When the 'Watergate Babies' rode their own wave of anger

If foreign-policy restrainers of both parties are looking for a model the new Congress can follow once it takes office in January, they could do worse than to refer back to the 1974 midterm election that brought to Washington a tidal wave of young Democrats who quickly passed legislation placing unprecedented constraints on the power of the “Imperial Presidency,” which had reached its zenith under former President Richard Nixon.

In many respects, the parallels between the 1974 midterms and the results of Tuesday’s election are eerie. Though Nixon, whose own imperial pretensions were more sartorial than architectural, had resigned from office three months before the vote, his abuses of executive powers loomed large over the election. Those abuses were, after all, hard to ignore: from Watergate and the impoundment of Congressional appropriations at home, to the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos and the covert CIA campaign to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Chile abroad.

The popular rejection of Nixon’s secrecy and executive overreach was coupled with an economic recession made much worse by the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, which, in an echo of the current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, was prompted by Washington’s military support for Israel during the October 1973 war.

It was in this context that Democrats, while still a somewhat fractious majority in both houses of Congress on the eve of the 1974 midterms, made a net gain of four Senate seats and a whopping 49 House seats, beefing up their position and bringing to Washington no fewer than 76 new members. Many of these so-called “Watergate babies” shared associations with the antiwar and human rights movements.

Even before the new Congress was seated in January 1975, the lame-duck Congress felt the vote had given it a mandate curb executive powers that had enabled Nixon and his powerful national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to involve the United States in unpopular conflicts abroad and support highly repressive foreign regimes. That same Congress had passed the War Powers Act two years before by a bipartisan supermajority over Nixon’s veto.

In its December 1974 session, the outgoing Congress approved a foreign aid bill that, among other provisions, imposed strict limits on the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam and on U.S. military and security assistance and arms transfers to the military junta in Chile, as well as South Korea and Turkey, setting the precedent for conditioning future U.S. aid and other support to countries on their respect for human rights.

Included in the same bill was the so-called Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which banned the CIA and the Defense Department from carrying out covert actions without an official “presidential finding” and “timely notification” to as many as eight congressional committees.

Once seated, the new Congress acted quickly to build on those measures. In January, the Senate voted 82-4 to establish what became known as the Church Committee (after its chairman, Idaho Sen. Frank Church), which investigated intelligence abuses by the CIA, the FBI, and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The following month, the House voted 286-120 to carry out its own investigation, known as the Pike Committee after its chairman, New York Congressman Otis Pike.

Among other things, the committees’ work and the abuses they uncovered resulted in the passage of the Clark Amendment. Part of the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, the amendment banned all direct or indirect U.S. military or paramilitary assistance to any faction in the civil war in Angola in which the CIA, at Kissinger’s direction, had secretly intervened alongside South Africa and its proxies in trying to overthrow the regime in Luanda after independence from Portugal.

Passed by a bipartisan coalition in both houses, the Arms Export Control Act also aimed to rein in the transfer of major U.S. weapons systems to various authoritarian regimes, a policy that Kissinger, in particular, favored as a way to enhance bilateral ties with those countries. It required the Pentagon to provide details of all such transfers in advance, gave Congress the power to veto them, and banned transfers to governments with a "consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights,” in what became the precursor to the “Leahy Laws.”

That same year, Congress also passed the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which, among other provisions, gives Congress the power to terminate any presidential declaration of emergency.

In the 60 years that have since passed, some of these laws have been watered down, effectively ignored, or even repealed — mostly, but by no means exclusively, by Republican administrations and their congressional supporters. And an “imperial presidency”has returned —particularly in Trump’s second term, during which he has issued an avalanche of Executive Orders, many of them to pursue a militaristic domestic and foreign policy by designating people and groups terrorists here and abroad.But Tuesday’s Democratic blowout across the country may have created an opportunity for the reassertion of congressional power on the order of what took place 62 years ago.

It is true that the Democrats will not enjoy the near-veto-proof majorities in Congress they won in 1974. They may claim as many as 56 seats in the Senate, still four fewer than back then. And, despite tremendous gains in the House, they’ll fall well short of 291 seats.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that much of the 1970s legislation was bipartisan, and Trump’s new “lame duck” status could empower Republicans who have shown signs of discomfort with the presidency policies, particularly on the war..

Despite the hyper-partisanship of recent politics, is it too far-fetched to imagine bipartisan agreement on legislation to constrain the executive, particularly on foreign policy?

A number of Republican lawmakers, for example, have demanded greater oversight over the administration’s lethal policy of bombing boats suspected of carrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, noted Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive.

“This new Congress has both the opportunity and the ability to stand up to Trump’s imperial impulses, his wannabe emperor syndrome, which is likely to become more pronounced now that he has so dramatically lost his domestic support,” Kornbluh told RS. “The 1975-76 Congress created a model for curtailing the executive’s interventionist impulses abroad.”

In this regard, one only has to cite Vice President JD Vance’s assessment on X Wednesday morning, in which he blamed the Republican wipeout on the war in Iran. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so,” he wrote in what probably reflects a serious split within the party and even within the administration itself.

Indeed, four Republican members in both the House and Senate voted alongside virtually every Democrat for an Iran war powers resolution in June. Could those numbers increase in the wake of Tuesday’s election and a weaker White House?

Of course, Democrats in the incoming Congress will not have enough votes by themselves to overcome a veto, and Trump has already promised to wield that power against any legislation he doesn’t like. “With the filibuster in place and no veto-proof majority… and a president who is a norm-buster, I just see more paralysis,” Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told RS, “I think the impact (of the election) on foreign policy will be negligible.”

As in 1974, much will depend on how the Republican survivors of Tuesday’s “bluenami” assess the election’s meaning for their own political futures.