United States in 1995Article Free Pass
Developments in Government
President Clinton had long been notorious in his critics’ eyes for trimming sails to suit whatever political breezes were blowing, but the new Republican majority in Congress made that tendency a sometimes helpful tool of statecraft. While it caused considerable anguish in left-wing Democratic circles, the president, who was the native of a region where states’ rights were still a shibboleth, found it easier to accept many of the decentralizing initiatives of the Republican legislators. On the other hand, the president also seemed capable of taking advantage of splits in his opponents’ ranks. He was able, for example, to head off some cutbacks in the Environmental Protection Agency, long a demon of many Republicans, after a number of more moderate Senate Republicans reconsidered the measure.
In the midst of the new federal diffidence toward expanding or defending its reach, more initiatives emerged from the states. Some were nothing less than reactionary, like the decision of Alabama to restore prison road gangs and bring back leg irons (though other states concurred with the notion of a tougher prison regimen less aimed at catering to prisoner comfort). On issues of broader import, however, many states had shown the way in endorsing programs of voucher-driven education and "workfare" for welfare recipients, but many also began to tackle other areas. One of the touchiest and most explosive issues was race-based preferment. In California, Governor Wilson signed an executive order that abolished almost all affirmative action policies. (President Clinton ordered a review of federal affirmative action policies but then declared that most should continue.)
The issue of race, perhaps the most sensitive tissue in the body politic, seemed to be undergoing a different kind of examination on each side of the black-white divide. While whites debated affirmative action, the largest black demonstration in Washington, D.C.’s history--larger than the 1963 march led by Martin Luther King, Jr.--took place under the auspices of the black separatist Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam. The "Million Man March" was a powerful demonstration of the concerns of black males about family disintegration and personal responsibility and endorsed personal and spiritual, rather than governmental, solutions to such ills. The demonstration also gave a powerful boost to the standing of Farrakhan, hitherto considered a mesmerizing but marginal racial demagogue.
Race also played an underlying role in the trial of O.J. Simpson, a black television pitchman and former football star, for the slaying of his white former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her acquaintance Ronald Goldman. Simpson was acquitted after less than four hours of jury deliberation. The trial’s turning points were the fiery, racially tinged address of Simpson defense counsel Johnnie Cochran and the discrediting of the Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, an investigator of the slaying who had, long before the trial, boasted to an interviewer of his racial prejudice and his planting of evidence to convict other alleged criminals. Enthusiasm or dismay at the trial outcome seemed to split largely along racial lines, which reinforced the notion that blacks and whites had entirely different views about the nature of the justice system.
In looking anew at affirmative action, both federal and state governments were following the lead of the Supreme Court. In 1995 the court agreed that affirmative action programs had to meet tests of strict judicial scrutiny to be constitutional. By a 5-4 vote the justices also struck down a Georgia statute that allowed the gerrymandering of electoral districts to compensate for past racial segregation. In a setback for homosexual activists, the court ruled that private parades such as Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration could exclude those it did not want to participate.
In a decision that could prove to be one of the more far-reaching of its term, the court set a limit on the federal government’s ability to use the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to impinge on matters otherwise outside its jurisdiction. The clause, which became a cornerstone of federal activism in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been used to justify everything from food standards to civil rights investigations. In overturning the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which used the clause to declare the possession of firearms around education sites to be a federal crime, the justices ended its infinite elasticity. On the other hand, the court agreed that no limits could be set on reelection to Congress without a constitutional amendment, a blow to the term-limits movement.
In another development relating to interstate commerce, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), once the most powerful bureaucracy in Washington, closed its doors at the end of the year. As of the first day of 1996, it would be no longer in existence. Established in 1887 to curb the power of the railroad "robber barons," the commission at one time had the power to regulate almost everything that moved across state lines. The deregulation of transportation in the 1980s had deprived the ICC of most of its reason for existing, but it had survived several attempts to close it. The remaining employees and commissioners were transferred to the Department of Transportation.
The House of Representatives passed a nearly total ban on gifts from lobbyists, following in the wake of a less stringent Senate ban. The measure did little, however, to stem the most questionable source of money for influence, donations to political action committees, and other devices that congressmen used to finance their political survival. House Speaker Gingrich, who had earlier given up a multimillion-dollar book advance from communications mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose vast holdings were much affected by federal oversight, drew a House ethics investigation after questions were raised about his alleged use of GOPAC, a not-for-profit organization, to funnel money to Republican causes. Congress proved itself tough on matters of legislators’ sexual behaviour. Sen. Robert Packwood, a Republican who headed the Finance Committee, resigned after the Senate Ethics Committee voted for his expulsion. Packwood had been charged with sexual harassment by 19 women, including a 17-year-old.
On the most high-profile ethics issue, the turgid Whitewater scandal, little insight was gleaned. Much of the focus of congressional concern had long since shifted from the original property deal, which took place long before the Clintons reached Washington, to the behaviour of administration officials after the July 1993 suicide of Vincent Foster, the White House counsel and overseer of the Clintons’ personal finances. Deputy Attorney General Philip Hyman told a Senate investigating committee that his department had been forced to stand by while White House Counselor Bernard Nussbaum entered Foster’s office and took files related to the Clinton family’s personal affairs. The senators were intrigued by telephone logs that showed long conversations between Hillary Rodham Clinton and two of the intruders immediately after the entry. After initially balking, President Clinton agreed at the end of the year to turn over to Senate investigators notes from meetings on the matter.
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