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"They're not in the Constitution – a concession speech, a congratulatory call." "Those rituals, few of them are mandated by law," Rocca said. Roosevelt tips his top hat while sitting in the back of a car with former President Herbert Hoover at the Inauguration in Washington, D.C., March 4, 1933.Īnd that ride is just one of the traditions we've come to expect during the transition season. So, it may not have been, you know, the most friendly of transitions, but they were trying to work together." President Franklin D. "But Hoover did ride in the car?" Rocca asked. Hoover had suffered a humiliating defeat, and according to Goodwin, the ride he shared with FDR to the Capitol on Inauguration Day 1933 was "very frosty." "It's hard to imagine – I mean, Franklin Roosevelt really did not know in January and February and March whether the government could collapse before he even had a chance to put his own programs into use," Goodwin said. And then, within the matter of weeks after that, seven states secede from the Union."ĭuring the Great Depression, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt waited to take the reins from lame duck Herbert Hoover, the country itself was on life support. "I can't even imagine what it was like during the period of time between Buchanan and Lincoln," said Goodwin. After Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860, he had to wait four months (back then the Inauguration wasn't until March) before President James Buchanan vacated the premises. Goodwin said, "Originally, the purpose of the waiting period was to give time for the new president to get from wherever they were to Washington, D.C., and that purpose seems to be less necessary today given modern transportation."īut 2020 isn't the first tumultuous transition. Two sections of the amendment also clarified the problem of presidential succession under certain conditions.To many people, the 78 days between November 3 and January 20 are feeling like 78 years … which raises the question, why is this period so long? It also required Congress to convene on January 3 each year and for the president and vice president to be inaugurated on January 20 rather than in March. The new amendment stipulated that the terms of all members of Congress begin on January 3. The Norris proposal was ratified by the requisite number of state legislatures on January 23, 1933, and took effect on October 15 of that year. In the meantime the newly elected members, spurred by their recent electoral victories and the problems of a nationwide economic depression, had to wait inactive and unorganized until the term of the old Congress expired. During the thirteen weeks of that session of the Seventy-second Congress, 158 defeated members (out of a total of 431) served until the new Congress convened in March 1933. The handicap of a session of Congress with numerous lame ducks was particularly evident in December 1932. norris proposed the amendment on March 2, 1932, as a way to shorten the period of time in election, or even-numbered, years during which members of Congress who had failed to be reelected (the lame ducks) would serve in office until their terms expired. The popular name given to the Twentieth Amendment to the U.S.