“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a group of corporate captains in November 2008. They were at that moment staring down the barrel of the subprime crisis and Emanuel, newly appointed chief of staff for the newly elected Obama administration, was assuring them that the president would use the mess to justify ambitious reforms in areas like health care, education, energy, and taxes.
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To do so, they referenced the history of government spending on disaster relief, telling a story that redefined the man-made catastrophe of the Great Depression as a natural disaster.
From its earliest years the United States Congress considered petitions for relief on an individual basis. Lawmakers responded to some crises that now seem quaint (grasshopper plagues, Indian wars) and others that don’t (floods, earthquakes). The power to authorize aid isn’t specifically enumerated in the Constitution, but it came to be accepted as part of the clause that allows taxing and spending on behalf of the “general Welfare.” And even when the constitutional grounds weren’t there, Congress found ways to spend the money. “Necessity knows neither law nor constitution, and never did in this country,” said Representative John Follett in 1884, arguing for aid after the Ohio River overflowed its banks. It’s hard to imagine anybody saying that today.
Even when the Supreme Court couldn’t be persuaded to uphold New Deal legislation, it was careful not to interfere with congressional spending prerogatives. In overturning the Agricultural Adjustment Act, for instance, “the Court resorted to a tortured argument that the act was an improper attempt to regulate agriculture”—a Tenth Amendment issue—rather than question subsidies to farmers per se. While strategizing over how to get the Social Security Act through the Court, FDR’s labor secretary, Francis Perkins, happened to run into Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, who gave her advice on how the government should frame its arguments: “The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power. You can do anything under the taxing power.”
by Michele Landis Dauber (University of Chicago Press) $25
