...The bill also contained hundreds of policy and spending provisions, including a relaxation of campaign finance rules, $100 million for the Green Line extension to Somerville and Medford, a change in federal pension rules that cuts retirement funds for some Americans, $5.4 billion to fight Ebola, and a ban on transferring prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to US facilities....

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/12/10/senator-elizabeth-warren-house-speaker-nancy-pelosi-oppose-provision-adding-uncertainty-bill-keeping-government-open/CyfUitKFXNt9WaD1sZlXUJ/story.html

I cannot really say for how long the "new" Republicans have been using the term "liberal." I do know that they spit it out like an epithet to coerce people. They use it to paint everyone who does not tow the party line as less than good Americans. Particular glee is taken by the neo-fascists in equating Democrats and Liberals as the same. This does not really surprise me since the politics of derision is a mainstay of the Reagan Republicans. If you cannot win, then denigrate. It is important to know that about the new conservatives, because without that knowledge; the hypocrisy of their beliefs cannot be exposed.

So what is a Rooseveltian Democrat? It is a view that common people can have a vision. That vision can and must include all people for the good of this country. It is also the realization that the government is responsible for nurturing the dream. In fact, the American Dream throughout the twentieth century is rooted in what President Roosevelt did in the first decade of the century. Did you think I was writing about Franklin Roosevelt? I do not mean to minimize what that man did. After all the three great accomplishments of his career are with us yet today. They are for the historically illiterate: the WPA, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Social Security Act.

One can tour this country and see the accomplishments of the WPA to this day. The roads, bridges and parks of this nation are a visual legacy of that idea. Although the Republicans in recent years have tried to undermine the National Labor Relations Board, it still stands for the American worker against big business. Then, of course, there is the Social Security Act; over the generations the Republicans have tried to gut and dismantle this dream. It truly galls them to see so much money that they cannot get their hands on.

The Roosevelt that I write about,. the man who is responsible for setting and defining this nation for the century is Theodore Roosevelt. When I think about what the Democratic party stands for; I cannot find anything that is not embodied in the beliefs and actions of our 26th President. Now I know that in the history books he is labeled as a Republican. But consider that of all the presidents; the Republicans hold up Truman and Kennedy as good examples. Is there a reason for this? Yes there is. It is because T.R. stood up against big business and the monopolies for the common man and the common good. So to name a Democrat is easier than to give in to one of their own The list of issues that T.R. stood for are still being debated and confronted to this day.

The 1906 message to congress addressed campaign finance. He asked for, "A law prohibiting all corporations from contributing to the campaign expenses of any party." Still ninety years later, even after what the current Republicans whine about as the big democratic campaign finance scandal. They refuse to even consider finance reform. Could it be that they have as much or more to gain by not addressing the issue?

In the same address to congress T.R. stated: "The United States Navy is the surest guarantor of peace which this country possesses." This is something that President Carter was aware of in the late seventies when he began the military build up of the Navy and in fact laid the keel for the 500 ship navy that the whiny-lying Republicans credit to Reagan.

When President Roosevelt was governor of New York, he passed a bill to outlaw racial discrimination in the public schools. In fact his stand on equality between the races cost him votes and support in the South. He received Booker T. Washington at the Whitehouse, the first President to do such a thing, costing him support in the South. Even then, those people hated anyone different.

T.R.'s stand for women and women's rights dates at least to his address to the Progressive Party convention in 1912 when he stated: "The burdens of labor and loneliness bear heavily on the women in this country; their welfare should be the especial concern of all of us." He had a singular belief that the nation would be better off with the "equality of right" concerning women's rights and suffrage.

The list of his achievements that are with us and part of our lives today is quite impressive: the Department of Commerce and Labor; the Interstate Commerce Commission; the Pure Food and Drug Act, meat packing inspections and child labor laws. He organized the National Forest Service in 1905. The truth is that he is the inventor of what we now look upon as the modern conservation movement. He put 125 million acres into reserves, created five new National Parks, sixteen national monuments, fifty-one wildlife refuges. The senator from Wisconsin, Robert Lafollette said: "His greatest work was inspiring and actually beginning a world movement."

http://salmonriver.com/issues/pol98/roosevelt.html

Broadview Heights tries new legal tactic in fight against fracking
12/5/2014

BROADVIEW HEIGHTS: A group of residents filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against the state of Ohio, Gov. John Kasich and two drilling companies.

It is believed to be the first suit of its kind in Ohio and seeks to protect the rights of self-governance, including the right to ban fracking.

In November 2012, Broadview Heights voters approved a charter amendment for a community bill of rights and banned fracking and the disposal of fracking waste.

In June 2014, Bass Energy and Ohio Valley Energy filed suit against the city to overturn the community bill of rights. The companies said that only the Ohio Department of Natural Resources oversees drilling.

Efforts by residents to intervene were rejected by a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge.

In the new suit, the residents contend that the Ohio Oil and Gas Act violates the constitutional right of residents to local self-government. The residents were aided by the Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

“This class-action lawsuit is merely the first in Ohio, and expected to be one of many filed by people across the United States whose constitutional rights to govern their own communities are routinely violated by state governments working in concert with the corporations that they ostensibly regulate,” said Thomas Linzey, executive director of the defense fund. “The people of Broadview Heights will not stand idly by as their rights are negotiated away by oil and gas corporations, their state government and their own municipal government.”

http://www.ohio.com/news/local/broadview-heights-tries-new-legal-tactic-in-fight-against-fracking-1.547110

In the early days of the New Deal, for example, FDR teamed up with Republican Senator George Norris of Nebraska to create the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), our nation’s first major regional supplier of public power. On May 8, 1933, also a part of the famous 100 days, Republican senators Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin and Bronson Cutting of New Mexico joined forces with Edward Costigan of Colorado to sponsor a bill authorizing $6 billion in public works expenditures. Moreover, the director of one of the most important New Deal stimulus agencies, the Public Works Administration (PWA), which among other things built the Triborough Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel in New York, the Washington National Airport, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the Grand Coulee Dam, and thousands of miles of public highways, was led by the progressive Republican head of the Department of the Inferior, Harold Ickes. Progressive Republicans even supported legislation aimed at securing the rights of workers to join unions and secure better wages, hours, and working conditions — the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act — and the vast majority of Republicans in both the House and the Senate voted for the Social Security Act and the establishment of the Social Security Administration, whose first head was the former governor of the state of New Hampshire, Republican John G. Winant.

In the meantime, the Roosevelt administration’s determination to expand the U.S. economy and put people back to work through compensatory deficit spending had raised the ire of many conservatives — including conservative Democrats — who denounced the New Deal as nothing more than a left-wing plot to take the United States down the path of socialism. One of the most outspoken critics was Al Smith, the former governor of New York and Democratic candidate for president in 1928. Smith’s vehement opposition to Roosevelt’s policies led him to join forces with other prominent conservative Democrats like John J. Raskob, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Jouett Shouse, who had served as the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the DNC, and John W. Davis, the party’s nominee for president in 1924, in forming the American Liberty League in August of 1934.

http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/bipartisanship-made-new-deal-possible

The Democratic Party became a liberal party largely through the "New Deal" policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Before FDR, "laissez-faire" or "free-market" policies were the only policies acceptable to America's ruling elites. FDR's New Deal policies used government spending power to create jobs for the masses of unemployed, and used payroll taxes to provide retirement security through Social Security. FDR also created regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to avoid another financial crisis.

FDR's liberal policies were supported by Democratic and Republican administrations until Ronald Reagan began a conservative counterattack against FDR's policies in 1981. After 8 years of Reaganism, conservative Democrats began embracing the Reaganite assault on liberalism, and called themselves "New Democrats" to distinguish themselves from traditional FDR-inspired liberals. These "New Democrats" drew support from large corporations that wanted a return to "laissez-faire" policies to get out from under regulations.

http://www.democrats.com/new-democrats

“No president since the founders has done more to shape the character of American government,” notes historian Alan Brinkley in his biography of Roosevelt. “No president since Lincoln served through darker or more difficult times. The agenda of postwar American liberalism was set out by FDR in 1944, when he called for an ‘economic bill of rights.’

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/02/04/fear-itself-democrats-duck-fdrs-lessons/

The Democratic Party, with the New Deal, became a liberal party, supported by big city political machines, labor unions and blue collar workers, ethnic minorities, farmers, White Southerners, the impoverished, and intellectuals. This coalition was so powerful that the Democrats won the White House seven out of nine elections from 1932 to 1968, as well as control of both houses of Congress during all but 4 years between the years 1932-1980 (Republicans won small majorities in 1946 and 1952). Starting in the 1930s, the term “liberal” was used in U.S. politics to indicate supporters of the coalition, while "conservative" denoted its opponents (including conservative Democrats).

Republicans and Democrats were both split on the New Deal. Conservative Democrats & Republican opposed it as an enemy of business and economic growth, but more moderate Republicans supported some of it (while promising to improve it). In the 1934 midterm elections, Democrats gained an additional 9 seats in the Senate, and 9 seats in the House. Republicans also lost seats to the Progressive Party, a liberal party allied with the Democrats.

http://www.authentichistory.com/1930-1939/2-fdr/2-reception/index.html