Why Is Lyndon B Johnson's Presidency-Necessary Or Harmful?

Within the first minutes of his 1966 State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a four-year term for officials elected to the House of Representatives (“The Harvard Crimson”). While plausible in discussion now, Johnson’s audience likely viewed his idea, deliberately placed at the opening of the annual speech, as unrealistic nonsense. To the purist, the Constitution and the guidelines set out for the nation have remained, and should remain, intact. In a Crimson article responding to the speech, published in same year, the author argues that expansion of term length “will provoke reverberations of the old Jeffersonian belief that frequent elections are the best guarantee against tyranny.” To the author, a member of the audience Johnson’s proposal was intended for, starting a conversation Johnson meant to inspire, the ‘60s were “an age of mass communications and sophisticated means of sampling public opinion…[where] annual or biennial elections are no longer necessary to determine the public will,” but a reform in extending House term length would …show more content…
The statistics of anger at Congress by the American people are not surprising, nor are they new: “Fifty-seven percent (57%) say Congress is doing a poor job… just 24% think their representative in Congress is the best possible person for the job” (Rasmussen Report). So while the argument remains that what the Founding Fathers asked for this, there is a reason the Constitution allows for amendments and calls itself a democracy: change is allowed. However difficult, however many Congressmen (and women) who have found their desks in Rayburn, Longworth or Canon House Office Buildings comfortable for decades, Americans remain disappointed in a representation plagued with problematic