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Keating Five

Keating Five

The Keating Five (or Keating Five Scandal) refers to a Congressional scandal related to the collapse of most of the Savings and Loan institutions in the United States in the late 1980s. Following the deregulation of the banking industry in the 1980s, savings and loan associations (also known as thrifts) were given the flexibility to invest their depositors' funds in commercial real estate. (Previously, they had been restricted to investing in residential real estate.) Many savings and loan associations began making risky investments. As a result, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the federal agency that regulates the industry, tried to clamp down on the trend. In so doing, however, the FHLBB clashed with the Reagan administration, whose policy was deregulation of many industries, including the thrift industry. The administration declined to submit budgets to Congress that would request more funding for the FHLBB's regulatory efforts. In 1989, the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, Calif., collapsed. Lincoln's chairman, Charles H. Keating Jr., was faulted for the thrift's failure. Keating, however, told the House Banking Committee that the FHLBB and its former chief Edwin J. Gray were pursuing a vendetta against him. Gray testified that several U.S. senators had approached him and requested that he ease off on the Lincoln investigation. It came out that these senators had been beneficiaries of $1.3 million (collective total) in campaign contributions from Keating. This allegation set off a series of investigations by the California government, the United States Department of Justice, and the Senate Ethics Committee. The ethics committee's investigation focused on five senators: Alan MacG. Cranston (D-Calif.); Dennis W. DeConcini (D-Ariz.); John H. Glenn Jr. (D-Ohio); John S. McCain III (R-Ariz.); and Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D-Mich), who became known as the Keating Five. The ethics committee's special counsel concluded that of the five, Glenn (a former astronaut) and McCain (a former war hero) were not really involved in the influence-peddling scheme. Indeed, it was widely believed at the time that the Democratic party, which at the time controlled the Senate, wanted McCain -- the only Republican in the group -- to remain a target of the investigation in order to avoid the impression that the scandal was only a Democratic problem. As Glenn's involvement with Keating was equivalent to McCain's, the only reason that Glenn was made a subject of the investigation was to keep McCain in the suspected group. In August 1991, the committee concluded that Cranston, DeConcini, and Riegle's conduct constituted substantial interference with the FHLBB's enforcement efforts and that they had done so at the behest of Charles Keating. The committee recommended censure for Cranston and criticized the other four for "questionable conduct." As it happened, Cranston, who was nearly 80 years of age, had already decided not to run for re-election in 1992. DeConcini and Riegle continued to serve in the Senate until their terms expired in 1992, but they did not seek re-election in 1994. Glenn did choose to run for re-election in 1992 and it was anticipated that he would have some difficulty winning a fourth term in the Senate. However, Glenn handily defeated U.S. Rep. R. Michael DeWine for one more term in the Senate before retiring in 1999. McCain also remained in the Senate and he made campaign finance reform a key legislative interest. The scandal was followed by a number of attempts to adopt campaign finance reform -- spearheaded by U.S. Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) -- but most attempts died in committee. A weakened reform was passed in the first year of President Bill Clinton's first term of office. Substantial campaign finance reform was not passed until the adoption of the McCain-Feingold Act. Keating

Savings and loan

A savings and loan association is a financial institution which specializes in accepting savings deposits and making mortgage loans. They are often mutually held (often called mutual savings banks), meaning that the depositors and borrowers are members with voting rights and have the ability to direct the financial and managerial goals of the organization. It is possible for a savings and loan to be stock-based and even publicly traded. This means, however, that it truly no longer is an association and depositors and borrowers no longer have any managerial control.

Early history of the savings and loan association

At the beginning of the 19th century, banking was still something only done by those that had assets or wealth that needed safekeeping. The first savings bank in the United States, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, was established on December 20, 1816, and by the 1830s such institutions had become widespread. Savings and loans accepted deposits and used those deposits, along with other capital that was in their possession, to make loans. What was revolutionary was that the management of the savings and loan was determined by those that held deposits and in some instances had loans. The amount of influence in the management of the organization was determined based on the amount on deposit with the institution. The overriding goal of the savings and loan association was to encourage savings and investment by common people and to give them access to a financial intermediary that otherwise had not been open to them in the past. The savings and loan was also there to provide loans for the purchase of large ticket items, usually homes, for worthy and responsible borrowers. The early savings and loans were in the business of "neighbors helping neighbors". In the United Kingdom, the first savings bank was founded in 1810 by the Reverend Henry Duncan, Doctor of Divinity, the minister of Ruthwell Church in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. It is home to the Savings Bank Museum, in which there are records relating to the history of the savings bank movement in Great Britain, as well as family memorabilia relating to Henry Duncan and other prominent people of the surrounding area.

The savings and loan in the early 20th century

The savings and loan association became a strong force in the early 20th century through assisting people with home ownership, through mortgage lending, and further assisting their members with basic saving and investing outlets, typically through passbook savings accounts and term certificates of deposit.

Early mortgage lending

The earliest of mortgages were not offered by banks, but by insurance companies, and they differed greatly from the mortgage or home loan we are familiar with today. Most early mortgages were short term with some kind of balloon payment at the end of the term, or they were interest only loans which did not pay anything toward the principal of the loan with each payment. As such many people were either perpetually in debt in a continuous cycle of refinancing their home purchase, or lost their home when they were unable to make the balloon payment at the end of the term of that loan. This bothered government regulators who then established the Federal Home Loan Bank and associated Federal Home Loan Bank Board to assist other banks in providing funding to offer long term, amortized loans for home purchases. The idea was to get banks involved in lending, not insurance companies, and to provide realistic loans which people could repay and gain full ownership of their homes. Savings and loan associations sprung up all across the United States because there was low-cost funding available through the Federal Home Loan Bank for the purposes of mortgage lending.

Further advantages

Savings and loans were given a certain amount of preferential treatment by the Federal Reserve inasmuch as they were given the ability to pay higher interest rates on savings deposits compared to a regular commercial bank. The idea was that with marginally higher savings rates, savings and loans would attract more deposits that would allow them to continue to write more mortgage loans which would keep the mortgage market liquid and funds would always be available to potential borrowers. However, savings and loans were not allowed to offer checking accounts until the late 1970s. This impacted the attractiveness of being a savings and loan customer and required many of them to hold accounts across multiple institutions so they could have access to checking and receive competitive savings rates all at the same time. A famous perception of savings and loans at this time was that they used the "3-6-3" business model:
- Take Deposits at 3 percent
- Lend at 6 percent
- Be on the golf course at 3 o'clock.

Regulatory changes

Savings and loan failures

See Savings and Loan crisis

The modern savings and loan

Modern savings and loan associations tend to look and feel like any other bank participating in retail banking. Recent changes in US regulations allow them to refer to themselves as banks or savings banks. The services offered today to individuals are similar, if not identical, to services offered by commercial banks or credit unions. Examples of Savings and Loans include:
- Washington Mutual
- World Savings

External links


- [http://www.ots.treas.gov/ Office of Thrift Supervision] Category:Financial services companies

Charles Keating

:For the actor, see Charles Keating (actor) Charles H. Keating Jr. (born 1923 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is a U.S. American lawyer and banker convicted of fraud in the Savings and Loan scandal of 1989. A conservative Catholic active in the Republican Party, he was formerly involved in anti-pornography efforts.

Early life, education and the war

Keating served as a fighter pilot in World War II. Subsequently he attended the University of Cincinnati and received a law degree after 2½ years, in 1948. He became a founding partner of the Cincinnati law firm Keating, Muething & Klekamp. Together with his wife Marie Elaine, he has five daughters and a son.

Anti-pornography efforts

In the late 1950s, Keating founded the Cincinnati anti-pornography organization Citizens for Decent Literature, later Citizens for Decency through Law. In 1960 he testified against pornography before Congress. In 1964–1965, he produced the movie Perversion for Profit featuring announcer George Putnam. It is a survey of then-available pornography, and an attempt to link pornography to the decline of culture and to the depravity of youth. In 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed Keating to the President's commission on pornography, which had been begun under Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Keating unsuccessfully attempted to stop publication of the commission's rather liberal recommendations with a restraining order. Failing in that effort, he filed a dissenting report, stating "One can consult all the experts he chooses, can write reports, make studies, etc., but the fact that obscenity corrupts lies within the common sense, the reason, and the logic of every man." Keating was also instrumental in the (rather ineffective) obscenity prosecution of pornographer Larry Flynt in 1976 in Cincinnati. In the 1996 Flynt biopic The People vs. Larry Flynt, he was portrayed by James Cromwell. He also appears in the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat.

Failure of Saving & Loan, the Keating Five

In 1972, Keating began to work for American Financial Corp., a company involved in insurance and banking. Four years later he moved to Phoenix, Arizona to run the real estate firm American Continental Corporation, a spin-off of American Financial Corp. In 1984, American Continental Corporation bought the Californian Lincoln Savings. Such savings and loan associations had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make highly risky investments with their depositors' money, which Keating took advantage of. Some regulators noted the danger and pushed for more oversight, but Congress refused. Some of this may be due to the Keating Five, five Senators (Dennis DeConcini, John McCain, Alan Cranston, John Glenn, Don Riegle) who had received some $300,000 from Keating in the 1980s. They later met twice with regulators who were investigating American Continental Corp., in an attempt to end the investigation. (In 1990, they would be rebuked to various degrees by the Senate Ethics Committee.) In 1985, Keating hired Alan Greenspan as an economic consultant, in an effort to convince an oversight agency to exempt Lincoln Savings from certain regulations. Greenspan delivered a favorable report, writing that Lincoln Savings was "a financially strong institution that presents no foreseeable risk to depositors or the government." (Greenspan produced similar favorable reports on numerous other banks that also failed soon after.) The agency ultimately declined the request. American Continental Corporation, the parent of Lincoln Savings, went bankrupt in 1989; more than 21,000 mostly elderly investors lost their life savings, in total about $285 million, largely because they held securities backed by the parent company rather than deposits in the federally-insured institution, a distinction apparently lost on many if not most of them until it was too late. The federal government covered almost $3 billion of Lincoln's losses when it seized the institution. Many creditors were made whole, and the government then attempted to liquidate the seized assets through its Resolution Trust Corporation, often at pennies on the dollar compared to what the property had allegedly been worth and the valuation at which loans against it had been made. In 1989, Keating refused to testify before the House Banking Committee, "taking the Fifth".

Legal consequences

Keating blamed the government regulators for the failure of Lincoln Savings and filed suit in order to regain control over the bank. The suit was dismissed in August 1990, with the judge calling the seizing "fully justified" because of the "looting" of the institution by Keating and his associates. In September 1990, Keating was criminally charged with having duped Lincoln's customers into buying worthless junk bonds of American Continental Corporation; he was convicted in state court in 1992 of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy and received a 10 year prison sentence. In January 1993, a federal conviction followed, with a 12 and a half year sentence. He spent four and a half years in prison, but both sentences were eventually overturned. In the 1980s, Keating had donated some $1,250,000 to Mother Teresa; during his state trial, she wrote a letter on his behalf to presiding Judge Lance Ito, saying that she was not informed about his business but she knew him as a man who was generous towards the poor. Various government agencies and private parties initiated civil lawsuits against Keating. One federal class action case involving 20,000 plaintiffs resulted in a $3.3 billion judgement (later reduced to $1.6 billion) against him and his former companies, for having defrauded investors. Another case filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was settled in 1994. Keating claimed to be bankrupt but agreed to repay millions should any hidden assets turn up. A third case filed by the Resolution Trust Corporation resulted in a summary judgement of $4.3 billion against Keating and his wife in 1994; it was overturned on appeal in 1999. Also in 1999, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the state trial judge Lance Ito had mistakenly allowed the jury to convict Keating without determining whether he intended to defraud investors. Thus the conviction was overturned; the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the government's appeal in October 2000, and state prosecutors declined to move for a retrial. In 1998, the same Court of Appeals had ruled that some of the jurors in the federal case might have been influenced by their knowledge of the state case and ordered the trial judge to investigate the matter; the trial judge then granted a new trial. In 1999, on the eve of the retrial of the federal case, Keating entered a plea agreement: he admitted to having committed bankruptcy fraud by extracting $1 million from American Financial Corp. while already anticipating the collapse that happened weeks later; in return, the federal prosecutors dropped all other charges against him and his son, Charles Keating III. He was sentenced to the four years he had already served. Keating remains essentially unrepentant, maintaining that not his mistakes, but regulators' actions, were ultimately responsible for the losses.

Swimming

In the 1940s, Charles Keating was a champion swimmer, winning the 1946 NCAA 200 yard butterfly competition. His son Charles Keating III swam in the 1976 Olympics, and his grandson Gary Hall Jr. competed in three Olympics and won 10 medals. Charles Keating has been a long-time supporter of U.S. swimming and helped to finance modern pools in Cincinnati and Phoenix.

External links


- Keating's anti-porn movie [http://webdev.archive.org/movies/movieslisting-browse.php?collection=prelinger&cat=Pornography Perversion for Profit]
- [http://www.newsmeat.com/ceo_political_donations/Charles_Keating.php Charles Keating's federal campaign contributions]
- [http://www.fdic.gov/bank/historical/s&l/slbib9.html Bibliography about Keating's involvement in the S&L scandal]
- [http://web.archive.org/web/20040218161907/http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/cac/pr/072.htm News Release] by the U.S. Department of Justice on Keating's guilty plea, 6 April 1999 Keating, Charles Keating, Charles Keating, Charles Keating, Charles

United States Department of Justice

:Justice Department redirects here. For other meanings of the term, see Justice Department (disambiguation). The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is a Cabinet department in the United States government designed to enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. It is administered by the United States Attorney General, one of the original members of the cabinet.

History

Initially the Attorney General was a one-person, part-time job, established by the Judiciary Act of 1789, but this grew with the bureaucracy. At one time the Attorney General gave legal advice to U.S. Congress as well as the President, but this had stopped by 1819 on account of the workload involved. In 1867, the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, led by William Lawrence, conducted an inquiry into the creation of a "law department" headed by the Attorney General and composed of the various department solicitors and district attorneys. On February 19, 1868, Lawrence introduced a bill in Congress to create the Department of Justice. This first bill was unsuccessful, however, as Lawrence could not devote enough time to ensure its passage owing to his occupation with the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. At last, eighty-one years after the establishment of the Office of the Attorney General, the Department of Justice was established. A second bill was introduced to Congress by Rhode Island Representative Thomas Jenckes on February 25, 1870, and both the Senate and House passed the bill. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law on June 22, 1870. Officially, the Department of Justice began operations on July 1, 1870. The bill, called the "Act to Establish the Department of Justice", did little to change the Attorney General's responsibilities, and his salary and tenure remained the same. The law did create a new office, that of Solicitor General, to supervise and conduct government litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States. Various efforts, none entirely successful, have been made to determine the meaning of the Latin motto appearing on the Department of Justice seal, Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur. It is not even known exactly when the original version of the DOJ seal itself was adopted, or when the motto first appeared on the seal. The most authoritative opinion of the DOJ suggests that the motto refers to the Attorney General (and thus to the Department of Justice) "who prosecutes on behalf of justice (or the Lady Justice)".

Operating units


- Antitrust Division
- Asset Forfeiture Program
- Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE or ATFE)
- Civil Division
- Civil Rights Division
- Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS)
- Community Relations Service
- Criminal Division
  - U.S. DOJ Office of Special Investigations(OSI)
- Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
  - Diversion Control Program
- Environment and Natural Resources Division
- Executive Office for Immigration Review
- Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys (see also U.S. Attorney)
- Executive Office for U.S. Trustees
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
- Federal Bureau of Prisons
  - National Institute of Corrections
- Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the United States
- INTERPOL — U.S. National Central Bureau
- Justice Management Division
- National Crime Information Center
- National Drug Intelligence Center
- National Security Service
- Office of the Associate Attorney General
- Office of the Attorney General
- Office of Attorney Recruitment and Management
- Office of the Deputy Attorney General
- Office of Dispute Resolution
- Office of Information and Privacy
- Office of the Inspector General
- Office of Intelligence Policy and Review
- Office of Intergovernmental Affairs
- Office of Justice Programs (OJP)
  - American Indian and Alaska Native Affairs Desk
  - Bureau of Justice Assistance
  - Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
  - Community Dispute Resolution
  - Corrections Program Office
  - Drug Courts Program Office
  - Executive Office for Weed and Seed
  - National Criminal Justice Reference Service
  - National Institute of Justice (NIJ)
  - Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
  - Office for Victims of Crime
  - Violence Against Women Office
- Office of Legal Counsel
- Office of Legal Policy
- Office of Legislative Affairs
- Office of the Ombudsperson
- Office of the Pardon Attorney
- Office of Professional Responsibility
- Office of Public Affairs
- Office of the Solicitor General
- Office of Tribal Justice
- Tax Division
- U.S. Attorneys
- United States Marshals Service
- U.S. Parole Commission
- U.S. Trustee Program In March 2003, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished and its functions transferred to the United States Department of Homeland Security. The Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Board of Immigration Appeals which review decisions made by government officials under Immigration and Nationality law remain under jursidiction of the Department of Justice.

See also

United States Assistant Attorney General

External link


- [http://www.usdoj.gov/ United States Department of Justice website] Justice Department of Justice
-

Alan Cranston

Alan MacGregor Cranston (June 19, 1914 – December 31, 2000) was a U.S. journalist and politician. He was born in Palo Alto, California and attended Pomona College and the National Autonomous University of Mexico before graduating from Stanford University in 1936. He was a correspondent for the International News Service for two years preceding World War II. When an abridged English-language translation of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf was released, sanitized to exclude some of Hitler's anti-semitism and militancy, Cranston published an abridged and annotated translation which he believed more accurately reflected the contents of the book. In 1939, Hitler's publisher sued him for copyright violation in the state of Connecticut; a judge ruled in Hitler's favor and publication of the book was halted. Before enlisting in the armed forces in 1944 as a private (he held the rank of sergeant at his discharge), he worked in the Office of War Information. The following year he wrote a second book, The Killing of the Peace, a synopsis of the failed bid to get the United States to join the League of Nations immediately following World War I. Cranston, a supporter of world government, became president of the World Federalist Society in 1948[http://www.antiwar.com/bock/b010301.html]. He successfully pushed for his state's legislature to pass the 1949 World Federalist California Resolution, calling on Congress to amend the Constitution to allow U.S. participation in a federal world government. A Democrat, Cranston was elected California State Controller in 1958 and reelected in 1962. In 1968, he was elected to the first of what would prove to be four six-year terms United States Senate, defeating Republican Max Rafferty in the general election after Rafferty had defeated the liberal Republican incumbent, Thomas Kuchel, in that party's primary, which was so acrimonious that many of Kuchel's supporters spitefully backed Cranston in the November election. The general election itself was also marred by mudslinging, as a conservative writer, Frank Capell, authored a pamphlet suggesting that Cranston may have had Communist leanings in his youth, and that during his stint at the Office of War Information he helped falsely convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Nazi Germany and not the Soviet Union had perpetrated the Katyn Forest Massacre (many of these same allegations would be recycled in an article that ran in American Opinion magazine in 1974 entitled Alan Cranston: The Shadow in the Senate, the article's title a reference to Lamont Cranston, the name of the main character in the popular mid-century radio program The Shadow). Cranston was Democratic Whip from 1977 to 1991 and an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination for the 1984 election. He was reprimanded by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics for "improper conduct" on November 20, 1991 after he accepted $1 million from Charles Keating. The committee deemed Cranston's misconduct the worst among the Keating Five. Cranston decided against running for a fifth term while he battled prostate cancer. He dedicated his retirement to the global abolition of nuclear weapons, first through the Nuclear Weapon Elimination Initiative of the State of the World Forum, and then as President of the Global Security Institute, which he founded in 1999. He lived in Los Altos, California from his retirement until his death.

References


- Bock, Alan: [http://www.antiwar.com/bock/b010301.html Eye on the Empire], Antiwar.com. Cranston, Alan Cranston, Alan Cranston, Alan Cranston, Alan Cranston, Alan Cranston, Alan

United States/Democratic Party

The Democratic Party, founded in 1792, is the longest-standing political party in the world. It is one of the two major parties in the United States, the other being the Republican Party. Currently it is the minority party in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. Democrats control 20 state legislatures, as do the Republicans (nine states have different parties in control of the upper and lower chambers, while Nebraska's unicameral legislature is elected on a nonpartisan basis). In 2005, the Democrats regained a majority of legislative seats nationwide. Of the two major U.S. parties, the Democratic Party is to the left of the Republican Party, though its politics are not as consistently leftist as the traditional social democratic and labor parties in much of the world. The Democratic Party is more notably factional than many major parties in the industrialized world, partly because American political parties in general do not have as much official power to control members as political parties in many other countries, and partly because the United States does not have a parliamentary goverment.

History

Beginnings

labor-1837).]] The Democratic Party's origins lie in the original Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1792. Today, that party is usually referred to as the "Democratic-Republican Party" to avoid confusion. After the disintegration of the Federalist Party, the Democratic-Republicans were the only major party in American politics. For 20 years, different factions of the party contended for the presidency, whose candidates were nominated by congressional caucuses. In 1824, a particularly bitter election was thrown to the House of Representatives, and won by John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford, and Henry Clay. Jackson, recovering from his defeat, gathered together prominent leaders, including Martin Van Buren of New York and even Vice President John C. Calhoun to support his next bid for the presidency. By the election of 1828, the unified party broke into two. One became the National Republican Party, and backed the incumbent President, and the other, which became known as the Democratic Party, after their insistence that the President hold a national mandate from the people, backed Andrew Jackson. The National Republican faction became the Whig Party (after their opposition to "King Andrew"), which would disintegrate in the 1850s when dissident Whigs and Northern Democrats formed the Republican Party.

Antebellum

Initially the Democratic Party was a coalition between Western pioneers in the Ohio River valley and Illinois - the "North West" of the U.S. at that time - and Southern planters and agrarians from the Jeffersonian coalition. This coalition was very similar to the one that Jefferson and Madison had worked to create, and lead to the belief that Jackson, and not John Quincy Adams, represented a continuous "Jeffersonian" tradition. This was in opposition to the Federalist and Hamiltonian conception of government which Adams was said to represent. The key issues were election access and the Bank of the United States. The Jeffersonians had opposed the first bank, but had allowed it to continue for 20 years of their time in power. The issue of the Bank, and tariffs would be the central domestic policy issue from 1828 to 1850, even though it was increasingly overshadowed by expansion and nativism in the run up to the Civil War. The Democratic Party would lose the presidency to William Henry Harrison, only to gain it back when his Vice President took office, and proceeded to enact many policies the party favored. James Polk would solidify the party's hold on power with a coalition that was increasingly based on holding a solid South and taking enough states in the North to win national power. The party also became increasingly associated with continuation of slavery, including pressing for more and more aggressive laws to enforce the recapture of enslaved individuals who had escaped, and for more of the Great Plains to be opened to slavery. This ran into the Missouri Compromise, which had set a free line, north of which slavery would be prohibited, in return for keeping a balance of power in the Senate. With the disintegration of the Whig Party in 1856 into two factions, the American Party of Millard Fillmore and the Republican Party whose first candidate was John Fremont, it seemed as if the Democratic Party would have a permanent dominance of political power.

Civil War and Reconstruction

In the 1850s, following the disintegration of the Whig Party, the Democratic Party became increasingly divided, with its Southern wing staunchly advocating the expansion of slavery into new territories, in opposition to the newly founded Republican Party, which sought to prohibit such expansion. Democrats in the Northern states joined the Republicans in opposing the expansion of slavery, and at the 1860 nominating convention the Party split and nominated two candidates (see U.S. presidential election, 1860). As a result, the Democrats went down to defeat with the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, a link in the chain of events leading up to the Civil War. During the war, Northern Democrats divided into two factions, War Democrats, who supported the military policies of President Abraham Lincoln, and Copperheads, who strongly opposed them. After 1864, the Democratic Party's main opposition has come from the modern Republican Party. The Democrats were shattered by the war but nevertheless benefited from white Southerners' resentment of Reconstruction and consequent hostility to the Republican Party. Once Reconstruction ended, and the disenfranchisement of blacks was re-established, the region was known as the "Solid South" for nearly a century because it reliably voted Democratic and there was, in many places, effectively only one party, there being no significant Republican presence. Though Republicans continued to control the White House until 1885, the Democrats remained competitive, especially in the mid-Atlantic and lower Midwest, and controlled the House of Representatives for most of that period. In the election of 1884, Grover Cleveland, the reforming Democratic Governor of New York, won the Presidency, a feat he repeated in 1892, having lost (but won the popular vote) in the election of 1888 (as had Samuel J. Tilden in the election of 1876).

Populism and Republican dominance

In the presidential election of 1896, widely regarded as a political realignment, Democrats favoring Free Silver defeated their conservative counterparts and succeeded in nominating William Jennings Bryan for the presidency (as did the agrarian Populist Party). Bryan, perhaps best known for his "Cross of Gold" speech delivered at the 1896 convention, waged a vigorous campaign attacking Eastern monied interests, but lost to Republican William McKinley in an election which was to prove decisive: the Republicans controlled the presidency for 28 of the following 36 years.

The New Deal

William McKinley The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression set the stage for a more progressive government and Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide victory in the election of 1932, campaigning on a platform of "Relief, Recovery, and Reform". This came to be termed "The New Deal" after a phrase in his acceptance speech. The Democrats also swept to large majorities in both houses of Congress, and among state Governors. Roosevelt altered the nature of the Party, away from laissez-faire capitalism, and towards an ideology of economic regulation and insurance against hardship. After winning re-election in 1936, Roosevelt embarked on an ambitious legislative program that came to be called "The Second New Deal." He was stymied, however, by an alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats, as well as by the Supreme Court. Frustrated by the conservative wing of his own party, Roosevelt made an attempt to rid himself of it; in 1938, he actively campaigned against five incumbent conservative Democratic senators, and to appoint more justices to the Court. However, Roosevelt's attempt to chastise the conservatives failed when all five senators won re-election despite Roosevelt's efforts, and his attempts to add justices to the Court became derisively known as "Court Packing". Roosevelt's New Deal programs focused on job creation through public works projects as well as on social welfare programs such as Social Security. It also included sweeping reforms to the banking system, work regulation, transportation, communications, stock markets and attempts to regulate prices. His policies soon paid off by uniting a diverse coalition of Democratic voters called the New Deal Coalition, which included labor unions, minorities (most significantly, Catholics and Jews), and liberals. This united voter base allowed Democrats to be elected to Congress and the presidency for much of the next 30 years. Under Roosevelt, the Democratic Party became identified more closely with modern liberalism, which included the promotion of social welfare, civil rights, and regulation of the economy.

Civil Rights Movement

In 1924 at the Democratic National Convention, a resolution denouncing the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan was introduced. After much debate, the resolution failed by just a single vote. This resolution later passed during the 1948 Democratic National Convention as part of a larger resolution endorsing civil rights. civil rights when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.]] The New Deal Coalition began to fracture as more Democratic leaders voiced support for civil rights, upsetting the party's traditional base of conservative Southern Democrats. After Harry Truman's platform showed support for civil rights and anti-segregation laws during the 1948 Democratic National Convention, many Southern Democratic delegates decided to split from the Party and formed the "Dixiecrats", led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond. Over the next few years, many conservative Democrats in the "Solid South" drifted away from the party. On the other hand, African Americans, who had traditionally given strong support to the Republican Party since its inception as the "anti-slavery party", shifted to the Democratic Party due to its New Deal economic policies. The national party's dramatic reversal on civil rights issues culminated when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Meanwhile, the Republicans were beginning their Southern strategy, which aimed to solidify the Republican Party's electoral hold over conservative white Southerners. Southern Democrats took notice of the fact that 1964 Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act on states rights grounds, and in the presidential election of 1964, Goldwater's only electoral victories outside his home state of Arizona were in the states of the Deep South. The degree to which the Southern Democrats had abandoned the party became evident in the 1968 Presidential election when every former Confederate state except Texas voted for either Republican Richard Nixon or independent George Wallace, the latter a former Southern Democrat. Defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey's electoral votes came mainly from the Northern states, marking a dramatic shift from the 1948 election 20 years earlier, when the losing Republican candidate's electoral votes were mainly concentrated in the Northern states.

1970s

In 1972, the Democrats nominated South Dakota Senator George McGovern as the Party's presidential candidate on a platform which advocated, among other things, U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans. McGovern was defeated in a landslide by incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon, the former winning only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. By 1976, however, things had changed dramatically. Nixon, under criticism during the Watergate scandal, resigned from the presidency in 1974. Prior to that, his Vice President, Spiro Agnew had been forced out by a separate scandal. After Agnew resigned, Nixon appointed Gerald Ford, a Republican Representative from Michigan as Agnew's replacement. Thus, when Nixon resigned, Ford became the first President in the nation's history to have been neither elected President nor Vice President. Ford soon pardoned Nixon. Mistrust of the administration, complicated by a combination of economic recession and inflation, sometimes called "stagflation," led to Ford's defeat in 1976 to Jimmy Carter, a former Governor of Georgia. In 1980, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan after serving one term in office.

1980s

Instrumental in the election of Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1980, were Democrats who supported many conservative policies. The "Reagan Democrats" were Democrats before the Reagan years, and afterwards, but they voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 (and for George H. W. Bush in 1988), producing their landslide victories. They were mostly white ethnics in the Northeast who were attracted to Reagan's social conservatism on issues such as abortion, and to his strong foreign policy. They did not continue to vote Republican in 1992 or 1996, so the term fell into disuse except as a reference to the 1980s. The term is not used to describe southern whites who became permanent Republicans in presidential elections. Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster analyzed white ethnic voters, largely unionized auto workers, in suburban Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63 percent for Kennedy in 1960 and 66 percent for Reagan in 1984. He concluded that Reagan Democrats no longer saw Democrats as champions of their middle class aspirations, but instead saw it as being a party working primarily for the benefit of others, especially African Americans and the very poor. Bill Clinton targeted the Reagan Democrats with considerable success in 1992 and 1996. The failure to hold the Reagan Democrats and the white South led to the final collapse of the New Deal coalition. Reagan carried 49 states against former Vice President and Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, a New Deal stalwart, in 1984. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, running not as a New Dealer but as an efficiency expert in public adminsitration, lost by a landslide in 1988 to Vice President George H. W. Bush. In response to these landslide defeats, the Democratic Leadership Council was created. It worked to move the Party rightwards to the ideological center. With the Party retaining left-of-center supporters as well as supporters holding moderate or conservative views on some issues, the Democrats became generally a catch all party with widespread appeal to most opponents of the Republicans.

1990s

catch all party In 1992, for the first time in 12 years, the United States elected a Democrat to the White House. They seemingly revived themselves only to lose both the House and Senate in the mid-year 1994 elections. While President Bill Clinton claimed and got credit for a balanced federal budget and welfare reform, congressional Republicans won on policy throughout the 1990’s. Clinton for example vetoed two welfare reform bills before signing the third, largely the same, right before the 1996 presidential elections. Labor unions, which had been steadily losing membership since the 1960s, found they had also lost political clout inside the Democratic Party: Clinton enacted the NAFTA free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico over the strong objection of these labor unions, much to the disappointment of those on the left of the Party. When the DLC attempted to move the Democratic agenda in favor of more centrist positions, prominent Democrats from both the centrist and conservative factions (such as Terry McAuliffe) assumed leadership of the party and its direction. Some liberals and progressives felt alienated by the Democratic Party, which they felt had become unconcerned with the interests of the common people and left-wing issues in general. Some Democrats challenged the validity of such critiques, citing the Democratic role in pushing for progressive reforms.

21st century

During the 2000 Presidential election, the Democrats chose Vice President Al Gore to be the Party's candidate for the presidency. Although Gore and George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, clearly disagreed on issues such as abortion, gun control, environmentalism, gay rights, foreign policy, public education, trade unionism, alternative fuel research, global warming, judicial appointments, and affirmative action, some critics -- Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader in particular -- asserted that Bush and Gore were too similar because they held the same views on free trade and reductions in government-funded social welfare. On election day, Gore won the popular vote by just over 500,000 votes, but lost in the electoral college by four votes. Some election observers blamed Nader's third-party candidacy for Gore's defeat. They pointed to the states of New Hampshire (4 electoral votes) and Florida (25 electoral votes), where Nader's total votes exceeded Governor Bush's margin of victory. In Florida, Nader received 97,000 votes; Bush defeated Gore by a mere 538. Winning either Florida or New Hampshire would have given Gore enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Florida by 538 votes in Florida in one of the most controversial elections, although he won the national popular vote.]] Republican Senators went from the majority in the 106th Congress to a split minority in the 107th Congress (with a Republican Vice President breaking a tie). However, when liberal Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vermont) changed his party affiliation to unaffiliated and chose to quorum with the Democrats, majoritarian status went to the Democrats but they lost it again in 2002. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the nation's focus was changed to issues of national security. All but one Democrat voted with their Republican counterparts to authorize President Bush's 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Senatorial Democratic leader Tom Daschle pushed for his party to approve the USA PATRIOT Act and the invasion of Iraq. The Democrats were split over the 2003 invasion of Iraq and increasingly expressed concerns about both the justification and progress of the War on Terrorism and the domestic effects including threats to civil rights and civil liberties from the USA PATRIOT Act. In the wake of the financial fraud scandal of Enron and other corporations, Congressional Democrats were integral in pushing for and developing a legal overhaul of business accounting with the intention of preventing further accounting fraud. With job losses and bankruptcies across regions and industries increasing in 2001 and 2002, the Democrats generally campaigned on the issue of economic recovery. The Democrats began fielding Presidential candidates as early as December 2002, when Gore announced he would not run again in 2004. Ex-Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, an opponent of the war and a critic of the Democratic establishment, was the frontrunner leading into the Democratic primaries. Dean had immense grassroots support, especially from the left wing of the Party. John Kerry, a much more centrist figure, was nominated because he was seen as more "electable" than Dean. In the time from 2003 to 2004, layoffs of American workers occurring in various industries due to outsourcing, some Democrats (including Howard Dean and Senatorial candidate Erskine Bowles of North Carolina) began to refine their positions on free trade and some even questioned their past support for it. By 2004, the failure of George W. Bush's administration to find weapons of mass destruction, mounting combat casualties and fatalities in Iraq, and the lack of any end point for the War on Terror were frequently debated issues in the election. That year, Democrats generally campaigned on surmounting the jobless recovery, exiting Iraq, and counterterrorism. jobless recovery Despite strong campaigning, the Republican Party won across the board. Kerry lost both the popular and electoral vote. Republicans gained four seats in the Senate and three seats in the House of Representatives. Also, for the first time since Barry Goldwater of Arizona won his first election to the Senate, the Democratic leader of the Senate lost re-election. In the end there were 3,660 Democratic state legislators across the nation to the Republicans' 3,557, and Democrats had gained governorships in Louisiana, New Hampshire and Montana. However, the Democrats lost the governorship of Missouri and a legislative majority in Georgia - which had once been a Democratic stronghold since Reconstruction. The most common hypothesis for why the Democrats lost was that the Republicans ran in opposition to gay rights and used state ballot initiatives against same-sex marriage to attract more so-called "values voters" to the polls.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_%28United_States%29#ref_4] Other hypothesis include that the Democrats had been tagged with too negative of a public image [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_%28United_States%29#ref_3] and that the Democrats failed to clearly articulate its true values, goals and issue positions.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_%28United_States%29#ref_2] Flaws in the electoral systems in Ohio and Florida led some to speculate the validity of the results (Bush received a majority of votes in both states); these controversies led Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and several Democratic U.S. Representatives (including John Conyers of Michigan) to force a Congressional debate on the issue when the 109th Congress first convened and propose disapproving the election results, a proposal that the neither House approved. (See 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities.) Since then, many Democrats have voiced serious concern about the future of their party. Prominent Democrats began to rethink the party's direction, and a variety of strategies for moving forward were voiced. Some have suggested moving towards the right to regain seats in the House and Senate and possibly win the presidency in 2008. Others suggested that the party move more to the left and become a stronger opposition party. These debates were reflected in the 2005 campaign for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which Howard Dean won over the objections of many party insiders. Dean sought to move the Democratic strategy away from the establishment, and bolster support for the party's state and local chapters.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_%28United_States%29#ref_6] When the 109th Congress convened, Democratic Senators chose Harry Reid of Nevada as their Minority Leader and Richard Durbin of Illinois to replace Reid as their Assistant Minority Leader. Reid convinced the Democratic Senators to vote more as a bloc on important issues, something which forced the Republicans to abandon their push for privatization of Social Security and instatement of the "nuclear option" to end judicial filibuster. The Senate did not vote on either proposal.

Factions

Centrists

Centrist Democrats identify with centrism and compromise. Though centrist Democrats differ on a variety of issues, they typically foster a mix of political views and ideas. Compared to other Democratic factions, they're mostly more supportive of the use of military force, and are more willing to end or reduce government sponsored initiatives, as indicated by their support for welfare reform and tax cuts. Prominent centrist Democrats in recent times have included former Arkansas governor and U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton, former First Lady/U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (New York), former U.S. Vice Pres. Al Gore (Tennessee), Gov. Tom Vilsack (Iowa), Gov. Mark Warner (Virginia), U.S. Sens. Joe Biden (Delaware), Joe Lieberman (Connecticut), Harry Reid (Nevada), and former U.S. Sen. John Edwards (North Carolina). This faction of Democrats are also affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council and are usually referred to as New Democrats.

Progressives

Many progressives are descendants of the New Left of Democratic Presidential candidate/Senator George McGovern of South Dakota; others were involved in the presidential candidacies of Howard Dean and U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. Progressive Democratic candidates for public office have had popular support as candidates in urban areas, the Northeast, the Midwest, and among African-Americans nationwide, though they have also been supported by other groups. Unifying issues among progressive Democrats have been opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, opposition to economic and social conservatism, support for universal healthcare and steering the Democratic Party in the direction of being a more forceful opposition party. Compared to other factions of the party, they've been most critical of the Republican Party, and most supportive of social and economic equality. Progressive Democrats have included Kucinich, Congressman John Conyers (Michigan), Congressman/civil rights activist John Lewis (Georgia), and late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone (Minnesota).

Labor

One of the most important parts of the Democratic Party coalition is the labor vote. They supply a great deal of the money, grass roots political organization and base of support for the party. While Union membership has fallen over the last four decades, the labor union component of the party is still very important. The Union vote tends to be more protectionist than centrists in the party. The labor wing is concerned with issues such as the minimum wage, as well as protection of pensions, collective bargaining and access to health insurance. Prominent members of this wing include Andy Stern of SEIU. Other important union organizations in the Democratic coalition include AFSCME, UAW, and the AFL-CIO. Most of the members in this faction tend to identify more with the progressive faction of the party.

Liberals

Liberal Democrats are to the left of centrist Democrats. The liberal faction was dominant in the party for several decades, until centrist forces asserted primary control. Compared to conservatives and moderates, liberal Democrats generally have advocated fair trade and other less conservative economic policies, and a less militaristic foreign policy, and have a reputation of being more forceful in pushing for civil liberties. Liberals are increasingly identified as being part of the larger progressive wing of the party. Prominent liberal Democrats include U.S. Sens. Russ Feingold (Wisconsin), Ted Kennedy (Massachusetts) and Tom Harkin (Iowa) and House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (California).

Conservatives

The Democratic Party was once a very conservative party, with a very influential Southern wing, though this changed as conservatives started to join the Republican Party. Many on the conservative wing of the party were referred to by terms such as "yellow dog Democrats", "boll weevils", "Dixiecrats", and "Reagan Democrats". Conservatives who left the party were known to make candidacies against Democrats who desired ethnic integration; some went as far as to establish third parties in order to run against other Democrats in general elections. Eventually, most of the once large conservative faction switched to the Republican Party as it became more conservative in the late 60s and 70s. There remains, however, a viable conservative wing of the Democratic Party, one which was mostly southern. These Democrats have consisted typically of moderate conservatives who feel the Republican Party does not share the values they hold most important; these mostly include conservatives who disagree with the Republican Party's conservative views on trade, taxes and civil rights, who are critical of the policies and actions of the administration of George W. Bush, and who identify with the populism of past Democratic icons. Prominent conservative Democrats of recent time include U.S. Senators Ben Nelson (Nebraska) and Mary Landrieu (Louisiana) and Congressmen Ike Skelton (Missouri), Gene Taylor (Mississippi), Colin Peterson (Minnesota), and Jim Marshall (Georgia).

Notable groups

There are several ideological groups within the modern-day Democratic Party. As the party is made up of several groups with different ideologies, several sub-groups within the party have been set up to promote the ideologies each respective group holds. Although some of these factions do not have official organizations representing them, they are often well-represented within the party. African Americans have voted consistently for Democratic Party candidates in the 85 to 90% range, and as such can be considered a faction in the party. Democratic African American leadership coalesces around the Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights activists and is generally considered liberal in outlook. Senator Barack Obama, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Congressman John Conyers are prominent leaders of this faction. The Democracy for America (DFA) political action committee generally supports fiscally responsible and socially progressive candidates at all levels of government. It was founded by ex-Vermont Governor and current Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean during his presidential campaign; its current Chairman is James H. Dean, Howard Dean's brother. The DFA fights against the influence of the far-right on American politics and works to rebuild the Democratic Party "from the bottom up". One of the most influential factions is the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an influential non-profit organization that advocates centrist positions for the party. Members often self-identify under the word "New Democrat". Centrist party leaders founded the DLC in response to the landslide victory of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan over Democratic candidate Walter Mondale during the 1984 presidential election, believing the Democratic Party needed to reform its political philosophy if it was to ever retake the White House, a goal which had eluded the party since the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter. The DLC hails President Bill Clinton as proof of the viability of third way politicians and a DLC success story. However, critics contend that the DLC is effectively a powerful, corporate-financed mouthpiece within the Democratic Party that acts to keep Democratic Party candidates and platforms sympathetic to corporate interests and the interests of the wealthy. During the 20th century, this included the interests of finance capital with the involvement of the U.S. political families of Kennedy, Rockefeller and Roosevelt. The DLC was founded and continues to be led by Al From. Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa is the current chairman. The 21st Century Democrats is a political organization active since 2000 in assisting candidates it describes as "progressive" or "populist" in winning elections. Its strategy puts emphasis on training large numbers of organizers to work at the grassroots level and targeting specific campaigns it sees as important. It has strong ties to veterans of campaigns for the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone. The Congressional Progressive Caucus or CPC is a caucus of progressive Democrats, along with one independent, in the U.S. Congress. It is the single largest Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives, although it currently has no members from the Senate. Well-known members include Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). The CPC advocates universal health care, fair trade agreements, living wage laws, the right of all workers to organize into trade unions and engage in strike actions and collective bargaining, the abolition of significant portions of the USA PATRIOT Act, the formation of a Department of Peace, the legalization of gay marriage, strict campaign finance reform laws, a complete pullout from the war in Iraq, a crackdown on corporate crime and what they see as corporate welfare, an increase in income tax on the wealthy, tax cuts for the poor, and an increase in welfare spending by the federal government. [http://bernie.house.gov/pc/issues.asp] [http://www.house.gov/lee/CongressionalProgressiveCaucus/] As a key source of political contributions, volunteers, and field organizing expertise, Organized Labor holds significant sway in the Democratic Party. Former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt was a leading supporter of labor in Congress. Trade unions have often been a considerable source of support for the party, and several elections were lost when the Democratic candidates were viewed as less than sufficiently supportive of their interests. Civil libertarians also often support the Democratic Party because its positions on such issues as civil rights and separation of church and state are more closely aligned to their own than the positions of the Republican Party, and because the Democrats' economic agenda may be more appealing to them than that of the Libertarian Party. They oppose the "War on Drugs," protectionism, corporate welfare, immigration restrictions, governmental borrowing, and an interventionist foreign policy. The Democratic Freedom Caucus is an organised group of this faction. The Blue Dog Democrats are a congressional caucus of fiscal and social conservatives and moderates, primarily southerners, willing to broker compromises with the Republican leadership. They have acted as a unified voting bloc in the past, giving its thirty members some ability to change legislation. The name appears to be both a reference to several well-known Louisiana paintings featuring blue dogs, as well as a reference to the old "yellow dog" Democrats having been "choked blue." Traditionally, the color blue has been associated with conservative ideals, contributing to the caucus' name. The Progressive Democrats of America lends itself to the progressive ideology within the party. Founded by members of Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, it does not hold much sway in the Democratic Party, being considered more radically liberal than other factions.

Issues

The principles and values of any political party are difficult to define and apply generally to all members of the party. Some members may disagree with one or more plank of their party's platform. On the budget, the Democrats in the 2004 platform swore to halve the yearly federal budget deficit by 2009. They stated that they seek "a Constitutional version of the line-item veto to make it easier to root out pork-barrel spending." On a major issue affecting civil liberties, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Democratic agenda is to "change the portions of the Patriot Act that threaten individual rights, such as the library provisions." They further explained in their platform, "Our government should never round up innocent people only because of their religion or ethnicity, and we should never stifle free expression." The party is against racial profiling in the war against terror. On crime, Democrats place more focus on methods of prevention of crime rather than on what penalties are applied to crimes. They emphasize improved community policing and more on-duty police officers in order to help accomplish that. Their platforms for 2000 and 2004 also cite crackdowns on gangs and drug trafficking as preventive methods. The 2004 platform also calls for rehabilitation for prisoners, in order to "reintegrate former prisoners into our communities as productive citizens." Their platforms have also particularly addressed the issue of domestic violence, calling for strict penalties for offenders and protections for victims. On equality and nondiscrimination, citing that "a day's work is worth a day's pay," and that on average a woman continues to earn 77% of what a man does, the Democrats call for laws for equal pay. The Democrats wish to uphold the Americans with Disabilities Act to prohibit discrimination against people on the basis of physical or mental disability. The Democrats cite affirmative action as a method with which to redress past discrimination and to ensure equitable employment regardless of ethnicity or gender. On gay marriage, many Democrats have publicly supported civil unions or same sex marriage, but it is not yet an official position of the party as a whole, or any of the members of the party leadership in Congress. The legal standing of gay marriage is a subject of debate within the Democratic Party. In the campaigns for the Party candidacy for the 2004 presidential election, candidates were divided, with John Kerry supporting civil unions while Howard Dean supported same-sex marriage. Most Democrats support the continued legalization of same-sex marriage and/or unions and progress in their nationwide acceptance. Many Democrats consider gay marriage to be a civil right of Americans. On health care, Democrats typically call for "affordable health care," and many advocate an expansion of government funding in this area. In their 2004 platform, the Democrats affirmed the pursuit of federally funded zygotic stem-cell "research under the strictest ethical guidelines, but we will not walk away from the chance to save lives and reduce human suffering." On abortion, the Democrats believe that privacy is a constitutional right. Thus as a matter of privacy and gender equality, women should be allowed to control their fertility and pregnancy, including access to abortion, legalized under Roe v. Wade. Often supporters refer to a "right to choose," without a direct reference to abortion. Many Democratic politicians include in this right practical access to abortion through government subsidies. The party's proposal (in 2000 and 2004) for public policy on termination of pregnancy is for abortion to be "safe, legal and rare" - namely, keeping it legal by rejecting laws that include governmental interference in any individual matter, and reducing the number performed by promoting both knowledge of reproduction and incentives for adoption. On gun control, the Democratic Party has introduced various gun control measures over the last 100 years. Most notable of these is the National Firearms Act of 1934 (signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the 1939 Gun Control Act (also signed into law by FDR), the 1968 Gun Control Act (introduced by Senator Dodd and heavily endorsed by Senator Edward Kennedy), the Brady law of 1993 (signed by President Bill Clinton), and the Crime Control Act of 1994 (also signed by Bill Clinton). However, many Democrats, particularly rural Democrats and especially southern and western Democrats, have dissented and favored more freedom to possess firearms. In the national platform for 2004, the only statement explicitly favoring gun control was a plank calling for renewal of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban .

Symbols

Assault Weapons Ban On January 19, 1870, a political cartoon by Thomas Nast appearing in Harper's Weekly titled "A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion" for the first time symbolized the Democratic Party as a donkey. Since then, the donkey has been widely used as a symbol of the Party. The DNC's official logo, pictured above, depicts a stylized kicking donkey. In the media, Democrats (and states which consistently vote Democratic) have relatively recently been depicted as blue, while Republicans, and the states in which they dominate, as red. In the early 20th century, the traditional symbol of the Democratic Party in Midwestern states such as Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Ohio was the rooster, as opposed to the Republican eagle. This symbol still appears on Kentucky and Indiana ballots. For the majority of the 20th Century, Missouri Democrats used the Statue of Liberty as their ballot emblem. This meant that when Libertarian candidates received ballot access in Missouri in 1976, they could not use the Statue of Liberty, their national symbol, as the ballot emblem. Missouri Libertarians instead used the Liberty Bell until 1995, when the mule became Missouri's state animal. From 1995 to 2004, there was some confusion among voters, as the Democratic ticket was marked with the Statue of Liberty, and it seemed that the Libertarians were using a donkey. The Democratic Party draws on its history of politicians (Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton), programs (Social Security, minimum wage, Medicare) and goals (expanded health insurance, greater incomes for average U.S. citizens, progressive taxation, and an internationalist Wikipedia:Footnotes for details. 1) Assign your footnote a unique name, for example TheSun_Dec9. 2) Add the macro to the body of the article, where you want the new footnote. 3) Take note of the name of the footnote that immediately precedes yours in the article body. 4) Add # to the list, immediately below the footnote you noted in step 3. No need to re-number anything! 5) Multiple footnotes to the same reference: see Wikipedia:Footnotes for a how-to. NOTE: It is important to add footnotes in the right order in the list! --> California is a state located on the west coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous state in the U.S., as well as the most physically diverse, with the highest and the lowest points in the lower 48 states located within 150 miles of each other. If California were an independent nation, it would have the sixth largest economy in the world (after the rest of the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain and France; see economy of California). The state's official nickname is "The Golden State" in reference to California's 1849 Gold Rush. California's U.S. postal abbreviation is CA, and its Associated Press abbreviation is Calif. As one of the most demographically diverse states in the nation, California is a dominant force in American culture as well as the nation's economy. It has some of the nation's largest cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco, and is responsible for many legal and technological innovations. The entire region originally known as California was composed of the Mexican peninsula now known as Baja California and much of the land in the current states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Wyoming, known as Alta California. In these early times, the boundaries of the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific coast were only partially explored and California was shown on early maps as an island. The name comes from Las sergas de Esplandián (Adventures of Splandian), a 16th century novel, by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, where there is an island paradise called California. (For further discussion, see: Origin of the name California.)

History

:Main articles: History of California, History of California (20th century) The first European to explore parts of the coast was the Portuguese João Rodrigues Cabrilho in 1542. The first to explore the entire coast and claim possession of it was Francis Drake in 1579. Beginning in the late 1700s, Spanish missionaries set up tiny settlements on enormous grants of land in the vast territory north of Baja California. The missions played a dominant role in the decimation of California's indigenous population. Upon Mexican independence from Spain, the chain of missions became the property of the Mexican government, and they were quickly dissolved and abandoned. In 1846, at the outset of the Mexican-American War, the California Republic was founded and the Bear Flag was flown, which featured a golden bear and a star. The Republic came to a sudden end, however, when Commodore John D. Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into San Francisco Bay and claimed California for the United States. Following the war, the region was divided between Mexico and the United States. The Mexican portion, Baja (lower) California was later divided into the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur. The western part of the U.S. portion, Alta (upper) California, was to become the state of California. In 1848, the Spanish-speaking population of distant upper California numbered around 4,000. But after gold was discovered, the population burgeoned with Americans and a few Europeans in the great California gold rush. In 1850, the state was admitted to the Union of the USA. During the American Civil War, popular support in California was divided 70% for the South and 30% for the North, and although California officially entered on the side of the North, many troops went east to fight for the Confederacy CSA. At first, travel between the far Pacific West to the eastern population centers was time-consuming and dangerous, requiring either long ocean voyages, or difficult transcontinental passages. A more direct connection came in 1869 with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. After this rail link was established, hundreds of thousands of Americans came west, where new Californians were discovering that land in the state, if irrigated during the dry summer months, was extremely well suited to fruit cultivation and agriculture in general. Citrus, oranges in particular, was widely grown, and the foundation was laid for the state's prodigious agricultural production of today. During the early 20th century, migration to California accelerated with the completion of major transcontinental highways like the Lincoln Highway and Route 66. In the period from 1900 to 1965 the population grew from fewer than one million to become the most populous state in the Union. From 1965 to the present, the population demographic changed radically and became one of the most diverse in the world. The state is generally liberal-leaning, technologically and culturally savvy, and a world center of engineering businesses, the film and television industry and, as mentioned above, American agricultural production.

Law and government

California is governed as a republic, with three branches of government, the executive branch consisting of the Governor of California and the other independently elected constitutional officers, the legislative branch consisting of the Assembly and Senate, and the judicial branch consisting of the Supreme Court of California and lower courts. The state also allows direct participation of the electorate by referendum, recall, and ratification. The Governor of California and the other state constitutional officers serve four-year terms and may be re-elected only once. The California State Legislature consists of a 40 member Senate and 80 member Assembly. Senators serve four year terms and Assembly members two. The terms of the Senators are staggered so that half the membership is elected every two years. The Senators representing the odd-numbered districts are elected in years evenly divisible by four, i.e., presidential election years. The Senators from the even-numbered districts are elected in the intervening even-numbered years, in the gubernatorial election cycle. California's legislature is organized in such a way that the party caucus leaders wield great power and can usually speak on behalf of their caucuses. Many important legislative decisions are thus not made on the floor of the legislature but in back-room deals by the "Big Five", which comprises the governor and the Democratic and Republican leaders of each chamber. For the 2005–2006 session, there are 48 Democrats and 32 Republicans in the Assembly. In the Senate, there are 25 Democrats and 15 Republicans. The current Governor is the Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose current term lasts through January 2007. Schwarzenegger was only the second person in the history of the United States to be put into office by a recall of a sitting governor (the first was the 1921 recall of North Dakota Governor Lynn J. Frazier). Schwarzenegger replaced Governor Gray Davis (1999–2003), who was removed from office by the October 2003 California recall election. The state's capital is Sacramento. During California's early history under European control, the capital was successively located in Monterey (1775–1849), San Jose (1849–1851), Vallejo (1852–1853), Benicia (1853–1854), and San Francisco (1862). The capital moved to Sacramento temporarily in 1852 when construction on a State House could not be completed in time in Vallejo. The capital's final move to Sacramento was on February 25, 1854 where it has been permanently, except for a four-month temporary move in 1862 to San Francisco, due to severe flooding in Sacramento. California's giant judiciary is the largest in the United States (with a total of 1,600 judges, while the federal system has only about 840). It is supervised by the seven Justices of the Supreme Court of California. Justices of the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal are appointed by the Governor, but are subject to retention by the electorate every 12 years. Judges of the trial courts, the Superior Courts in each county, may be appointed by the Governor or elected directly by the voters, depending on when the vacancy occurs. Superior Court judges serve six-year terms, after which they may run for re-election. Unlike the retention elections for Supreme Court and Court of Appeal justices, Superior Court judges run for re-election in open races, in which other qualified candidates may run as challengers. California's legal system is explicitly based on English common law but carries a few features from Spanish civil law. Capital punishment is a legal form of punishment and the state has the largest "Death Row" population in the country. At the national level, California is represented by two senators and 53 representatives, as of 2005. It has 55 electoral votes in the U.S. Electoral College. (As California is the most populous state in the Union, its counts of Congressmen and Presidential Electors are, of course, also the largest.) The two U.S. Senators from California are Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. 33 Democrats and 20 Republicans represent the state in the U.S. House of Representatives. While California is among the most Democratic and liberal states in the nation because of the large concentration of voters in populous areas, much of California is politically very conservative, notably the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, Orange and San Diego counties, and most inland, eastern, and rural areas. Democratic bastions are mostly coastal and include the entire San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Salinas, Santa Barbara, and Imperial County. The state has supported Democrats in the last four presidential elections. In 2004, Republican President George W. Bush received a majority of votes in more than half the state's 58 counties, but still lost California's 55 electoral votes to John Kerry, who won 54.3% of the popular vote, by a margin of 10 percentage points. See also: List of California Governors, U.S. Congressional Delegations from California, List of California counties, List of California ballot propositions

Geography