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Watch it and weep. Media Burn, the video archive, has posted online a clip of Dan Rostenkowski, the Chicago Democrat who was then majority whip, welcoming his party’s newcomers to the House of Representatives in 1981 (watch it after the jump). The leadership’s job, said Rostenkowski, who’d already been in the House 22 years, is to spare you the distress of having to vote on any bill “that will embarrass you, that will certainly cause you some concern with respect to getting reelected.”
In that simpler time, the opposition—which Democrats opposed but sometimes compromised with or even conceded to—was the other party, the Republicans, led by the new president, Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t a terrifying insurgency that threatened apostates with defeat not in the next general election but in the next primary.
