Nixon...

 Nixon's Domestic Policies

 

What were Nixon's Domestic policies?

Nixon refused to fallow the Eisenhower pattern of consolidating democratic programs and attempting to run the more efficiently.

 

To Nixon race was the most important domestic issue. The department of Health, Education, and welfare stalled on implementing desegregation of the southern school districts until prodded by federal court orders. With Nixon setting the tone by declaring that legal segregation was inadmissible; almost all of the all-black southern schools were merged into unitary school districts by 1970.

 

Nixon's proposed amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, up for renewal in 1970, were tilted toward the South. The president proposed that its provisions be extended to all states so as not to "discriminate" against one region and that voting-rights lawsuits be tried first in state courts, a change that would have diminished the prospects of effective enforcement of the law.

 

 

The Nixon administration had its own proposals to fight poverty. It rejected two approaches that were being considered at the end of the Johnson administration—nationalizing the existing welfare program or instituting a guaranteed minimum income through a negative income tax—and instead proposed a program of family allowances developed by the Urban Affairs Council under the direction of Daniel Moynihan. The program was eventually defeated in the Senate in 1970 by an unlikely coalition of conservatives and liberals.

 

Nixon's domestic record was neither liberal nor conservative, but politically pragmatic. His civil rights policies; judicial appointments; and unsuccessful attempts to appoint southerners to the Supreme Court all represented political payoffs to the South. Nominees Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell were blocked by a coalition of legislators sensitive to charges by civil rights organizations that these men, while on the federal bench, had either demonstrated opposition to Supreme Court case law protecting the rights of blacks or demonstrated incompetence in applying the law.