Six Months of the Second New Deal Congress

Report Outline
Major Legislation; the President and the Congress
The Budget, Taxation, and Borrowing
Bonus and Inflationary Legislation
Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935
Expansion and Liberalization of Federal Lending
Supreme Court Decisions and New Deal Legislation
Social Security and Labor Legislation
Banking, Transporation, Regulatory Legislation
National Defense, Anti-War Bills, Treaties

Major Legislation; the President and the Congress

The First Session of the 74th Congress met on January 3, 1935, and has now been in progress a full six months. Plans of congressional leaders for a sine die adjournment about July 15 were rudely upset toward the end of June by President Roosevelt's insistence upon passage at this session of the taxation-of-wealth program laid before the Congress in his special message of June 19. Consideration of this program by the House Ways and Means Committee will be started July 8. It is not now expected that the work of the session will be completed before August 15.

The attention of the second Congress of the Roosevelt administration, during its first half year, was devoted principally to new measures advanced by the President to forward the purposes of the New Deal and to extensions or modifications of administration measures enacted by the last Congress. The most important piece of permanent legislation passed by the two houses during this period was the Social Security Act of 1935, setting up federal-state systems of unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. The most important piece of emergency legislation was the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, designed to permit the federal government to “quit this business of relief” and to provide employment for persons able to work until such time as jobs in private industry become available.

Other important measures finally approved by both houses were: