The Americans borrowed the term “lame duck” from the British, who first applied the insult to failed entrepreneurs in the 18th century and then to politicians in the 19th century, whose time in office was rapidly running out. Before the 20th Amendment was ratified in 1933, lame presidents and congressmen served for long periods after the election. The new presidents did not take office until March 4, four full months after the election, and a new Congress generally did not meet until 13 months after the election.
After the 20th Amendment, the lame duck period was very short, but that did not stop lame politicians from packing their remaining weeks in office with last-minute pardons and acts of political sabotage.
James Buchanan did nothing to prevent the separation
James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States, c. 1860.
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When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, the slave states led by South Carolina made clear their intentions to separate from the Union, instead of making concessions to the next Republican government. President James Buchanan, a lame duck with an office full of southerners, chose to blame Lincoln and the northern abolitionists for the slavery division rather than taking a hard line against southern secession.
In his December 1860 State of the Union address, Buchanan said that “the president-elect’s background was sufficient to justify Southern fears that he would try to invade his constitutional rights”, although Buchanan did not believe Lincoln would make him act so hastily. The biggest blame for the secession crisis was, according to Buchanan, “the prolonged and intemperate interference of the people of the north in the issue of slavery in the southern states”.
After South Carolina and six other states formally separated in December 1860 and January 1861, Buchanan went through a difficult situation. He knew that secession was illegal, but he also believed that the constitution prohibited him from sending federal soldiers to suppress the rebellion. When South Carolina troops surrounded Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Buchanan sent an unarmed ship, the Star of the West, to provide reinforcements for the U.S. Army. But when Star of the West was hit and barred from entering the port, Buchanan gave up.
“I don’t think the story is fair to Buchanan,” says Daniel Franklin, associate professor emeritus of political science at Georgia State University and author of Deplorable giants: presidents in their final terms. “Like Hoover [when he faced the Great Depression], Buchanan was limited in his concept of what the government could do. He did not imagine that the federal government had the power to stop the states ”.
By the time Lincoln opened in March 1861, the separatist states had already formed the Confederate States of America and the Civil War was almost guaranteed.
Benjamin Harrison attacked the economy to punish Cleveland
After Benjamin Harrison shouted a narrow Electoral College victory against incumbent President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Harrison and his Republican supporters in Congress rushed to add six new Western states to the Union and package them with Republican supporters. But instead of guaranteeing a Republican victory in the 1892 election, there was a negative reaction, with voters sending Cleveland back to the White House and handing Congress over to Democrats.
Harrison and the Republicans had campaigned under the threat that the election of Cleveland and the Democrats would sink the United States economy, and now, with only four months left of his presidency, Harrison decided to torpedo the economy alone so that it appeared to be the fault of Cleveland.
As historian Heather Cox Richardson explains, Republican-owned newspapers published apocalyptic editorials to scare foreign investment, while the US Treasury burned a surplus and refused to bail out Wall Street financiers. The result was a stock market crash with just eight days to go before Cleveland took office.
The crash quickly turned into the 1893 Panic, a severe economic depression that lasted until 1897. And, as Harrison expected, Cleveland largely took the blame.
A lame senate censored Joseph McCarthy
Roy Cohn (left) and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy during McCarthy’s investigations, trying to prove the existence of Communist subversion in high government circles, 1954.
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In the anxious early days of the Cold War, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was an aggressive attack dog against what he believed to be a communist infiltration of the United States government. In 1950, McCarthy claimed to have the names of 205 Communists actively working in the US State Department. Even when an investigation failed to produce any evidence, McCarthy remained on the attack and capitalized on Cold War fears to accuse political opponents of disloyalty.
In 1953, with a Republican president in the White House, McCarthy was named chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Investigations Subcommittee. From that top job, McCarthy launched further investigations to eradicate communist traitors, including a 1954 television broadcast of the United States Army, during which he tormented and reprimanded a witness, Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker. For viewers at home, McCarthy’s performance was an outrage.
The Senate has finally had enough, too. After the 1954 midterm legislative elections, the Senate convened a special lame duck session to consider 46 separate charges of misconduct against McCarthy. It was the first time that only one Congressional chamber had returned for a lame duck session since the 20th Amendment was passed.
McCarthy did not fall without a fight. He called misconduct hearings a “lynched party” and labeled the committee responsible as “the involuntary servant of the Communist Party”. Ultimately, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censor McCarthy on two counts, none of which had anything to do with his communist “witch hunt” years. Instead, the Senate blamed McCarthy for his abuse of the very senatorial committees that investigated him.
McCarthy kept his job, but never regained his political power. The senator died in 1957 at the age of only 48.
Congress needed to clean up after the Watergate mess
The 1974 session of Congress was the most productive in the history of the legislature. Called on 18 November and postponed a month later on 20 December, the lame duck Congress passed 138 pieces of substantive legislation, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and a federal Privacy Act. But his most important job was to clean up after the Watergate scandal.
At the top of the list of priorities during the lame duck session was the approval of Nelson Rockefeller’s appointment as vice president of Gerald Ford. Ford himself had only been named vice president of Richard Nixon a year earlier, when Spiro Agnew resigned on corruption charges. After Nixon resigned in disgrace because of his involvement at Watergate on August 9, 1974, Ford was sworn in as president on the same day.
In a farewell shot for Nixon, Congress also voted to overturn a previous deal that would have allowed Nixon to retain ownership and control of his presidential tapes and papers. These condemnatory documents would remain in the government’s possession.
READ MORE: 7 quotes revealing Nixon from his secret tapes
George HW Bush forgave planners against Iran
WATCH: What was the Iran-Contra case?
One of the darkest blemishes in the two terms of Ronald Reagan’s Republican administration was the Iran-Contra case, a secret plot to sell weapons to Iran and use the profits to finance Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Reagan himself claimed to be unaware of the illegal scheme, but several members of his government, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, were indicted and, in some cases, convicted of perjury and withholding evidence.
George HW Bush was Reagan’s vice president and also claimed to be unaware of the Iran-Contra plot. After winning the presidency in 1988, Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. And on December 24, 1992, goofy Bush pardoned six of Iran-Contra’s indicted or convicted planners, none of whom saw a day in prison for his crimes.
A Congressional Lame Duck Session accused Bill Clinton
After suffering unexpected losses in the 1998 midterm elections, Republicans called a special session of the House of Representatives to consider impeachment articles against President Bill Clinton. Clinton was accused of lying to Congress and obstructing the investigation of his scandalous affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
The Chamber met on December 17, 1998 and voted two days later for Clinton’s impeachment for two articles of impeachment: perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton was the first president to be impeached in 130 years. During the Senate impeachment trial in January 1999, Clinton was acquitted of both charges and served the rest of his second term.
READ MORE: How many U.S. presidents faced impeachment?
Bill Clinton forgave a runaway billionaire
Gisela and Marc Rich, 1998
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On Bill Clinton’s last day in office before handing the White House over to George W. Bush in 2001, Clinton issued 140 presidential pardons and 36 commutations. While goofy presidents are expected to issue an abundance of pardons on their way out the door, one of Clinton’s pardons drew the ire of Republicans and Democrats.
Marc Rich was a convicted fraudster who fled to Switzerland in the 1980s to avoid jail time and ended up on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list. Rich was also a generous contributor to both political parties and a philanthropist in Israel and Iran. Although Clinton swore there was no quid pro quo involved in the last-minute forgiveness of the “runaway financier”, Clinton’s critics and even some allies were furious.
“It was a terrible pardon,” said Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy. “It was unforgivable. It was outrageous … Here was a man [Rich] who was involved in a major fraud and showed absolutely no remorse ”.
READ MORE: 7 famous presidential pardons