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Constituents. and pretty soon, they re taking orders from the swamp rather than the people. so if we want to end the corruption, and move legislation on capitol hill, we need the old timers to do the decent thing and begin to retire! john conyers is the most potent example. the congressman who has just been charged this week with sexual harassment by two women so far in two days is 88 years old. he has held his congressional seat for 52 years! so l.b.j. was president and the film mary poppins was released the year was elected. now, it s time for john to go fly a kite, too, and he s not alone. remember that song? congressman slaughter, democrat from new york is also 88. she s been in congress for 33 years. republican congressman sam johnson, 87 years old. and he s been kicking around congress for 26 years. ....
It mean the only attracted to it are superegos? i ve always had a theory, if we lined up all of our presidents they would have some odd chromosome that the rest of us don t have? without question. in order to seek that office you have to have a massive ego. you have to have a need to be loved, a need for attention, and a need for power. so it is elevated, but you re hoping that your leaders have that plus a filter? not just a filter, but a knowledge of how to govern. a knowledge of how policy intertwines with people s lives, and how politics works. you have to have somebody who understands it. so lbj was larger than life. he had all of those things but also knew how to get stuff done. he was steeped in government. he knew how to get things done. let me ask you about what s going on in hollywood right now. ....
Should not cede the moral high ground on this issue. i don t know if you all owout many the audience could hear my guests were all like, uh! this week, the washington post took a closer look at the details of paul ryan s better ideas and found that his idea of a war on poverty so far relies heavily on promoting volunteerism and encouraging work through existing federal programs including the tax code. promoting volunteerism and encouraging work all far short of an lbj standard of marshaling the full force of government to e rad kate the crisis of poverty. it s those very protections ryan has targeted with bung et plans that help the ploor. even as it gives massive tax breaks to the wealthiest of americans. paul ryan is no new lbj. paul ryan s even paul ryan, you know, we re familiar with his policies. for him to even invoke lbj in the context of poverty, i m sorry, that is offensive to me. that is he is the antithesis of what lbj, you know, looked at ....
Seats makes it very difficult for people to say well politically we re going to make deals with people in the house or things are kind of structurally gridlocked. i think this is more a symptom of that than anything else. but the other thing, too, is when we look at lbj, we tend to think about two things with him, which is 64 and 65, the civil rights act and the voting rights act. but this is really about the arc of his career because he does this in 57 and does it again in 1960, like the little remembered 1960 civil rights act, and then the 1964 and then 65. yet this was a guy who had been part of some of these anti-lynching filibusters earlier, who certainly in his discourse still sounded very southern. you know, i don t want to repeat how he sounded, right, on air. and i wonder, raul, in part as i was spending time with carroll s book and thinking about it, if there is something that has been lost in the art of brokering and if part of what has been lost is ....
Working on a new book about lbj. and raul reyes, nbc latino contributor and columnist for usa today. thanks for being here. thank you. julian, i want to start with you. in this moment, do you think that lbj facing the constraints that reid is facing would have made the same decision, that he would have gone ahead and changed the senate rules and seen that as a power play or would he have tried to negotiate in his very johnson time of way? i think he would have looked favorably at what he did. during the 1950s when lbj was in the senate, it wasn t just the civil rights bill he worked on. he tried to change the leadership for those ho who blocked legislation. when he left the senate, the majority leader of the senate had a lot more sway than he had when lbj started. so i think what reid did is not so different from the kind of tactics that lbj was obsessed with. the rules mattered in congress. ....