American politics (non-partisan) from the beginning to date

by Thomas V. Cooper; Hector T. Fenton

The laws exacting these few millions from eleven States, and these hundreds of millions from twenty-seven States, originated, as the Constitution requires all bills for raising revenue to originate, in the House of Representatives. They are not recent laws. They have been approved and affirmed by succeeding Congresses. The last House of Representatives and its predecessor approved them, and both these Houses were ruled by a democratic Speaker, by democratic committees, and by a democratic majority. Both Senate and House are democratic now, and we hear of no purpose to repeal or suspend existing revenue laws. They are to remain in full force. They will continue to operate and to take tribute of the people. If the sum they exact this year and next year, shall be less than last year, it will be only or chiefly because recent legislation favoring southern and tobacco-growing regions has dismissed twelve or fourteen million of annual tax on tobacco.

This vast revenue is raised and to be raised for three uses. It is supplied in time of severe depression and distress, to pay debt inflicted by rebellion; to pay pensions to widows, orphans, and cripples made by rebellion; and to maintain the Government and enforce the laws preserved at inestimable cost of life and treasure.

It can be devoted to its uses in only one mode. Once in the Treasury, it must remain there useless until appropriated by act of Congress. The Constitution so ordains. To collect it, and then defeat or prevent its object or use, would be recreant and abominable oppression.

The Constitution leaves no discretion to Congress whether needful appropriations shall be made. Discretion to ascertain and determine amounts needful, is committed to Congress, but the appropriation of whatever is needful after the amount has been ascertained, is commanded positively and absolutely. When, for example, the Constitution declares that the President and the judges at stated periods shall receive compensation fixed by law, the duty to make the appropriations is plain and peremptory; to refuse to make them, is disobedience of the Constitution, and treasonable. So, when it is declared that Congress shall have power to provide money to pay debts, and for the common defense and the general welfare, the plain meaning is that Congress shall do these things, and a refusal to do them is revolutionary, and subversive of the Constitution. A refusal less flagrant would be impeachable in the case of every officer and department of the Government within the reach of impeachment. Were the President to refuse to do any act enjoined on him by the Constitution, he would be impeachable, and ought to be convicted and removed from office as a convict. Should the judges, one, or some, or all of them, refuse to perform any duty which the Constitution commits to the judicial branch, the refusal would be plainly impeachable.

Congress is not amenable to impeachment. Congressional majorities are triable at the bar of public opinion, and in no other human forum. Could Congress be dissolved instantly here as in England, could Senators and Representatives be driven instantly from their seats by popular disapproval, were they amenable presently somewhere, there would be more of bravery, if not less of guilt, in a disregard of sworn obligation. Legislators are bound chiefly by their honor and their oaths; and the very impunity and exemption they enjoy exalts and measures their obligations, and the crime and odium of violating them. Because of the fixed tenure by which the members of each House hold their places and their trusts, irreparable harm may come of their acts any omissions, before they can be visited with even political defeat, and before the wrong they do can be undone. A congressional majority is absolutely safe during its term, and those who suffered such impunity to exist in the frame of our Government, must have relied on the enormity and turpitude of the act to deter the representatives of the people and the representatives of States from betraying a trust so exalted and so sacred as their offices imply.

Mr. President, it does not escape my attention, as it must occur to those around me, that in ordinary times obvious aphorisms, I might say truisms like these would be needless, if not out of place in the Senate. They are pertinent now because of an occasion without example in American history. I know of no similar instance in British history. Could one be found, it would only mark the difference between an hereditary monarchy without a written constitution, and a free republic with a written charter plainly defining from the beginning the powers, the rights, and the duties of every department of the Government. The nearest approaches in English experience to the transactions which now menace this country, only gild with broad light the wisdom of those who established a system to exempt America forever from the struggles between kingcraft and liberty, between aristocratic pretensions and human rights, which in succeeding centuries had checkered and begrimed the annals of Great Britain. It was not to transplant, but to leave behind and shut out the usurpations and prerogatives of kings, nobles, and gentry, and the rude and violent resorts which, with varying and only partial success, had been matched against them, that wise and far-seeing men of many nationalities came to these shores and founded “a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Such boisterous conflicts as the Old World had witnessed between subjects and rulers—between privilege and right, were the warnings which our fathers heeded, the dangers which they shunned, the evils which they averted, the disasters which they made impossible so long as their posterity should cherish their inheritance.

Until now no madness of party, no audacity or desperation of sinister, sectional, or partisan design, has ever ventured on such an attempt as has recently come to pass in the two Houses of Congress. The proceeding I mean to characterize, if misunderstood anywhere, is misunderstood here. One listening to addresses delivered to the Senate during this debate, as it is called, must think that the majority is arraigned, certainly that the majority wishes to seem and is determined to seem arraigned, merely for insisting that provisions appropriating money to keep the Government alive, and provisions not in themselves improper relating to other matters, may be united in the same bill. With somewhat of monotonous and ostentatious iteration we have been asked whether incorporating general legislation in appropriation bills is revolution, or revolutionary? No one in my hearing has ever so contended.

Each House is empowered by the Constitution to make rules governing the modes of its own procedure. The rules permitting, I know of nothing except convenience, common sense, and the danger of log-rolling combinations, which forbids putting all the appropriations into one bill, and in the same bill, all the revenue laws, a provision admitting a State into the Union, another paying a pension to a widow, another changing the name of a steamboat. The votes and the executive approval which would make one of these provisions a law, would make them all a law. The proceeding would be outlandish, but it would not violate the Constitution.

A Senator might vote against such a huddle of incongruities, although separately he would approve each one of them. If, however, they passed both Houses in a bunch, and the Executive found no objection to any feature of the bill on its merits, and the only criticism should be that it would have been better legislative practice to divide it into separate enactments, it is not easy to see on what ground a veto could stand.

The assault which has been made on the executive branch of the Government and on the Constitution itself, would not be less flagrant if separate bills had been resorted to as the weapons of attack. Suppose in a separate bill, the majority had, in advance of the appropriations, repealed the national-bank act and the resumption act, and had declared that unless the Executive surrendered his convictions and yielded up his approval of the repealing act, no appropriations should be made; would the separation of the bills have palliated or condoned the revolutionary purpose? In the absence of an avowal that appropriations were to be finally withheld, or that appropriations were to be made to hinge upon the approval or veto of something else, a resort to separate bills might have cloaked and secreted for a time the real meaning of the transaction. In that respect it would have been wise and artful to resort to separate bills on this occasion; and I speak, I think, in the hearing of at least one democratic Senator who did not overlook in advance the suggestion now made. But when it was declared, or intended, that unless another species of legislation is agreed to, the money of the people, paid for that purpose, shall not be used to maintain their Government and to enforce the laws—when it is designed that the Government shall be thrown into confusion and shall stop unless private charity or public succor comes to its relief, the threat is revolutionary, and its execution is treasonable.