On July 4th, 200 years ago, James Madison was President and most of our Founding Fathers were still around and active in public life. In the House of Representatives, Henry Clay of Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from John Boehner's Ohio, wielded the gavel that Boehner now holds. America was at war with Great Britain, having been declared by President Madison and the 12th Congress in response to British depredations against American maritime commerce.
Like John Boehner's 113th Congress, Clay's 13th Congress didn't get much done, though for much different reasons. Boehner's problem is ideological constipation of his membership trapped in a gridlock of their own creation. The 113th Congress can't even pass bills the Speaker wants passed, like Transportation and Agriculture.
The reason for inaction of Henry Clay's 13th Congress was that the British landed a force that sacked and burned Washington D.C., running Congress out of town and temporarily out of business. Rather than an occupation, the attack was an intentional punitive expedition in reprisal for a US attack which burned York, now Toronto, in Canada.
The War of 1812 was not without opposition. Sustained riots in Baltimore marked the Summer of 1812 when war was declared. Militarily, aside from the punitive sack of Washington, the War mainly consisted of repeated British attempts to invade East Coast ports and New Orleans and British attacks overland from Canada into Michigan and Ohio, while the US repeatedly sent missions into British Canada. Western state Native Americans allied with Britain. The electorate must have approved, at least after the fact. Four leading military figures from that War later became U.S. Presidents.
I wonder if there might eventually be another similarity between Speaker Clay and Speaker Boehner. Clay went on to run unsuccessfully for President several times. I don't really expect that of Boehner. But Henry Clay also lived through the fracturing and eventual demise of his political party. If the effects of demographic changes in America on the GOP are as significant as many on this site believe, John Boehner could see something similar happen to the GOP.
Henry Clay was a Democrat-Republican, the party of Jefferson against the Federalists, the Party of Hamilton, Adams and the commercial and financial interests. But after the election of 1824, the party split into the Jacksonian Democratic Party and the Whigs who eventually faded into a new Republican Party.
That's why local Democratic Party organizations still have Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners. If the GOP breaks apart, it will change the Democrats, too. Henry Clay's opposition in 1813, the Federalist Party, didn't survive either. I hope that the change I see coming blows Democrats to the left rather than drawing them to the right.