Lame duck President Reagan - 20 May 1988

The late great Denis Brogan the Scot, who at the end was Sir DW Brogan, knew more about the history and the current practice of American and French government, not only more than any foreigner of his time, but more than 90% of the Americans and the French.

He once said to me, "You can live in a country 30, 40 years and take in everything, but the only mistakes you’ll make will be the very simplest ones". I need go no farther than my own experience to bear this out. I discovered about, oh, 10 years ago, that for the previous 40 years I had been going into the grocers or the supermarket or the deli or wherever and always asking for soda water. And always, I was too dumb to notice, the assistant would either call off the name of a soft drink or say something like, "Would that be club soda?" "Yes, indeed, club soda".

By the time I had acquired the reflex of asking for club soda, everybody in the past four or five years has taken to calling it, and labelling it, seltzer, a slip which escaped everybody involved in the making of my television history of America. It had to do with the title of the second episode.

The first episode was called "The new found land" and covered the original inhabitants, the Indians, then the Spanish who came here to conquer, then the French who mapped and explored one-third of the continent in the name of their king, Louisiana. The second episode was to be about the third wave, the English, who came to colonise and stay, make a home here, so, I gave it the title "Home from home", and so it was, and nobody questioned it for a minute until it was shown in this country, at which point every other American who’d seen it said, "What does it mean, home from home?"

That was a stopper, what does it mean? Good grief, they speak English don’t they? Ah, somebody wise in the idiom of both countries said, "It means, home away from home, doesn’t it?" It was too late to change the title and in reruns it stands. So, I raised no eyebrow, caught no breath, a few weeks ago when a German visiting New York asked me simply, "What is a lame duck?"

The usual answer is Ronald Reagan, but I knew that this man was not the proper audience for such quippery, he knows this country’s politics very well, indeed a good deal better than most natives. Except, I suppose, in the simplest things. What he meant was, how did the expression come about, what did it originally mean, how does it apply now. He was one German who was going to think twice when people asked him if Ronald Reagan was a lame duck.

Well, it’s a very old phrase, in 18th-century England it meant a bankrupt businessman. And in Craig’s Dictionary of American English, which has a reference as far back as 1761, it's defined as an office holder, who has not been reelected, especially a defeated member of the short session of Congress after the November election. The first actual quotation is 1860 there and refers to some minor body, a court of claims, as being a receptacle of lame ducks or broke-down politicians.

In the south, long ago, many state constitutions laid it down that a governor could run for only one four-year term, and down there it was called, the eunuch rule. The idea was to prevent a governor building up a solid, long-lasting, political machine. There have been, down the decades, many ingenious ways of defeating this provision, most commonly by having a brother run for the second term. Alabama’s former governor George Wallace, after his first term ran his wife, she was elected and, as Wallace proudly put it, Alabama then had two governors for the price of one.

The term "the eunuch rule" gave way everywhere to lame duck and, when I was first reporting Congress, it was regularly applied every four years, right after a presidential election to the sitting Congress that would be replaced by the new Congress, the following March. March, not January? No, from the beginning of the republic until 1933, there was always a four-month interval between administrations because originally it took so long to count the votes over vastly scattered regions, to bring the electors together in one place, to declare the winner and finally, to assemble the new senators and congressmen, rumbling into Washington from 600 miles away to the north, 1400 miles from Florida.

Obviously, by the 1930s not even the most rock-ribbed, southern conservative insisted on using a stage coach, but what forced the change was the pressure of dire events – in a word, of the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt was elected on the usual day, in the first Tuesday in November, 1932, in the pit of the Depression. The first thing he did was to close all the banks and then go through, with this advisors, a list of all the banks that were worth backing with federal funds, and of the others that were allowed to fail.

Yet, in this fearful moment, he still had to wait four months for a new Congress to meet and put through the emergency legislation the country badly needed. The old Congress went on sitting but had no power to write new binding laws, and that interim Congress was always called the lame duck congress. Well after the frustrating impasse of that dark winter of 1932-3, the country had had enough of this old tradition.

One of the first things Congress did, and the states following on to ratify, was an amendment to the Constitution which pushed forward the inauguration of the new president from 4 March to 20 January. What this did was to halve the waiting period before the new president took office, and kill off all together the lame duck Congress. For now, the old Congress finishes its business before the election.

The word maintains a lively existence in state, and local, politics wherever a public official makes lame duck appointments, throwing bouquets to his friends, which will soon fade when he has gone. But it’s in talking and writing about presidential politics that the word never dies.

The moment President Eisenhower came in for his second, and under the Constitution his last, term and the moment Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1985, people – the opposition of course – talked hopefully about his being a lame duck president. This is always wishful thinking. The powers of the president, particularly in foreign policy, are considerable enough to let him do some pretty vigorous and/or mischievous limping, as he has proved.

But there is little doubt in the conventional wisdom of today that Mr Reagan, ever since his farewell State of the Nation address in January, has been a lame duck president. Well, is that so? It’s true that the one power that liberals most fear has been immobilised – the power to nominate new justices to the Supreme Court. If another judge died in the next month or two, the Democrats would see to it that the machinery of confirming him it must be done through the Senate in the first place, through its judiciary committee they’d see that the hearings would drag out and out and the committee would take forever to report its finding to the Senate floor.

However, during the past three years, Reagan has managed to elevate a most conservative judge to be chief justice, and he has appointed, and got confirmed, two others whose general bent is conservative. In spite of one surprisingly liberal decision from Chief Justice Rehnquist – upholding the free press right of a sleazy pornographic editor to write a foul description of a well-known preacher – apart from this, the court has recently delivered rulings that greatly please Mr Reagan and the conservatis, most recently this week.

The court, by a six to two vote, supported a policeman’s right to research the garbage, the dustbin, of a private home, without a warrant. It was a case in California about a man suspected of being a narcotics dealer. The police could show no cause to get the search warrant for his house, so they went to the garbage collector to turn over to them the contents of the man’s dustbin where they found items that indicated the use of narcotics. After that, the police got their warrant and the house was searched and the drugs were found.

The man sued, under the fourth amendment to the constitution, which says, pretty plainly, the right of the people "to be secure into their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated".

It would seem to be a right of privacy that certainly extends to unwarranted searches and seizures of the household rubbish. But the court said no, over a withering dissent from the liberal Justice Brennan. And today, the New York Times among others, has raised a little storm saying that when citizens wonder, each time they discard a document, a condom or a dirty book whether the cops might be interested, some part of freedom has been trashed.

Well, apart from this achievement, he longed for from the beginning of establishing a Supreme Court with a conservative bias, the lame duck president has powers intact that he could still exercise before November. He is still commander in chief: he could, and did, put the navy on guard in the Persian Gulf, he and nobody else decides how far to go with Mr Gorbachev, he is determined to maintain aid to the Cntra rebels in Nicaragua even though the Contras and the Sandinistas are talking, he will have the last word on how to oust General Noriega in Panama. He maintains military aid to the Honduran army, to the humiliation of the country's politicians.

In spite of a mountain of evidence that gives at the very least the appearance of wrongdoing by his attorney general, he keeps the man on. And the lame duck president still has the power, before or after the trial, to pardon Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter of all criminal charges. Some duck, some limp.

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