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Part 20: Huddleston Presidency (1992-1996)
President Huddleston's long coattails in the election gave the Democrats in Congress a strong incentive to pass more "bread and butter" legislation that would be popular with voters. The first proposal, the negative income tax proposal promised by Huddleston during his campaign, was planned to be the centerpiece of the 103rd Congress and Speaker Foley and newly-elected Senate Majority Leader Dodd kicked off discussion soon after the new congress convened. Things almost immediately went south. Republicans in both chambers objected strongly to implementing the proposed negative income tax (NIT) scheme, saying it would enable jobless adults to forgo looking for work and pointing out the massive amount of legislation that would have to be modified or repealed in order to make the plan feasible.
By this time, the press had unearthed several scandals that regarding congressional corruption, mostly implicating Democrats, who had controlled Congress almost continuously since the 1950s. This was compounded by the resignation of both Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy and Chief of Staff Carroll Hubbard in the same week following an federal investigations into financial irregularities reported by cabinet members. The resignation in disgrace of the president's chief of staff (followed by Hubbard's eventual prison sentence that Huddleston commuted before leaving office in 1997) gave the Republicans a strong rallying cry, promising to root out congressional corruption and implement tax and tort reform while also "restoring government to its proper size and sphere".
The 1994 midterms resulted in a massive swing against the Democratic leadership. Speaker Foley became the first sitting speaker to lose his own seat since Galusha Grow in 1862 as the Republicans took the House for the first time in over 40 years. The 12-seat majority the Democrats had in the Senate prior to the election was nearly wiped away as the GOP picked up 10 seats in the upper house.
Relations between President Huddleston and the new speaker, Dick Cheney of Wyoming, were among the worst between a sitting president and speaker in post-war history and were not aided in the least by Cheney's outspoken opposition to the president's negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (who had eventually won the behind-the-scenes struggle to succeed Grishin), something the lame-duck Huddleston considered crucially important to his legacy. The flow of legislation that had remained nearly constant (only being disrupted during the twilight years of the Humphrey administration) since the Great Depression nearly ground to a halt as Cheney, feeling empowered by a majority, pushed for the implementation of the program the GOP had promised, only deviating in exchange for concessions from the administration or Senate Democrats.
...President Huddleston's final term, like his first, kept him very active on the foreign policy scene. Gorbachev's ascension had given him a willing partner in negotiations to finally ease the end of the Cold War, something both leaders had privately felt was a senseless conflict, especially with the Soviet Union now facing visible economic problems. Meetings between American and Soviet officials throughout 1995 and 1996 in Switzerland over issues such as nuclear stockpile reduction, NATO, Eastern Europe and the Baltics, proxy conflicts in the Third World and other international agreements led to the massive agreement known as the Bern Accords.
The Bern Accords are viewed by historians as marking the de facto end of the Cold War and were the sole bright spot in an otherwise dim era of the Huddleston presidency that was beset by scandals from multiple executive agencies. The Accords, while on its face a series of compromise between the two superpowers, was in fact a massive American victory, with only a few token concessions given to the USSR (agreeing to prevent the former Warsaw Pact states from entering into multinational defense arrangements- which eased fears of foreign encroachment on the former Soviet sphere) that saw the threat of Soviet military or nuclear strike effectively ended in exchange for an end to informal hostilities that had handicapped the ability of Gorbachev and the Soviet state from moving their economic direction in a more manageable direction....
President Huddleston's second term saw him able to appoint two more justices to the Supreme Court, with the retirement of Byron White in 1993 and his replacement by David S. Tatel, who became the first blind Supreme Court justice. Associate Justice Homer Thornberry died in December 1995 and Huddleston's initial choice, former congressman Theo Mitchell of South Carolina, had his nomination withdrawn when it was learned Mitchell had violated federal finance laws during his failed re-election campaign in 1994. The scandal-embittered president then picked Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the D.C. Court of Appeals who was confirmed easily.
By this time, the press had unearthed several scandals that regarding congressional corruption, mostly implicating Democrats, who had controlled Congress almost continuously since the 1950s. This was compounded by the resignation of both Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy and Chief of Staff Carroll Hubbard in the same week following an federal investigations into financial irregularities reported by cabinet members. The resignation in disgrace of the president's chief of staff (followed by Hubbard's eventual prison sentence that Huddleston commuted before leaving office in 1997) gave the Republicans a strong rallying cry, promising to root out congressional corruption and implement tax and tort reform while also "restoring government to its proper size and sphere".
The 1994 midterms resulted in a massive swing against the Democratic leadership. Speaker Foley became the first sitting speaker to lose his own seat since Galusha Grow in 1862 as the Republicans took the House for the first time in over 40 years. The 12-seat majority the Democrats had in the Senate prior to the election was nearly wiped away as the GOP picked up 10 seats in the upper house.
Relations between President Huddleston and the new speaker, Dick Cheney of Wyoming, were among the worst between a sitting president and speaker in post-war history and were not aided in the least by Cheney's outspoken opposition to the president's negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (who had eventually won the behind-the-scenes struggle to succeed Grishin), something the lame-duck Huddleston considered crucially important to his legacy. The flow of legislation that had remained nearly constant (only being disrupted during the twilight years of the Humphrey administration) since the Great Depression nearly ground to a halt as Cheney, feeling empowered by a majority, pushed for the implementation of the program the GOP had promised, only deviating in exchange for concessions from the administration or Senate Democrats.
...President Huddleston's final term, like his first, kept him very active on the foreign policy scene. Gorbachev's ascension had given him a willing partner in negotiations to finally ease the end of the Cold War, something both leaders had privately felt was a senseless conflict, especially with the Soviet Union now facing visible economic problems. Meetings between American and Soviet officials throughout 1995 and 1996 in Switzerland over issues such as nuclear stockpile reduction, NATO, Eastern Europe and the Baltics, proxy conflicts in the Third World and other international agreements led to the massive agreement known as the Bern Accords.
The Bern Accords are viewed by historians as marking the de facto end of the Cold War and were the sole bright spot in an otherwise dim era of the Huddleston presidency that was beset by scandals from multiple executive agencies. The Accords, while on its face a series of compromise between the two superpowers, was in fact a massive American victory, with only a few token concessions given to the USSR (agreeing to prevent the former Warsaw Pact states from entering into multinational defense arrangements- which eased fears of foreign encroachment on the former Soviet sphere) that saw the threat of Soviet military or nuclear strike effectively ended in exchange for an end to informal hostilities that had handicapped the ability of Gorbachev and the Soviet state from moving their economic direction in a more manageable direction....
President Huddleston's second term saw him able to appoint two more justices to the Supreme Court, with the retirement of Byron White in 1993 and his replacement by David S. Tatel, who became the first blind Supreme Court justice. Associate Justice Homer Thornberry died in December 1995 and Huddleston's initial choice, former congressman Theo Mitchell of South Carolina, had his nomination withdrawn when it was learned Mitchell had violated federal finance laws during his failed re-election campaign in 1994. The scandal-embittered president then picked Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the D.C. Court of Appeals who was confirmed easily.
- lord caedus
- Word Count: 780