https://archive.ph/CFmIH https:// www. nytimes. com/2021/04/12/opinion/biden-fdr-new-deal. html

Can Biden Be Our F.D.R.?

President Biden wants to change the trajectory of the country. He’s off to a good start.

By Jonathan Alter

Mr. Alter is a journalist and the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.”

April 12, 2021

With one of the biggest and fastest vaccination campaigns in the world and the signing of a $1.9 trillion dollar Covid relief package, the president has made a good start at that. His larger aim is to change the country by changing the terms of the debate.

Just as Mr. Roosevelt understood that the laissez-faire philosophy of the 1920s wasn’t working anymore to build the nation, Mr. Biden sees that Reagan-era market capitalism cannot alone rebuild it.

The New Deal was just that — a “deal,” a new social contract between the government and the people, with a new definition of what the government owes us when we’re in trouble.

Before Mr. Roosevelt, it was largely up to local communities and the private sector to relieve suffering and expand employment. Mr. Roosevelt shifted the onus of responsibility and didn’t worry about overshooting the target. Like Mr. Biden today, he argued that spending too little is riskier than spending too much. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity,” F.D.R. said in explaining the philosophical shift, “than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

How is that possible with no Republican votes? The answer is that under a new ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, the arcane process of budget reconciliation — usually a once-a-year event and already employed to enact the Covid relief package — can now be used on multiple occasions. This gives the president the chance to post more F.D.R.-size victories with 50 Democratic votes and Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.

To achieve F.D.R.-level permanent structural change, Mr. Biden will have to keep racking up the wins. (Most of Mr. Roosevelt’s enduring accomplishments came after the first year of his presidency). And he will need to connect his program to a spiritual renewal of America’s civic religion. The presidency is “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership,” Mr. Roosevelt said. At his first formal news conference on March 25, Mr. Biden made several efforts — on immigration, “sick” voter suppression and China — to lend his own moral cast to his presidency.

To do his own part — enacting more legislation — Mr. Biden has hinted that he will work with Democrats to amend Senate rules to return to the “talking filibuster” of Roosevelt’s day that actually required obstructionist senators to stay on the floor. (This would mean convincing Joe Manchin, who represents West Virginia in the Senate, that such a reform would not “weaken” the filibuster.)

More filibuster reform will almost certainly be necessary for full Rooseveltian success. With the reconciliation process not available for most legislation, Democrats may need another carve-out like those granted in the last decade for executive branch appointments, federal judges and Supreme Court nominees, all of which now require only 51 votes. The next exception — call it “the democracy option”— would be any bills that expand the right to vote, including H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Whatever the future holds, Mr. Biden and Mr. Roosevelt are now fused in history by the size and breadth of their progressive ambitions. Jimmy Carter took office when liberalism was fatigued; Bill Clinton said “the era of Big Government is over”; Barack Obama was forced to conform to the mantra of deficit hawks. Mr. Biden was lucky enough to have been elected when what the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called “the cycles of American history” are spinning left. He is the first president since Lyndon Johnson who can rightly be called F.D.R.’s heir. Soon we’ll know if he squanders that legacy — or builds on it.

https://archive.ph/dbZq0

Executive Order 6102 is an executive order signed on April 5, 1933, by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States."

Executive Order 6102 required all persons to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve, in exchange for $20.67 (consumer price index, adjusted value of $382 today[4]) per troy ounce. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, as amended by the recently passed Emergency Banking Act of March 9, 1933, violation of the order was punishable by fine up to $10,000 (equivalent to $185013 today[4]) or up to ten years in prison, or both.

Order 6102 specifically exempted "customary use in industry, profession or art"—a provision that covered artists, jewelers, dentists, and sign makers among others. The order further permitted any person to own up to $100 in gold coins (a face value equivalent to 5 troy ounces (160 g) of gold valued at about $6,339 in 2016). The same paragraph also exempted "gold coins having recognized special value to collectors of rare and unusual coins". This protected recognized gold coin collections from legal seizure and likely melting.

The price of gold from the Treasury for international transactions was thereafter raised to $35 an ounce ($648 today[4]). The resulting profit that the government realized funded the Exchange Stabilization Fund established by the Gold Reserve Act in 1934.

https://archive.ph/7L8GN

Executive Order 9066 was a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. This order authorized the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas as military zones, clearing the way for the deportation of Japanese Americans, German Americans and Italian-Americans to internment camps.

On March 9, 1942, Roosevelt signed Public Law 503 (approved after only an hour of discussion in the Senate and thirty minutes in the House) in order to provide for the enforcement of his executive order. Authored by War Department official Karl Bendetsen—who would later be promoted to Director of the Wartime Civilian Control Administration and oversee the "evacuation" of Japanese Americans—the law made violations of military orders a misdemeanor punishable by up to $5,000 in fines and one year in prison.[2]

As a result, approximately 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were evicted from the West Coast of the United States and held in internment camps across the country. Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not incarcerated in the same way, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Niihau notwithstanding. Although the Japanese American population in Hawaii was nearly 40% of the population of Hawaii itself, only a few thousand people were detained there, supporting the eventual finding that their mass removal on the West Coast was motivated by reasons other than "military necessity."[3]