Heather Cox Richardson

And that, when we started out by talking, I was a little uncomfortable using the word cataclysm at first, but boy, do these next two weeks look like they're going to be sort of make it or break it weeks for our future.

I'm laughing.

Like you and I, we've done boats.

We've done TV.

Here's the thing.

Okay, so the cowardice in this Congress is, I think, new in part because of the ways in which the primary system has been jiggered so that the people who are in Congress, the Republicans, not the Democrats, but the Republicans who were in Congress have almost been selected

to be weenies when it came to Trump, right?

But this is not the first Congress not to do its job.

And we always point to the Congress under Truman that he called the do nothing Congress.

But of more interest, I think in this moment is the one in the early 1920s, in which the Republicans take over from a period of time in which the Democrats have really dominated the

early 20th century under Woodrow Wilson and they've done all kinds of stuff that a lot of Republicans really hate like the income tax and you know progressive legislation and so on and of course all the racial stuff all the you know the racist stuff too but um

The Republicans complain a lot less about that.

But when they get in control of Congress in the early 1920s, they really can't get their feet under them.

They have been an opposition party for so long that they basically don't know how to take the reins and run anything.

So they start to squabble amongst themselves, especially between the old guard, the Henry Cabot Lodges, for example, and the younger people like –

fighting Bob La Follette out of Wisconsin.

You know, they just can't really get their feet under them.

So what happens in that case is that the power of the federal government slides into the cabinet and the people who really begin to run the government are Andrew Mellon at Treasury and are Herbert Hoover at Commerce.

In 20, that's 20 to 23, I think it is.

It's going to be Harding.