By Paul Kane · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Jimmy Carter might not have believed the words of praise coming from Democrats and Republicans under the Capitol dome this week.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) hailed Carter as “a man who modeled the virtues of service.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) praised the 39th president’s ability “to get down in the weeds and the dirt,” both for political success and post presidential work helping to build homes for the impoverished.
And Vice President Kamala Harris, before hundreds of Democratic and Republican lawmakers gathered Tuesday in the Rotunda, hailed the “gifted man who also walks with humility, modesty and grace.”
The high praise did not fully convey Carter’s tumultuous relationship with Congress during his one term in the White House, a fight that left him politically wounded and contributed to his defeat in 1980 by Ronald Reagan.
Carter’s greatest legacy came largely in foreign affairs, including brokering peace between Egypt and Israel and winning passage of the Panama Canal deal.
His domestic policy agenda turned into a battle in which most proposals got modified, completely reworked or just ignored on Capitol Hill, even as Democrats held massive majorities.
Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts), who won his first House race in 1976, recalled the optimism of Carter’s early days as counter to Richard M. Nixon’s presidency and the Vietnam War.
“One was post-Watergate and the other was post-Vietnam War. The American people had wanted to turn the page on that era, and Jimmy Carter was the page turner,” said Markey, one of two current members of Congress who served during Carter’s entire term.
Carter, a former governor of Georgia, tailored his 1976 presidential campaign as the outsider who would shake up the halls of power. He defeated a crowded field of experienced congressional Democrats and then won the general election against President Gerald Ford, who spent nearly three decades in Washington.
Carter and his senior advisers tried to live up to that outsider ethos once he took charge. “He didn’t want to haggle and have to make deals,” said Jon Ward, author of “Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party,” the book documenting the 1980 presidential campaign.
An engineer by training, the new president thought he could eschew the type of schmoozing lawmakers had come to expect from previous presidents. “It was kind of puritanical, hyper rational,” Ward said of Carter’s approach.
Following 1974 and 1976 Democratic routs in elections, Carter started his presidency with Democratic majorities of 292-143 in the House and 62-38 in the Senate – more massive than either party has ever since had.
He embraced a sweeping agenda that included increased taxes on capital gains; public financing for congressional elections; a full-employment program, and a consumer protection agency pushed by Ralph Nader, according to the book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone.”
But business groups, after losing political ground to Nader and his activist allies the previous decade, fought back furiously and divided Democrats, many of whom were Southern conservatives who in today’s Congress would be Republicans.
The full employment program got heavily watered down, a pro-labor bill died amid a Senate filibuster, and the tax plan ended up the “ultimate indignity,” as Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis wrote in their book about Democrats. “Instead of a progressive tax increase on capital gains and corporations, the bill that passed Congress now reduced these tax rates.”
Ward’s book about Carter and Kennedy noted how the new president’s dismissive nature toward lawmakers was made only worse by his senior aides, including top adviser Hamilton Jordan, who fought with House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Massachusetts) and refused to take his calls.
In Carter’s first year, O’Neill privately started referring to “Hamilton Jerkin” and by August 1977 the only major legislation signed into law was the creation of the Energy Department. “Other than that, the White House agenda ground to a halt,” Ward wrote.
After his death Dec. 29, many remembrances compared Carter to President Joe Biden, in part because the current president was the first senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 campaign and they both had one-term presidencies mired by inflation and security flare-ups in the Middle East.
But his arm’s-length approach toward lawmakers more closely resembled how Barack Obama handled Congress during his presidency.
While raising two young daughters, Obama set a regular schedule of dinnertime with family rather than socializing with lawmakers. Despite being an avid golfer, Obama played just a handful of rounds that included members of Congress in his eight years as president.
But the 44th president understood the need to outsource glad-handing. He hired a former member of House Democratic leadership, Rahm Emanuel, as his first chief of staff in 2009, working closely with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California). Biden, as his vice president, welcomed his unofficial role as backslapping emissary on Capitol Hill, particularly with the Senate.
Obama and Biden both racked up much bigger domestic policy legislative achievements, with much smaller Democratic majorities, in their first two years as president than Carter.
Markey said that ideological fault lines were so different back then, as he and other young Democrats found liberal Republican allies on the House Commerce Committee to push environmental laws over the objections of conservative Democratic chairs.
“It’s like so out of the ability of people today to even understand. A lot of the legislation was passed on a totally bipartisan basis with Democrats and Republicans voting no and Democrats and Republicans voting yes,” Markey said.
Carter had won the Democratic nomination after party reforms in the early 1970s that turned individual states’ primaries and caucuses into the serious battlegrounds that we now take for granted. Carter and his team of advisers outsmarted other, more experienced national players, leading them to be dismissive of Washington’s normal ways.
“He could not or would not understand that sending a congressman a set of presidential cufflinks, or taking them on a ride on Air Force One during a trip to their state, was worth far more than rational argument about why he should support Carter’s energy plan,” Ward wrote.
Senate Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the 1978 elections, which also saw House Democrats lose almost 15 seats. An energy crisis in the Middle East sent gasoline costs soaring, and then Iranian militants broke into the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held more than 50 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Kennedy saw a groundswell of support for a primary challenge to Carter. He cited Carter’s opposition to pushing a national health-care proposal in his decision to enter the race, but polls showed him leading the incumbent by a wide margin.
A handful of Senate Democrats and more than 15 House Democrats endorsed Kennedy, who took his campaign all the way to the convention in New York in August 1976.
Markey recalled having no grudge against Carter but found himself enthralled with his state’s leading political family. At the convention, Markey haggled with Carter’s team over the platform, winning inclusion of ending nuclear power and increased “safe energy” measures.
Given a 10-minute prime time address on Tuesday night, he highlighted Kennedy’s “dream shall never die” speech and the party’s support for liberal energy policy.
Carter lost big to Reagan, whose coattails allowed Republicans to gain more than 10 seats and the Senate majority. A young Rep. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) easily defeated a Democratic Senate incumbent, John Culver, and 44 years later Sen. Grassley recalled how in the early 2000s Carter invited the senator to speak at a Baptist church in Atlanta.
“We have a similar foundation – two small-town boys, anchored in our faith,” Grassley said Wednesday in a speech.
Grassley and Biden are the only other federal officials still serving who were in office during Carter’s full term.
Markey never faced any retribution from Carter or his aides over defecting to Kennedy – “I don’t think that was his way” – and he met with the former president when he lobbied the senator on supporting his effort to eradicate the Guinea worm disease.
He said that so much of Carter’s work, regardless of how it was received by Congress in the 1970s, became Democratic doctrine in this century.
“You look back now and all that holds up very, very well,” Markey said.