Our focus on a president's first 100 days in office leads us astray

The focus on a president's first 100 days in office has gotten out of control. Candidates, including now-President Joe Biden, have taken to promising during their campaigns to accomplish many things in that very small window of time. They have even gone so far as to assure voters that they will do a slew of things on Day 1 in office.

And Biden tried to deliver on his promises, signing a flurry of executive orders on his first day in office, including extending the interest-free pause on some federally held student debt. And he's rightfully proud that more than 200 million doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered before his 100th day in office, double his initial goal. And, of course, there was the stimulus, narrowly passed after Senate Democrats resorted to the budget reconciliation process.

But that victory in particular highlights the real limits of what presidents can do during and after their first three months in office. Change still hinges on what Congress manages to pass and the courts uphold, and even in the best-case scenario, that process can take years to unfold.

There is no better example than Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency — which many journalists and scholars credit, and sometimes blame, for starting our national obsession with a president's first 100 days. Whole books have been dedicated to this very short period of an administration that lasted 12 years. But what happened after Roosevelt's first 100 days had a far greater effect on both the country and the world than his initial accomplishments. Congressional and Supreme Court power actually enabled and frustrated a man still judged by most to be one of America's greatest presidents.

During the four-month interregnum after his election victory, Roosevelt received little help from outgoing President Herbert Hoover. The worsening economy created a need for action immediately after Roosevelt finally took the oath of office in March 1933.

That urgency helped produce myriad accomplishments during the remarkably action-packed next three months. Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, used the Emergency Relief and Construction Act that Hoover had signed to create the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and signed the National Industrial Recovery Act as well as other bills that created the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Yet some of those early experiments for relief did not work all that well or were met with fierce opposition outside Washington. Future President Jimmy Carter remembered a pecan farmer throwing him to the ground and beating him for following the rules set out for AAA crop payments. Other measures foundered in Congress or were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court's conservative majority.

New Dealers forged their real legacy after the 1934 midterm elections. A president's party typically loses seats in Congress during midterm elections, but 1934 was an anomaly. Roosevelt's coalition of liberal Democrats and Republicans actually increased their power.

Those substantial gains made passage of the 1935 Social Security Act, more significant banking reforms and the National Labor Relations (better known as the Wagner) Act possible. Those and other laws started to construct a social safety net that improved the lives of millions of Americans, who played a major part in making the New Deal for which Roosevelt is still celebrated.

Yet, even this increase in the power of Roosevelt's coalition in Congress only gave him a short window to aggressively relieve and reconstruct the nation — and he still had to make compromises with many of the Southern and Western Democrats who ran committees or wielded other significant influence on Capitol Hill. The result was an unequal safety net that exacerbated long-standing inequalities. Agricultural, domestic and public-sector workers, primarily men and women of color, would not have the rights to guarantee themselves a New Deal, like so many White men working in Steel Belt industries did as they signed up for unions, opened bank accounts and took out home loans.

And while those compromises got programs into the statute books, they provided no assurance that the Supreme Court would keep them there as the justices heard challenges to these programs' constitutionality.

Historians still debate whether Roosevelt's famous court-packing effort toppled that judicial hurdle, but it was an important factor in the 1938 midterm elections that weakened liberals' power in Congress. Afterward, conservative Southern and Western Democrats joined forces with conservative Northeastern and Midwestern Republicans to bedevil the Roosevelt administration. They not only stopped Roosevelt and his congressional allies from expanding the nascent social safety net — by including national health insurance, for example — but they also imposed real limits on how the Roosevelt administration ran the celebrated American war effort.

For example, tense 1943 congressional budget negotiations ended with lawmakers unceremoniously defunding a lot of the agencies training Americans for work in war production factories and crafting policies to avoid the unemployment crisis that had followed World War I's end. The very next year, that same coalition almost killed the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill of Rights, still lauded for lifting so many White, working-class soldiers into the home-owning, college-educated middle class. Congressional conservatives settled for once again using their power to force the kind of compromises that had denied many citizens of color a New Deal.

But the political war the administration fought at home before and during World War II exposes how presidential accomplishments have always been contingent on how much power his allies have in Congress, as well as how much the Supreme Court allows him to act. Depression and wartime Capitol Hill conflicts are also an important reminder that the president who started our national obsession with an administration's first 100 days actually achieved far more in the four years between his first and second midterms, when the voters had a chance to weigh in and send reinforcements to Washington to ensure the advancement of his agenda.

The fraught history of Roosevelt's presidency reveals how continued fixation on his first 100 days distracts from how important Congress and the courts were then and remain. The real legacy of the Biden administration, like all of his predecessors, will be forged after Congress is able to fully weigh his agenda and the courts assess the inevitable legal challenges to much of it. This reality reminds us how American federalism was designed to forestall the kind of sweeping change that candidates always promise to achieve in 100 days, or even on Day 1, which has never been enough time to assess any president's performance.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and the author of "Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt," which Harvard University Press will publish in August 2021. This piece was written for The Washington Post.