The lengthy government shutdown of October-November 2025 suggests that the U.S. constitutional structure is faulty – no sensible system could possibly be designed for such frequent failure. Yet in its early decades, both before and after the dark cloud of slavery was forcibly removed, the system worked quite well – children were brought up on the speeches of the “Famous Five” most eminent Senators selected in 1957, the last two of whom, Robert LaFollette (1855-1925, Senator, 1906-25) and Robert Taft (1889-1953, Senator, 1939-53), served well into the twentieth century. The system went wrong somewhere. When you look carefully, it becomes obvious that one brief period of multiple “reforms” was responsible: the early 1970s.
The damage was caused largely by a seismic movement within the Democratic party, whereby it came to be utterly dominated by the progressives. Before 1958, both parties were coalitions. The Democrats included progressives from the big cities and southern conservatives whose Democratic affiliation dated back to post-Civil War Reconstruction, while the Republicans consisted of a majority of rural conservatives, dominated by a noisy minority of urban liberals, who selected Republican Presidential candidates such as Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower. In this system, there was a considerable ideological overlap between the two parties; maybe a third or more of the Senate belonged to the “wrong” party.
In such a Senate, the filibuster made a great deal of sense. It required actual speaking, so that Sen. Strom Thurmond’s (D. then R., S.C., 1954-56, 1956-2003) famous 1957 speech of 24 hours 18 minutes against what became the 1957 Civil Rights Act (setting a record recently broken by Senator Cory Booker (D.NJ)) required Senate Majority Lyndon Johnson to get 67 Senators to override him. Had Thurmond and his Southern Democrat colleagues not been prepared to speak for days against the legislation, no override would have been necessary. In such an environment, legislation could be passed only if it could get a broad consensus of the Senate, but with the huge ideological overlap between parties, such a consensus could often be obtained, provided the legislation was suitably moderate, like the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
The radical wing of the Democratic party triumphed in the 1958 midterm elections, especially in the Senate. From then on, the radicals had hopes of overriding conservative opposition to pass their favored legislation through overriding the veto; the Kennedy assassination and the ephemeral Democratic majority elected in 1964 gave them that opportunity. With African-Americans finally registered to vote by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Democrats no longer needed conservative southerners, so over time the southern Senate and Congressional seats migrated to the Republican party, a process that was completed by the Gingrich revolution in 1994.
In the interim, the Democrats dominated both the House and Senate, with a 40-year House monopoly from 1954-94 and a Senate majority from 1954-80. This made government very difficult for the Republican President Richard Nixon (1913-94, President 1969-74), who had to deal with irresponsible Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. Partly, he dealt with this by implementing damaging Democratic priorities such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which has bedeviled the U.S. economy from that day to this, making Americans perhaps 30-40% poorer than they should be. However, Nixon’s triumphant reelection in 1972, carrying 49 of the 50 states, sent the radical wing of the Democrats into overdrive. The 1970s constitutional changes were a result of their hatred.
The first Constitutional change, de facto rather than de jure, was Nixon’s attempted impeachment and subsequent resignation. This effectively nullified his landslide 1972 victory, something that had never previously been attempted in U.S. history. The Watergate break-in itself was a minor action, common in electoral politics to that date, that was blown out of proportion through a disgraceful campaign by the media and Congressional Democrats. To achieve their aims, the Democrats first needed to get rid of Nixon’s staunch Vice President Spiro Agnew; they did so by their friends in the Maryland judiciary concocting stories of local corruption that were never proved, with the media hysteria forcing him to resign. Having replaced Agnew with Gerald Ford, who Congressional Democrats thought would be moderate and ineffective (in the event, he was better than that) they then proceeded to nullify the 1972 election.
Americans had voted by a massive majority for a future in which in Martha Mitchell’s words: “This country’s going so far right you won’t recognize it.” They were denied this glorious future, even four years of which under a re-energized Nixon might have wiped out much of the 1964-72 legislative damage, notably on immigration and environmental over-regulation. Beyond this sad travesty, the Watergate scam made impeachment much easier, so that Republicans foolishly impeached President Bill Clinton over his dalliance with an intern and Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats, together with the newly elected Zelenskyy government in Ukraine concocted an entirely fictitious farrago to waste the last year of President Trump’s first term on a groundless impeachment scam, for which travesty many should be imprisoned, both in Ukraine and the U.S. Undoubtedly, should the Democrats win the 2026 midterms, they will try the same trick again, to the great detriment of the quality and standards of government. The mania for unaccountable Special Counsels also dates to the Watergate debacle, causing further damage from time to time.
The second 1970s constitutional erosion that has been devastating to the quality or even the mere functionality of Congress was the changes in the Senate filibuster. Whereas a filibuster had traditionally required a cadre of speakers with stentorian voices and good bladders (hence the 1940s Southern prototype of Senator Beauregard “Foghorn” Claghorn) the requirement to sustain it through speech was abandoned in 1972. The vote to override it was then changed to 60 rather than two thirds of those voting three years later (in practice, that eliminated the possibility of sneaking something through in an empty Senate at 3am).
While some Southern Democrats and liberal Republicans remained in the Senate, this automatic filibuster may have been just about workable. However, the greater Party discipline of recent years has made it an absolute block to passing legislation, since it is impossible to gather the half dozen Senators from the opposition required to get to 60. Obamacare sneaked through in 2010, by some Parliamentary maneuver I forget – the Democrats had 59 Senators reliably, but not 60 – but nothing of any substance has passed since, save through the dubious kludge of a “reconciliation” resolution, supposed to be used for budgetary issues only, and limited to one per annum.
Wimpy Republican Senators (are there any other kind?) are frightened of losing the filibuster, because it would enable the Democrats, when they gain the majority, to pass all kinds of damaging left-wing rubbish. However, the Biden administration showed that Democrats will pass damaging left-wing rubbish anyway, through Presidential decree, likely to be upheld by a Court system that dares not offend the leftist media too badly. It would be much better for the Republicans to remove the filibuster and have the ability to pass decent legislation that the electorate will support, thus returning them to continued power. Of course, that would require Senate leadership to kneecap the likes of Senators Lisa Murkowski (R.-AK), John Cornyn (R.-TX) and Thom Tillis (R.-NC) whose main pleasure in life is obstructing Republican initiatives by voting with Democrats, but if the Senate ever did anything useful, the electorate could be relied upon to primary those who were needlessly obstructive to the common goals. In this matter, President Trump is right!
With the filibuster removed, and the President and Congress of the same party, legislation would become easy (subject to the Awkward Squad as usual). Normal legislation and the annual Budget would be passed by simple majority, with the electorate taking care at the next election of any Congress that became ideologically over-aggressive. Only when Congress was split or the President from the opposing party would compromise be necessary, and the idiocy of closing the government for weeks at a time occasionally occur. With one party controlling the whole of government, it is a disgraceful weakness, never contemplated by the Framers, that government closures should ever happen.
The third Constitutional disaster perpetrated by the lopsided Democrat majorities of the 1970s is the Budget process. Before 1974, the President could impound funds that Congress had appropriated for frivolities; this was an important means by which Nixon maintained Budget control and Republicans in general could limit Democrat profligacy. However, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 prevented this salutary mechanism and opened the door to endless pork-barrel waste, passed through the broken Congressional Budget process. Now, reducing expenditure can only be done through a rescission bill, which can be passed with a 51-vote majority, but only once a year, making it very difficult to implement – the last such rescission before 2025 was in 2000.
The 1974 Act, introduced in a spasm of leftist Democrat hatred against Nixon, also introduced the present Budget process, which has yet to function properly. From then until now, the President’s Budget presented to Congress every spring is a complete waste of paper; it lies unread as soon as it has been presented. In theory, Congressional Committees are then supposed to prepare budgets for the areas for which they have responsibility, which are supposed to be combined into a Budget before September 30, the end of the fiscal year. In practice, this never happens; the Federal Budget is “controlled” by the laughable processes of Continuing Resolutions, which incorporate all last year’s waste into this year’s spending – so the U.S. is still operating on Biden-era profligacy and corruption – and Omnibus bills, which several months late combine the entire exercise into a multi-thousand-page monstrosity full of spurious rubbish and left wing lunacy that nobody reads.
Enough! We have suffered for 50 years from the appalling damage done to the U.S. Constitution by evil-minded Democrats in the 1970s, blinded with their hatred of the noble President Nixon. The filibuster must be ended – it serves no useful purpose. The Budget Control and Impoundment Act must be repealed, allowing the President to impound wasted moneys as he did before 1974 and thereby giving each Administration proper control over the Budget process. Finally, we need a Frivolous Impeachment Act, which will bring severe penalties for all those bringing Impeachment actions for means determined as frivolous by the Supreme Court. This would include Watergate, Clinton’s infidelity and Trump’s first (Ukraine) impeachment but not his second (January 6) impeachment, where the grounds were appropriate but the entire riot was concocted by Nancy Pelosi and a corrupt FBI, who should yet bear the blame for it, including lengthy incarcerations. Finally, we need an Electoral Fraud Act, providing for paper balloting and ID verification and preventing the frauds that were committed in 2020.
Nixon, Now More than Ever, We Need Nixon Now!
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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)