This post is part of a series on the need for government reform and how to get it done. For more on this topic, visit the series page. If Joe Biden is elected president and the federal government is to meet rising public concerns for faithful execution, he must make reform part of his agenda.
It is one thing for him to promise a twenty-first-century government that is open and competent, as so many candidates have over the years. It is quite another to offer specifics on the size and cause of problems and provide a clear list of possible solutions that might help the government deliver on presidential promises. Consider five commitments toward that goal. Expand the make-government-work-for-the-people plan to include government performance.
Americans agree that campaign spending is too high and special interests too strong, but the way to make government work for the people is to give it the resources and authority to do the job well. Dismantlers and rebuilders are more likely than other Americans to believe that special interests run the country, and they blame both parties for the horror stories about members of Congress and presidential aides who engage in misconduct.
They know the legislative process is broken and want it fixed. Call it worse than it looks , worse than you think , or even the worst of the worst , the two groups want an end to insider dealing and the gridlock it produces. They also want effective federal oversight offices, starting with the Office of Government Ethics and Offices of Inspector General.
Most of the American press is liberal. And also, America's president is a liberal democrat. Charles Grey was a liberal reformer, probably a broad church Anglican. George Etienne Cartier was a practicing lawyer before he was elected liberal reformer in Canada. He was a Liberal government. To capture votes of Americans who felt the federal government was too big, too wasteful, and too liberal.
In their strong or weak government policy, they were liberal. But they were conservative in that they believed in industry, big business, and rich controlling the government. The liberal government currently does not have a slogan. Before this, it was difficult or impossible for black students to get into good liberal arts colleges. Was Bismarck a German liberal who favored constitutional and democratic government?
If you mean in the United States, the conservative is pro-small government, the liberal is for more government intervention. Actually, most objective analysts would say Mr. Obama is a centrist Democrat. He is liberal on social issues, but leans more conservative on issues such as defense.
He believes the government should stay out of people's bedrooms and private lives, and he believes that the government does have a role in solving the problems and improving the lives of Americans. The liberal television networks. It is now a coalition Government of Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Log in.
US Government. Study now. Watergate and Vietnam receded in the rearview mirror. Popular programs like Medicare and Social Security remained intact. For all his talk about reducing the size and the role of government, Reagan did not eliminate a single major program in his eight years in office.
Yet, during those eight years, the trust index never rose above forty-five per cent. And since Reagan left office, aside from intermittent spikes, including one after September 11th, it has declined steadily. In the past fourteen years, in good times and bad, the index has never exceeded thirty per cent. The questionnaire used in the A. But partisanship accounts only for changes in the distribution of responses.
So maybe someone is to blame. It is a convenience to reviewers, although not an aid to clarity, that two recent books devoted to the subject assign responsibility to completely different perpetrators. Harris blame the Republican Party.
He sued, and won a settlement, which he used to establish the Center for the Study of Responsive Law. In , Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which empowered the federal government to set safety standards for automobiles, a matter heretofore left largely to the states.
The key to all these successes, Sabin thinks, is that a new player arose in government policymaking: the public. There was no seat at the table for the consumer, or for the people obliged to live with air and water pollution. The solution was the nonprofit public-interest law firm, an organization independent of the government but sufficiently well funded to sue corporations and government agencies on behalf of the public.
The power of groups like the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club grew. By the nineteen-seventies, the environmental movement had acquired political clout. It helped that courts were willing to grant these groups legal standing. You would think that congressional acts addressing workplace safety and pollution would have raised the level of trust in the federal government.
He says that liberal reformers assailed not only the industries responsible for pollution, unsafe working conditions, and so on but also the government agencies assigned to oversee them. The reformers essentially accused groups like the Federal Trade Commission of corruption.
It was not enough for them to mobilize public opinion on behalf of laws that a Democratic Congress was more than willing to pass. They sought to expose and condemn the compromises that government agencies were making with industry. The reformers had the effrontery of the righteous. One of the leading environmentalists in the Senate was Edmund Muskie.
Muskie was from Maine, a state that was dependent on the paper-mill industry. It is certainly true that distrust has been promoted from the left as well as from the right. Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's arguments, each group should present a proposal for a changed social policy on their topic to the entire class: Why is their problem such a pressing one for the nation?
What do they propose should be done? How will it alleviate the social problems that the United States faces in the s and 40s? Why should their policy or legislation come first?
Students should write a newspaper editorial either supporting or criticizing Eleanor Roosevelt's political work. What do they find admirable or troubling about her entry into politics? Is this the right role for a First Lady or ex-First Lady?
They could choose either her New Deal work or her post work and use some of the documents from the activities to support their arguments. Students should be assigned a date i. Students should be instructed to mention the specific evidence that they have examined; their arguments should be based on contemporary positions suited to the year they are assigned.
They will need to cite specific actions taken by Eleanor Roosevelt, and possibly those of other women in the Roosevelt administration. They may choose to discuss the role of women in politics more generally. When the editorials have been turned in, students could share their views in chronological order and discuss why these views might or might not have changed over time.
Another activity could be to compare Eleanor Roosevelt's political work as First Lady and her post career. Students could read some of her "My Day" columns in each era. Kennedy" lesson at the National Parks Service.
Skip to main content. Lesson Plan. Photo caption. Eleanor Roosevelt in Arthurdale, West Virginia, What were Eleanor Roosevelt's views about the role of government in solving social problems? Describe the role Eleanor Roosevelt carved out for herself as a social reformer. Analyze and discuss the views that Eleanor Roosevelt held as an advocate for social justice. Describe and explain the changing roles of women in politics in the s and s.
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