Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other The conservative coalition, founded in 1937, was an unofficial alliance of members of the United States Congress which brought together the conservative wings of the Republican and Democratic parties to oppose President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.
According to James T. Patterson: "By and large the congressional conservatives agreed in opposing the spread of federal power and bureaucracy, in denouncing deficit spending, in criticizing industrial labor unions, and in excoriating most welfare programs.
"[3] The coalition dominated Congress from 1939[4] to 1963, when former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency and broke its influence.
Johnson took advantage of weakened conservative opposition, and Congress passed many progressive economic and social reforms in his presidency.
[5] The conservative coalition, which controlled key congressional committees and made up a majority of both houses of Congress during Kennedy's presidency, had prevented the implementation of progressive reforms since the late 1930s.
The conservative coalition opposition weakened on civil rights bills, ultimately enabling President Johnson and Everett Dirksen to convince sufficient numbers of Senate Republicans to ally with liberal Democrats to invoke cloture and push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had won a second term in a landslide, sweeping all but two states over his Republican opponent, Alf Landon.
However, the Southern Democrats, who controlled the entire South at the time with little Republican opposition, were divided between liberal and conservative factions.
Among their leaders were Senators Harry Byrd and Carter Glass of Virginia and Vice President John Nance Garner of Texas.
The document called for a balanced federal budget, state's rights, and an end to labor union violence and coercion.
[13] A handful of liberal measures, notably the minimum wage laws, did pass when the conservative coalition split.
Truman was frustrated by continued conservative strength in Congress, in spite of liberal gains in the 1948 midterm elections.
[15] During his presidency, John F. Kennedy attempted with some success to reduce the conservative hold over the Rules Committee, which had blocked liberal reform measures over the years.
The liberal wing of the Democratic Party (elected mainly from Northern cities and Unionized regions), on the other hand, tended to combine with Republicans from the west and the north to put their own legislation through.
This vote broke a Southern filibuster led by Senators Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Strom Thurmond (D-SC).
[21] In 1968, Nixon and native Southerner and American Independent candidate George Wallace carried the same number of states in the South.
These Watergate Babies joined forces with more senior liberals and stripped committee chairmanship from three senior Southern Democrats: Wright Patman, William R. Poage, and F. Edward Hébert, and otherwise reformed the House, making it more responsive to the overall Democratic Caucus and leadership, and with less power for committee chairs (and the minority party.)
[23] Boll weevils was a political term used in the mid-to-late 20th century to describe a bloc of conservative Democrats, mostly Southerners, who remained in the United States Congress throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
These included Democratic House members as conservative as Georgia's Larry McDonald, who was also a leader in the John Birch Society.