Bill Clinton
By 1992, President George H.W. Bush's popularity was declining quickly, primarily due to a downturn in the economy but also due to shortcomings in his leadership. Both liberals and conservatives disliked his policies, and he never connected with voters. He had signed burdensome legislation into law, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, which required small businesses to comply with costly new regulations for citizens having physical or mental disabilities. Buildings were required to install elevators, for example, and create other accommodations like setting aside many parking spaces for people with disabilities. Lawyers could enter retail stores, spot something not in compliance with the new regulations, and file expensive lawsuits against the businesses with demands for payment of the lawyers' own attorneys' fees. While everyone wanted to do more for the disabled, this federal legislation created countless lawsuits and expenses. The U.S. Supreme Court used the ADA to order the Professional Golf Association (PGA) to drop its ban on golf carts at events so that a golfer who claimed he had a rare circulatory problem could compete while using a golf cart![4]
Conservatives supported a candidate (Pat Buchanan) to challenge Bush for the Republican nomination; Bush won the nomination but was crushed in a three-way contest in the fall. Democrat Bill Clinton won 43% of the vote, Bush won 37%, and independent third-party candidate Ross Perot (a wealthy businessman from Texas concerned about the budget deficit) won 19%.
Bill Clinton became a controversial president who served for eight years but never won even 50% of the vote. In 1993, his wife (the "First Lady") Hillary Clinton led a massive committee-based effort for the government to take over the health care system, which is about 1/7th of the nation's economy. Conservative doctors, pro-lifers and the insurance industry helped defeat Hillary's complex plan in Congress. Also in 1993, terrorists linked to radical Muslims set off a truck bomb under the World Trade Center in an attempt to knock down the two massive towers. Fortunately, the plan failed, and only six were killed.
Shortly after he was inaugurated, Clinton sought removal of the longstanding ban on homosexuals in the military. But the Democrats in Congress refused to lift the ban, and instead a policy of "don't ask, don't tell" was implemented. Gays would not be expelled from the military unless they actively promoted ("tell") their lifestyle. That policy remained in force until late 2010, when Democrats repealed it.
Enjoying big Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Clinton aggressively pushed a liberal agenda. He raised taxes on both individuals and businesses. In 1994, he signed a federal gun control bill into law known as the "Brady Bill," which imposed a national five-day waiting period for handgun purchasers and required a criminal background check. He signed into law the "Violence Against Women Act," which authorized women to sue institutions like colleges in federal court over alleged incidents that were never charged or proven as crimes (this provision was later held unconstitutional), and authorized the spending of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to encourage women to charge men with crimes. He signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, which created a "free-trade zone" encompassing Mexico, Canada, and the United States and submitted the United States to control by an international tribunal to decide disputes in trade. This resulted in a big increase in importation of illegal drugs (like cocaine and marijuana) from Mexico, and was later used to order the United States to allow never-inspected trucks to enter from Mexico to flood the American highways. NAFTA was unable to obtain the 2/3rd vote required in the Senate to be ratified as a treaty, and instead it was (perhaps improperly) passed as an ordinary federal law with mere majority votes in Congress.
In the "midterm elections" in 1994 (called "midterm" because it is halfway between the presidential elections), there was a voter backlash against the liberal policies of President Bill Clinton. Republicans swept to victory in a landslide, and captured large majorities in both the House and Senate. But before the Republican majority took office, a "lame duck" session of the Democratic House and Senate passed a law requiring the United States to join the World Trade Organization. Like NAFTA but on a world-wide scale, the WTO aims to promote world trade by lowering trade barriers. In practice, it forces the United States to submit to the authority of an international tribunal comprised mostly of nations hostile to America, and that court has ruled against the United States in nearly every trade dispute. Also like NAFTA, the WTO was passed as an ordinary federal law rather than obtaining the 2/3rd vote required by the Constitution to ratify treaties.
Debate: Do you think Congress should pass treaties as ordinary laws when unable to obtain the 2/3rd vote required under the Constitution to ratify a treaty?
The Republican Congress that took over in 1995 passed several important conservative laws, including a massive welfare reform (this was in last week's lecture) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which established that federal law would recognize only marriages between a man and a woman and that one state did not have to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another state. Clinton, chastened by the landslide defeat of his Democratic Party, began to govern more like a conservative. He also wanted to win reelection in 1996, and he knew he had to move in the same direction as the nation: to the "right" (more conservative).
On April 19, 1995, domestic terrorism hit the United States when Timothy McVeigh exploded a massive truck bomb in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. This caused the building to collapse and kill 168 people, including children in a day care center that was in the building, and injured over 800. Reportedly McVeigh was angry at the federal government for a raid that it conducted against a group in Waco, Texas, which occurred exactly two years earlier and resulted in the deaths of dozens of citizens. Speculation that McVeigh had foreign help for this attack was never proven, and McVeigh himself was executed after a lengthy trial that included testimony by a friend who described how McVeigh intended to do this. McVeigh got the death penalty for his crime.
Clinton's approval rating increased based on his response to this terrorism, just as the future President George W. Bush's approval rating soared after the terrorist attack in 2001. Clinton also benefited from an improving economy, which increased his chances of being reelected. In 1996, the Republicans nominated the aging Senator Bob Dole, a moderate Republican, to run against Clinton. Clinton, along with his Vice President Al Gore, won reelection easily but failed to attain 50% support by the voters. Ross Perot ran again, but did not do as well as he had in 1992.
By the 1997 the internet was becoming mainstream and very popular, and the nation began to experience the "dot-com" boom (e.g., amazon.com) that would last until 2000. An internet craze swept the nation, and speculators (short-term investors) bought up the stock of new internet companies and drove up their price to high levels far above what was reasonable. The stock market, particularly the high-tech NASDAQ exchange, reached record levels. The economy benefited from all this, and the first budget surplus in decades was achieved by the federal government. But just as in 1929, the boom was followed by a "bust" that occurred in mid-2000.
Bill Clinton should have enjoyed immense influence during this good time. But his personal immorality caught up with him, in what became known as the "Monica Lewinsky" sex scandal. Clinton had a sexual relationship with this young woman, who worked at the White House as an unpaid "intern". When Clinton was asked about this under oath during a lawsuit, he lied about it. That was perjury, a serious crime, and the House impeached Clinton near the end of 1998 for it. But as happened to President Andrew Johnson about 130 years earlier, the Senate did not reach the 2/3rd vote needed to remove Clinton from office.
In spring 1999 at a public high school in Columbine, Colorado, two anti-Christian bigoted high school students massacred 12 students, one for believing in God, and a teacher. Clinton and liberals seized on this event to push hard for gun control. But in the presidential election in 2000, voters in the pro-gun, rural states of West Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas remembered and voted against Democratic candidate Al Gore, causing him to lose the election. Democratic strategists admitted after the election that the gun control issue really hurt them, and no leading Democrat has pushed for gun control ever since.