Author: BooMan

Last Wednesday, the Senate voted 90 to 9 to attach an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that prohibits abuse and torture of prisoners detained by the military or other U.S. agencies. It would forbid “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment that has been alleged recently by various organizations, including the Red Cross and the U.S. Army, at prison camps in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mr. Bush hopes to kill the measure in the House, where the administration is lobbying the leadership. But failing that, he threatens to use the first veto of his presidency to bring down the measure.

It would be more than a shame; it would be nothing less than a national disgrace, if it comes to this. The thought of the president of the United States fighting tooth and nail to maintain the right for our military and the CIA to torture prisoners flies in the face of everything this country stands for.

Twenty years before the GOP’s “Contract With America” wave of 1994, the House absorbed the shock of another freshman class that was just as big and as dominated by one party.

The members of the Class of 1974 were young, relatively new to public office and remarkably certain they could remake Washington in their own image. They viewed Congress as ossified, beholden to powerful interests, unresponsive to the people and ripe for the taking.

The Class of 1974 had 75 Democrats to just 17 Republicans (the “Contract” Class of 1994 would have 73 Republicans and just 13 Democrats). This huge influx of Democrats was known as the “Watergate babies.” The label derived from the scandal that, less than three months earlier, had caused President Richard M. Nixon to resign under threat of impeachment.

So strong was the tide running that fall — especially after Nixon was pardoned by successor President Gerald R. Ford — that Democrats were elected in districts all over the Northeast, the Midwest and the West that had voted Republican for generations.

The two most senior members of the then-minority Republicans were defeated. In Massachusetts, Paul E. Tsongas became the first Democrat elected to the House from his district in the 20th century. The bookish Andrew Maguire in New Jersey and the street-savvy organizer Toby Moffett in Connecticut captured suburban Republican districts.

In the West, Timothy E. Wirth won the Colorado district based in Boulder, Les AuCoin became the first Democrat from Oregon’s northwest corner since the 1800s and California elected a crop of young legislators that included George Miller, Henry A. Waxman and Norman Y. Mineta.

The new victors were a Kiddie Corps, half of them under 40. Tom Downey of New York, just 25, was the youngest member of Congress since the early 1800s. “We were young, we looked weird. I can’t even believe we got elected,” Moffett would say two decades later.