Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, who represented Illinois from 1950 to 1969, played a key role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was an ally of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and a powerful force as Senate Minority Leader. In an eerily similar echo of today's budget debate, Dirksen warns of the dangers of increasing the temporary debt limit—which was then set at $328 billion—in this 1965 video from the National Press Foundation.
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