Americans borrowed the term “lame duck” from the British, who first applied the insult to bankrupt businessmen in the 18th century, and then to 19th century politicians whose tenure was quickly running out. Before the 20th Amendment was ratified in 1933, lame presidents and members of Congress served for long periods after the election. The new presidents were not inaugurated until March 4, a full four months after the election, and a new Congress often did not meet until 13 months after the election.
After the 20th Amendment, the period of the lame duck was significantly shortened, but that didn’t stop lame politicians from wrapping their remaining weeks in power with last-minute pardons and acts of political sabotage.
James Buchanan did nothing to stop secession
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, the slave-owning states ruled by South Carolina made it clear their intention to separate from the Union rather than make concessions with the new Republican administration. President James Buchanan, a lame duck with a cabinet full of southerners, chose to blame Lincoln and the abolitionists in the North for the division over slavery rather than take a hard line against secession from the South.
In his State of the Union address of December 1860, Buchanan stated that “the President-elect’s track record has been sufficient to justify the Southern fears that he will attempt to invade their constitutional rights”, although Buchanan did not didn’t believe Lincoln would. act so fast. The biggest blame for the secession crisis was, as Buchanan saw, “the protracted and intrusive interference of the peoples of the North in the question of slavery in the southern states”.
After the formal secession of South Carolina and six other states in December 1860 and January 1861, Buchanan was in dire straits. He knew secession was illegal, but he also believed that the Constitution prohibited him from sending federal soldiers to quell the rebellion. When South Carolinian troops surrounded Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Buchanan sent an unarmed ship, the Star of the West, to provide reinforcements to the US military. But when the Western Star was pulled over and prevented from entering the harbor, Buchanan withdrew.
“I don’t think the story is fair to Buchanan,” says Daniel Franklin, associate professor emeritus of political science at Georgia State University and author of Pitiful Giants: Presidents in their final terms. “Like Hoover [when he faced the Great Depression]Buchanan was limited in his conception of what the government could do. He did not imagine that the federal government had the power to stop states.
By the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861, the Secessionist States had already formed the Confederate States of America, and civil war was virtually assured.
Benjamin Harrison torpedoed the economy to punish Cleveland
After Benjamin Harrison squeaked a narrow Electoral College victory over incumbent President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Harrison and his Republican backers in Congress rushed to add six new Western states to the Union and pack them with Republican loyalists. But instead of guaranteeing a Republican victory in the 1892 election, there was a backlash, with voters overwhelmingly sending Cleveland back to the White House and returning Congress to the Democrats.
Harrison and the Republicans had campaigned on the threat that the election of Cleveland and the Democrats would sink the American economy, and now with only four months left in his lame presidency, Harrison has decided to torpedo the economy. himself so that it seems to be Cleveland’s fault. .
As historian Heather Cox Richardson explains, Republican newspapers ran apocalyptic editorials to scare off foreign investment, while the US Treasury burned a surplus and refused to bail out Wall Street financiers. The result was a stock market crash with just eight days until Cleveland’s inauguration.
The crash quickly turned into the Panic of 1893, a severe economic depression that lasted until 1897. And as Harrison hoped, Cleveland took much of the blame.
A censored Lame-Duck Senate Joseph McCarthy
In the anxious beginnings of the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was an aggressive attack dog against what he believed to be Communist infiltration of the US government. In 1950, McCarthy claimed to have the names of 205 Communists actively working in the US State Department. Even when an investigation produced no evidence, McCarthy remained on the attack and capitalized on Cold War fears to accuse political enemies of disloyalty.
In 1953, with a Republican president in the White House, McCarthy was appointed chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Investigations Subcommittee. From that high-profile post, McCarthy launched more investigations to root out Communist traitors, including a 1954 televised investigation into the US military in which he harassed and berated a witness, Brigadier General Ralph W Zwicker. For viewers at home, McCarthy’s performance was an outrage.
The Senate has finally had enough. After the 1954 midterm legislative election, the Senate convened a special lame duck session to consider 46 separate counts of misconduct against McCarthy. It was the first time that a single House of Congress has returned for a lame duck session since the passage of the 20th Amendment.
McCarthy did not fall without a fight. He called the misconduct hearings a “lynching party” and called the responsible committee “the unwitting servant of the Communist Party.” In the end, the Senate voted 67-22 to censor McCarthy on two counts, neither of which had to do with his years of Communist “witch-hunting”. Instead, the Senate blamed McCarthy for abusing very Senate committees that investigated him.
McCarthy kept his job, but never regained his political power. The senator died in 1957 at just 48 years old.
Congress must clean up after Watergate mess
The lame 1974 session of Congress was the most productive in the history of the legislature. Convened on November 18 and adjourned a month later on December 20, the lame Congress passed 138 substantive pieces of legislation, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and a federal privacy law. But his most important job was to clean up after the Watergate scandal.
Topping the priority list during the lame duck session was approving the appointment of Nelson Rockefeller as Gerald Ford‘s vice president. Ford himself had only been appointed vice chairman of Richard Nixon a year earlier when Spiro Agnew resigned over corruption. After Nixon resigned in disgrace for his involvement in Watergate on August 9, 1974, Ford was sworn in as chairman the same day.
In a kickoff to Nixon, Congress also voted to rescind a pre-agreement that would have allowed Nixon to retain ownership and control of its presidential bands and papers. These damning documents would remain in the possession of the government.
READ MORE: 7 Nixon Quotes Revealing His Secret Tapes
George HW Bush pardoned Iran-Contra planners
WATCH: What was the Iran-Contra affair?
One of the darkest spots on Ronald Reagan’s two-term Republican administration was the Iran-Contra affair, a secret plot to sell arms to Iran and use the profits to fund the Contra rebels in the Nicaragua. Reagan himself claimed to have no knowledge of the illegal scheme, but several members of his administration, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, were ultimately charged and, in some cases, convicted of perjury and withholding of evidence.
George HW Bush was Reagan’s vice president and also asserted his ignorance of the Iran-Contra plot. After winning the presidency in 1988, Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. And on December 24, 1992, a lame duck pardoned six of Iran-Contra’s indicted or convicted planners, none of whom have ever seen in jail. for his crimes. .
Lame Duck congressional session impeached Bill Clinton
After suffering unexpected losses in the 1998 midterm election, Republicans called a special session of the House of Representatives to consider articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton. Clinton has been accused of lying to Congress and obstructing the investigation into his scandalous affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
The House met on December 17, 1998 and voted two days later to impeach Clinton on two articles of impeachment: perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton was the first president to be impeached in 130 years. During the Senate impeachment trial held in January 1999, Clinton was acquitted of both counts and served the remainder of his second term.
READ MORE: How Many US Presidents Have Been Arraigned?
Bill Clinton pardoned runaway billionaire
On Bill Clinton’s very last day in power before handing over the White House to George W. Bush in 2001, Clinton issued 140 presidential pardons and 36 commutations. While lame presidents are expected to grant a glut of pardons upon their exit, one of Clinton’s pardons drew the ire of Republicans and Democrats alike.
Marc Rich was a convicted tax evader who fled to Switzerland in the 1980s to avoid jail time and eventually landed on the FBI’s “most wanted” list. Rich was also a generous contributor to both political parties and a philanthropist in Israel and Iran. Although Clinton swore there was no misunderstanding involved in the last-minute forgiveness of the “fugitive financier,” Clinton’s critics and even some allies were furious.
“It was a terrible forgiveness,” said Democratic Senator Pat Leahy. “It was inexcusable. It was scandalous … Here is a man [Rich] who was involved in a huge scam and showed no remorse.
READ MORE: 7 famous presidential pardons