It’s rare to see President Obama compared to Harry Truman. But Garland Tucker, author of The High Tide of American Conservatism, has found at least one good point of comparison.
He explains in a recent column published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
President Obama should be worried. The recent lower court rulings against the constitutionality of last year’s health-care legislation have now set the stage for a likely dramatic confrontation before the Supreme Court. This is reminiscent of another historic clash before the court – the steel seizure case of 1952. In one of the most significant cases in U.S. constitutional history, an overly confident, overreaching president was unexpectedly halted by the bounds of the U. S. Constitution.
The steel seizure case arose from a crisis in the prosecution of the Korean War. By late 1951, the war demands had resulted in record output from the U. S. steel industry; the steelworkers demanded a wage increase of 35 cents per hour — and the unions threatened a strike that would cripple the war effort.
Negotiations at the Wage Stabilization Board postponed the showdown until the following spring, but the unions and the steel companies had intractably squared off by April 1952.
For political reasons, President Harry Truman – ever the partisan Democrat – refused to invoke the Republican-authored Taft-Hartley Act, by which the government could temporarily enjoin a strike.
Truman harbored a deep distrust of corporate America and sided instinctively and decisively with the unions.
