Posted: April 25, 2017
resident Trump is criticized for things he has done, and for things he has left undone. It is possible to sin either way, of course, by action or by inaction; nothing unreasonable about that. What is unreasonable is the additional, arbitrary standard to which he, like all modern presidents, is held liable: what he has done, and left undone, in the first hundred days of his administration.
Trump’s health care bill crashed on takeoff, his tax reform hasn’t been seen, his executive orders on immigration were throttled by politically hostile judges—the list of setbacks is already, according to pundits, a litany of failures. Why? Because these top-drawer items were not signed, sealed, and delivered in the president’s first hundred days. Why is that important? Because the first hundred days are the most important days of all. And why is that? Because Franklin Roosevelt proved they are!
As though FDR doesn’t have enough to answer for, here is another of his legacies. No president before him had paid particular attention to the first hundred days after inauguration, since his four-year term of office had almost 1,361 more days to go. Why obsess about the initial 6.8%?
Besides, when in his July 24, 1933, fireside chat FDR spoke of “the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal,” he was referring to “the historical special session of the Congress” that he had convened and that had opened on March 9 and adjourned on June 16. That is, the Hundred Days were congressional days, measured by when Congress was in session, not executive days, measured since the presidential inauguration. (Before the 20th Amendment, presidents were inaugurated later than they are now, on March 4, so the discrepancy was not huge.) Today’s Congress commonly works three days a week, however, so if you wanted to apply Roosevelt’s implicit criterion of a hundred congressional work days, you’d be counting not to April 29, the end of Trump’s hundred days, but likely into July or August. Ah, but Congress is in recess the whole month of August, so make that September or even later in the fall before the hundred-day mark might be reached.
It’s true that in 1933 Roosevelt put the 73rd Congress through its paces. But the reason, or at least the excuse, for the rush of legislation was that the country was in an economic emergency, signaled by the steadily worsening banking panic. To get the closed banks open again was the purpose of the first piece of legislation he submitted, the Emergency Banking Act—introduced on March 9 at 12:37 p.m., and passed by both houses by 7:23 that evening.
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Absent the Great Gepression and, more acutely, the banking panic, the Hundred Days would not have gotten off with such a bang, or seen the passage, at a more languid pace, of the leading elements of the New Deal (e.g., the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act). Absent a similar emergency, why should we expect a president’s (pardon the misnomer) first hundred days to have anything like the same urgency and focus?
Within two years the National Industrial Recovery Act’s centerpiece (Title I, which established the corporatist National Recovery Administration) had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The Roosevelt Administration never attempted to revive it. In 1936 the same fate befell the Agricultural Adjustment Act, though in less sweeping fashion. Haste makes waste.
Perhaps the most famous piece of legislation associated with the New Deal, the Social Security Act, had nothing to do with the Hundred Days. The “cornerstone” of the New Deal, as it's been called, wasn't laid until 1935, after seven long months of deliberation.
Every president since FDR has been urged by professors and pundits to launch a hundred days’ blitzkrieg. Only losers, they claim, do not have a transformative agenda teed up and ready to go during the early months. But this is a historical hustle, an attempt to aggressively mislead citizens and presidents into thinking that rushed change is normal, indeed healthy, because change is usually progress and therefore the sooner, the better.
When applied to most administrations, including some of the most celebrated, however, the test yields surprisingly little. What did George Washington or Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln accomplish in his first hundred days? Some noteworthy things, but nothing to fire the progressive imagination.
In short, there could hardly be a more arbitrary and unhistorical test of presidential quality. President Trump may confidently assure his critics that, like the Constitution’s framers, he believes good legislation requires deliberation, which generally takes time. Let the final version of his health care bill be significantly better than the first, and he will prove his point to the country’s satisfaction.