If Democrats and Republicans could find common ground in the ’60s, they can do it again.
If you’ve heard one word about the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House last week, it’s “unprecedented.” So says the. It’s true, of course: Never before in the country’s history has a House speaker been deposed and the chair left vacant for an indeterminate period of time.
The analogy isn’t perfect. Despite all the recent intra-GOP strife, the two major political parties are far more ideologically coherent — and polarized — today than in the 1950s. But history provides some precedent here. It also suggests that there are only two ways out of this Congressional quagmire: Either one party wins a landslide victory, as Democrats did in 1964, or a critical number of Republicans make common cause with Democrats to forge a functioning House majority.
For decades, that coalition consistently frustrated the ambitions of liberal Democrats who formed the majority of the party’s national base and congressional delegation. By the mid-1940s, it had successfully dismantled several key elements of the New Deal and Fair Deal, including price controls and a fair employment practices order.
The Senate was even more regressive than the House in those days. The journalist William White once dubbed the upper body of Congress “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.” But in the House, the unofficial conservative coalition belied national Democrats’ nominal majority. In the late 1950s, Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans held 311 of the 435 seats in the House. Together, they kept civil rights and social spending measures forever bottled up in committee.
Assuming no one wins a landslide majority in Congress in the current, polarized environment, the third reason is most instructive today. Between 1964 and 1968, moderate and liberal Republicans found common cause with national Democrats in Congress to form a new, informal governing majority that replaced the old conservative coalition. Consider the vote tallies in the House.The Voting Rights Act of 1965: 221 Democrats and 112 Republicans voted yes.
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