Quote of the Day (The U.S. Senate, Slapping Down Joe McCarthy At Last)

“Resolved, That the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, failed to cooperate with the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration in clearing up matters referred to that subcommittee which concerned his conduct as a Senator and affected the honor of the Senate and, instead, repeatedly abused the subcommittee and its members who were trying to carry out assigned duties, thereby obstructing the constitutional processes of the Senate, and that this conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, is contrary to senatorial traditions and is hereby condemned.”--Transcript of Senate Resolution 301: Censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1954)

If you ask me, it took them long enough, and the result was akin to the Feds nailing Al Capone on income-tax evasion. But when it was all over, the U.S. Senate had voted on this date in 1954, 67-22, to censure—or, in the language of the resolution, “condemn”—Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. At long last, they had proven there was a limit to what they would tolerate.

After Ralph Flanders (R-Vermont) introduced his resolution to censure McCarthy in late July, 46 counts of misconduct were tallied, then reduced to five broad categories. (Not surviving the initial cut: Flanders’ move to strip the Wisconsin senator of his authority over the Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations. Too many senators disliked the idea of anything potentially infringing on their jurisdiction.)

The Senate adopted Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson’s idea of having a bipartisan select committee with vast judicial experience. The six members of the Watkins Committee ended up voting to deplore McCarthy's s actions on three of the five counts but felt that censure was not required.

The committee did feel that two areas required punishment: a) McCarthy’s abusive treatment of the highly decorated Gen. Ralph Zwicker, and b) his bullying of a Senate investigation of their investigators into his conduct. Eventually, the Zwicker count was exchanged for the Watkins count (embodied in the quote above).

In bone-dry language, the Senate was saying that McCarthy did not play well with others—specifically, them. Nothing about his reckless use of the Senate’s investigative powers; nothing about how he hid behind senators’ immunity from libel suits to make broad innuendoes about citizens’ loyalties; nothing about how he spread a wave of terror in American embassies, colleges and universities, and libraries; nothing about how he lowered America’s standing abroad with his antics.

For a long time, many of McCarthy’s Senate colleagues—including, suggests biographer Robert A. Caro, LBJ—feared what he could do. (LBJ’s typically memorable quote on why he didn’t move against McCarthy sooner: “You don’t get in a pissin’ contest with a polecat.” Maybe I should have made that the quote of the day!)

The Senate did not act until the televised Army-McCarthy hearings exposed his conduct for longer than the normal couple-minute news segment, dropping his approval ratings below 30 percent. In that light, you could argue that the censure vote was like someone coming along to pump a suicide victim full of bullets.

But three more outcomes had to follow the censure vote before McCarthy could be consigned to history:

* his fellow senators had to do what they originally had done when they encountered McCarthy in the Senate, before they came to fear him: ostracize him;

* the press had to ignore him; and

* Bibulous “Tailer-Gunner Joe” had to sink into a watery grave in 1957.

This Day in Presidential History (Clay Introduces Censure Resolutions Against Jackson)

December 26, 1833—The stakes in Andrew Jackson’s struggle against the Second Bank of the United States escalated, as Senator Henry Clay, a longtime enemy of the President, introduced two resolutions censuring him for his conduct in the affair. The occasion marked the first—and even until today, the only—occasion in which Congress has censured a Chief Executive for his conduct while in office.

“I was born for a storm and a calm does not suit me,” Jackson once told a visitor, and seldom did he prove it more than in the controversy over the bank—a private enterprise in which the U.S. government held stock.

The bank had been re-chartered in 1816 after its temporary absence had severely handicapped the nation during the War of 1812. Since then, it had been instrumental in keeping the nation on an even financial keel.

The problem with the bank was twofold: 1) As operated by its head, Nicholas Biddle, a Philadelphia aristocrat, the bank had quickly become deeply elitist; and 2) Biddle, a child genius who had attended the University of Pennsylvania at age 10, was too clever by half, and had offered financial inducements to numerous lawmakers on Capitol Hill to retain support. As Arthur M. Schlesinger noted in The Age of Jackson: “It enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the currency and practically complete control over credit and the price level.”

Having run into problems with banks early in his career because of speculation issues, Jackson was predisposed anyway against powerful financial interests. He found ready political support for his position among debtor interests of the West, local banking interests of the East who resented Biddle’s heavy-handed domination, Eastern workingmen and traditional Jeffersonians. The bank’s bid to have its charter renewed brought Jackson into battle.

Aligned against him in the Senate were “The Great Triumvirate”—Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. Like just about every Senator before or since—and certainly including the two nominees in this past year’s Presidential race—they took a look at the incumbent and swore that they could do a better job. But each had his own reasons for supporting the bank and/or opposing Jackson.

Let’s deal with Calhoun first. Coincidentally—and uncomfortably for the South Carolinian—that would have been the preference of Jackson, too, who had gone from having him as a running mate to expressing a desire to hang him from the nearest tree. The President did not appreciate his advocacy of nullification, which Jackson correctly believed to be a threat to the Union. Additionally, in the Peggy Eaton affair, Calhoun, by siding with his wife and other spouses of Cabinet members, made himself persona non grata with a President who had resolved to defend the honor of a woman he believed had been sullied, like his beloved, deceased wife Rachel, with baseless accusations of sexual misconduct. Isolated, Calhoun had become the first and (aside from Spiro Agnew) only Vice President in our nation’s history to resign.

Like Calhoun, Webster very much wanted to become President; unlike him, the Massachusetts senator was one of the people who had accepted retainers from Biddle. He believed firmly in a strong national government, but he was still not above reminding Biddle that if he wanted his continued eloquent support, he’d better make sure he was paid, and promptly.

But the prime mover in the censure resolution was Clay, seen by Jackson in the 1824 Presidential election as the man who, through a “corrupt bargain” with John Quincy Adams, had become Secretary of State—unlike now, a steppingstone to the Presidency—by throwing his support in the House of Representatives to the New Englander. The two men also courted the same electoral base in the West. Clay, in turn, despised Jackson as a “military chieftain.”

Jackson’s decision to withdraw the government’s deposits from the Bank—and even to accept to replace one Secretary of the Treasury, William Duane, with a more compliant man, Roger B. Taney—led the opposing party, the Whigs, to ponder their options. They couldn’t do anything in the House of Republicans, still under the control of Democrats. But the Senate, in which they had a majority, afforded possibilities.

Clay’s speech in support of censuring the President was so vitriolic that even Adams (now distinguishing himself in the House of Representatives) thought Clay had pushed it too far (though Adams believed that his former opponent and successor in the Oval Office had it coming).

The resolution passed, but by the end of his second term the President’s friend and ally in the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton, was finally able to have it expunged from the Senate records (a prospect that did not at all please Jackson).

In his colorful history Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989, Michael Beschloss included a chapter on the bank fight. While Jackson did defeat an institution growing increasingly corrupt, he left no comparable structure once he destroyed it. Partly as a result, the nation had no major banking institution to help it through bad economic times when the charter was allowed to lapse. The U.S. had to endure several panics, occurring every 20 years or so, before the Federal Reserve System was created in the Progressive Era under Woodrow Wilson.

The bank war figured in Presidential history in other ways through the years. In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt hailed the "Jackson-Lincoln theory of the Presidency" that promoted strong executive action. FDR regarded the bank fight as an early example of how the President as tribune of the people could take on what he termed "economic royalists."

More ominously, Jackson's defiance of Clay's request for communications with his Cabinet on the Bank was the opening salvo in the ongoing Presidential-Congressional struggle over executive privilege.

The censure option also came up in the struggle to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998. While Jackson had claimed that the censure resolution named offenses that were impeachable and that, thus, the Senate had no constitutional place in resorting to censure, Democrats during the Clinton impeachment trial brought out a censure as an alternative. After Clinton survived the impeachment vote, his party brought forward a censure resolution, which was defeated by Republicans on a nearly straight-line party vote..

Quote of the Day (Joseph Addison, Reproach and Reputation)

“It is folly for an eminent person to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected by it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph.”—English essayist, poet, & politician Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

(Wise words to remember, as Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden—and now, Sarah Palin—take their lumps from what H.L. Mencken called the “Gang of Pecksniffs”—i.e., the press.)