The “Do-Nothing” Congress

In 1946 President Harry Truman called the Republican Congress back then the “do-nothing” Congress. This is what they did and you can decide for yourself if they deserved the nickname or not.

• The 18th Congress passed the first balanced budget since the Great Crash. [Great! Too bad this Congress can’t do the same thing. Maybe voters can make the Senate a majority Republican too?]
• They chopped taxes by nearly $5 billion (while at the same time exempting millions of low-income working-class Americans from taxation). [Yes! Always like tax cuts.]
• The Congress quashed a socialist national health-care scheme. [Now, you are talking! It looks like the Left has to always bring up socialized medicine. Then again they tend to be composed of socialists or wannabe-socialists anyway.]
• Passed the Taft-Hartley freedom-to-work act over the president’s veto. [Truman hated this act—and I bet most unions did too.]
• The Office of Price Administration was demolished. [You can kind of guess what the agency did. Sounds like a gov’t agency Obama would like. Glad the Congress scrapped this FDR program.]

“Do-nothing” really? I think they did quite a lot. The authors of A Patriot’s History of the United States said the Congress did nothing that Truman liked. Probably so. But good for them. They did some other things like creating the CIA and the Dept. of Defense but these five I particularly liked.