The Sum Of All Putridity
By Mitch Berg
Michael Barone writing in the WashEx notes that Henry Waxman and George Miller, the last two members of the Democrat “Class of 1974” – the huge class of liberal Democrats that swept into office after Watergate – to have “served” continuously since ’74, are retiring. (Two other members – Chuck Grassley, one of few Republicans, and Rick Nolan, who spent three terms, retired in 1980, and was re-elected in 2012, are the only two other members of the class).
And the class of 74 left a noxious legacy indeed. For all the bemoaning of “extremism” and “polarization” that the likes of Lori Sturdevant do (usually blaming it on the Tea Party), it was in fact the “Class of ’74” that got that ball rolling:
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 chairmen. 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.
And it was then that the Democrat Party began to truly shed its honorable, post-WW2-era legacy and become the extremist party it is today. (It took twenty years for the Congressional GOP to adopt the similar rules).
And lest you think it was all inside-the-beltway wonkery?
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.
They coarsened our political discourse, they worked tirelessly to blow up the national debt (with great success!), and they directly aided and abetted genocide, with the blood of millions on their hands.
Good riddance.
February 5th, 2014 at 6:18 am
And none of the Democrats who go on and on about the “Nixon southern strategy” spend a second of time thinking about the hard left turn their party took after 1968. The white working class didn’t reject the Democrats because they were racists, they rejected the Democrats because it rapidly became a party of America-hating socialists.
February 5th, 2014 at 8:27 am
“And none of the Democrats who go on and on about the “Nixon southern strategy” spend a second of time thinking about the hard left turn their party took after 1968. ”
Or the fact that while the South voted for Nixon and Reagan (as did the entire rest of the country), their congressional delegations and governor’s offices remained reliably Democrat until the nineties.
February 5th, 2014 at 8:44 am
Whenever you see Waxman on TV, say at some sort of hearing, you realize what a dick he is. Its all about power and raming his leftwing agenda down peoples throats.
And who may replace him? Sandra Fluke. The gal who said she spends $1000 a year on birth control and demanded someone else pay for it.
We’ve gone from Sam Rayburn to Sandra Fluke. We are screwed.
February 5th, 2014 at 11:07 am
My first exposure to Waxman was during one of the financial hearings, possibly TARP, in which he was viciously excoriating some automaker’s executive. As repugnant as he looks anyway (I, too, am a homely man so feel justified in describing him as such), he was even more so at the time. He was screaming at the guy on the stand, insulting him, and not allowing him to speak.
It was the most disgraceful, repulsive, and obnoxious display of supposedly civil discourse I have ever seen. He was obviously playing to his non-capitalist crowd and supporters. Even I, who am normally quite timid, would have told him to get screwed and walked out. The fact that the executive didn’t do so was also disgraceful. Usually people who look like Waxman tend to mitigate their appearance by displaying kinder demeanors. Disgusting …
February 5th, 2014 at 9:32 pm
When a politician is in front of television cameras all bets are off.