Americans. Roosevelt famously made war on the Supreme Court in 1937 after it began striking down New Deal legislation. Historians regard Roosevelt as easily the greatest president of the twentieth century, but that doesn’t mean his presidency was neat or consistent.

Since FDR, every Democratic president has carried the New Deal gene. This is to say that they have acted on a generalized impulse to expand the welfare state, whose framework was first erected by the New Deal. They do this because it seems right–along with the New Deal gene, they carry the fairness gene. Presidents also do it because, like establishing national parks and monuments late in their terms, it has become a legacy issue. And they do it because it is, or appears to be, good politics.

It is no wonder that the New Deal gene tempts Democratic chief executives to go for broke. National problems will have backed up unaddressed, like a logjam. Then a political breakthrough occurs. If Democrats suddenly find themselves in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, that is the moment to act. Who knows when the planets will align again? (This is why the Biden Administration so often describes its initiatives as once-in-a-generation opportunities. They may well be.)

In this spirit of seizing the moment, Franklin Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman (1945-1953), proposed a program expanding on the New Deal that he called the Fair Deal; it got virtually nowhere. John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) was a less enthusiastic proponent of ambitious legislation. But his successor, Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969)–a young Texas congressman during the New Deal–explicitly set out in his Great Society program to out-do Roosevelt and tie up all the loose ends left over from the 1930s. Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001), both far more conservative, fiscally tightfisted, and cautious than Johnson, nonetheless mounted discrete but significant efforts to expand the social safety net and overall social fairness. Barack Obama (2009-2017) scored major successes, such as the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), separate medical coverage for an additional 4,000,000 uninsured children, and landmark legislation against pay discrimination (the Lilly Ledbetter Act).

We might think of how all this has transpired as a relay race where the runners pass the baton. Health care provides a prime example. FDR made universal health insurance a top priority following passage of the Social Security Act, but World War II got in the way. Harry Truman later said his biggest disappointment as president was his failure to secure health care for every American. When Lyndon Johnson’s legislative legerdemain summoned forth Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, the acts’ authors assumed that universal health care would follow because uncovered Americans would demand it. Carter and Clinton both advanced comprehensive health care plans to make that happen, and both failed (Clinton spectacularly). Since then, health care reform has looked like salami slicing. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 benefits some 25,000,000 people today, but 28,000,000 remain uninsured. Provisions in President Biden’s pending Build Back Better plan would extend health coverage to about another 3,400,000.

Utterly clear during the 1930s, the political benefits of exercising transformational presidential leadership have proved decidedly mixed since then. Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 knowing full well that, while the time was ripe and the cause morally imperative, it would cost Democrats the South. The party has never fully recovered. To take another instance, polls have shown that expanding health care has been a consistently popular idea since the 1940s–a suitable passage of time, one would think, for Madison to have granted his approval, and a definite political winner. Yet the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) provides a prime example of the political penalty a president can pay even for a sure thing. In 2010, a backlash against Obamacare helped Republicans flip the House, picking up a net 63 seats. It also poured fuel on the Tea Party fire. Only in recent years, with Obama out of office for half a decade now, has Obamacare finally become popular. Politically, 2010 is ancient history. The public always wants to know, “What have you done for me lately?”

Meantime, the window of opportunity for liberal reform movements like the New Deal and the Great Society has narrowed to a peephole. The New Deal lasted for six years, 1933-1939, with ongoing aftereffects like the GI Bill (1944). As we have seen, Truman’s Fair Deal went almost nowhere (he did desegregate the armed forces by executive order). Lyndon Johnson absorbed John Kennedy’s legislative program into his own and labored to get as many bills through Congress as possible while he had lopsided majorities. The Great Society had a four-year lifespan, 1964-1968. (Richard Nixon endorsed so much liberal legislation that his administration might be seen in some ways as the afterlife of Johnson’s.) Jimmy Carter’s achievements were scattershot. Bill Clinton’s tenure foretold the way things would head from that time forward. Following a flow of legislation in 1993-1994, the House changed hands, reducing the flow to a trickle. The pattern reappeared with Barack Obama, whose administration at first put lots of “points on the board” (in the words of Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff). But following what Obama justly termed the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” gridlock resumed for his final six years. 

Today, all the obstacles thrown up by the Framers and by innovators like Elbridge Gerry, of gerrymander fame, and John C. Calhoun, have converged to stymie the legislative agendas of Democratic presidents. These obstacles include small state and rural over-representation, gerrymandering (now fully computerized, a field where Republicans outperform), and the Senate filibuster. Not to mention that the country has become more polarized than at any time since the Civil War.

All of this explains where Joe Biden finds himself right now, with the Build Back Better plan pending before the Senate. He is walking a tightrope. The opportunity for legislative accomplishments has narrowed from six-plus years eight decades ago to two years now, given voters’ tendency to throw one or both houses of Congress to the opposite party midway through a president’s first term. Unless he can break the jinx, Biden’s time is running short. Having signed massive measures on COVID-19 relief and infrastructure, he has just one more certain shot at legislation on a New Deal scale. It took an election miracle–the Democrats’ improbable pickup of two Senate seats in Georgia’s runoff elections last January–to even put him in contention. Running for president as a moderate’s moderate, his New Deal gene switched on. Now he is relying on a method–reconciliation–that by nature resembles the creaking jalopies in The Grapes of Wrath, with mattresses, wash tubs, and chicken coops strapped aboard.

Other systems of government–parliamentary systems–don’t work this way. Today, James Madison might approve of those over what he participated in creating two and a half centuries ago. No country copies American governmental structure anymore. Parliamentary government is simply more modern, less herky-jerky. Parliamentary systems register public opinion more readily and implement change more smoothly. Recognizing this, one of America’s two leading political scientists in the late nineteenth century criticized the Founders and what he considered the clunky Constitution they had framed, writing of his strong preference for a parliamentary system. This political scientist was Woodrow Wilson, who, as president (1913-1921) ran his administration as much as he could like a prime minister. It was he who taught FDR how a president could push a great legislative agenda through Congress. 

Today, I expect, Wilson would favor a different system of democracy even more strongly than he did then. In his time, he confronted more primitive forms of the since-modernized obstacles that face Joe Biden. When Biden declares that “the American people sent us here to deliver, . . . to make the government work,” he is really talking about whether our democracy can still function. That was the question with which James Madison struggled in 1788–how to make it work. Madison did not get everything he wanted at the Founding. Biden will not get everything he wants now. But then, as FDR observed, “nobody can.”

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John Broesamle, a previous contributor to RINOcracy.com, is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University, Northridge. His books on American politics and society include Reform and Reaction in Twentieth Century American Politics, Twelve Great Clashes that Shaped Modern America: From Geronimo to George W. Bush (with Anthony Arthur), and, most recently, How American Presidents Succeed and Why They Fail: From Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. In those books and others over the past 30 years, Broesamle has analyzed how American government works in practice, from the turn of the twentieth century down to today.