I'm pretty much pissing my pants laughing at the Republican claims that they are going to repeal health care reform, although I suppose I should show more sympathy at their windmill tilting given the historical analogue I'm going to convey.
In 1946, organized labor stood at the pinnacle of its power in the United States. The combination of effective militancy in the 1930s, coupled with New Deal legal reforms like the Norris-LaGuardia Act and the Wagner Act ("National labor Relations Act") and the more than full employment in the industrial sector prompted by the war effort had resulted in 15 million Americans belonging to unions out of a population of 141 million. Roughly thirty percent of American workers belonged to unions -- unions imbued with a kind of militancy and ambition and visionary leadership -- John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, and Walter Reuther among others -- that it would be difficult for us to imagine.
During World War II organized labor for the most part eschewed strikes, understanding that any interruption to production would rightly be seen as a betrayal of the soldiers in the field. Once the war ended, however, unions and their members flexed their muscles and embarked on a series of large scale strikes aimed at achieving the kind of wage increases that were not possible during the war when wage and price controls reigned. In 1946, five million union members went on strike. (To put that in perspective, during the five-year period from January 1, 2001 through December 31, 2005, only 500,000 workers went on strike.) This militancy spawned an enormous backlash. At the same time, the Democratic Party, which had controlled the House since 1931, and the presidency and the Senate since 1933 was the target of an inevitable Thermidorian reaction -- aided hugely by the popular sense that Truman was not up to the job -- which resulted in sweeping Republican victories in the mid-term elections of 1946. The Republicans gained 55 seats in the House and 13 seats in the Senate -- astronomically huge gains when one considers that the states of the old Confederacy remained 100% Democratic, albeit for the most part controlled by racist reactionaries.
The Republicans' highest priority upon gaining control of Congress was to rein in the power of organized labor. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed over Truman's veto in the summer of 1947, outlawed the closed shop, the secondary boycott, created an action for damages for unlawful strikes, codified the concept that an employer has a free speech right to oppose unionization, undermined the Norris-LaGuardia Act, and permitted states to adopt so-called "right-to-work" laws making a union shop unlawful. Although not fully evident at the time, the seeds of labor's undoing were sown at that moment.
The unions vowed to repeal Taft-Hartley, which in turn became a longstanding and bedrock plank of the Democratic Party. In the meantime, the Republican hold on power was extremely short-lived. In the 1948 election, not only did Truman shock Dewey, but the Democrats picked up 9 Senate seats and 75 House seats, regaining control of both houses. The Republicans would regain control of the Congress following the 1952 election, but would lose control of the House in the election of 1954 and remain in the minority for the next forty years, and lose control of the Senate from 1954 to 1980.
Never, however, despite the fact that the Democrats would control the House for 44 of 46 years from 1948 to 1994, the Senate for 38 of 46 years in that same time period, and the presidency and both houses of Congress for 18 of those 46 years -- and more than 60 Senators in eight of those 18 years, were the Democrats able to roll back Taft-Hartley. The one major effort to do so, the attempt during the midst of Johnson's amazing 1964-65 legislative run to repeal section 14(b) of Taft-Hartley (the "right-to-work" provision), passed the House, but was stymied by a filibuster led by Republican leader Everett Dirksen, The Senate then required 67 votes to end a filibuster and the Democrats came up just short.
And that was that. More tepid labor reform during Carter's term in office floundered due to a filibuster when conservadem Dale Bumpers (from Arkansas) would not support cloture. Taft-Hartley has remained the law of the land and unions in the private sector have withered on the vine.
The point of this little history lesson is that 1) it makes sense to act boldly when you have a shot at power, because you never know when you'll get it back; 2) under the American system, once one party has achieved something it really wants, it is damn hard to dislodge it; and 3) playing defense in the American system is a whole lot easier than getting something positive accomplished.,
Health care reform is here to stay. (I'll provide link later but will post for now before I head off to make a living.)
