CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



155 



er any obligation exists on the part of the Gov- 

 ernment for past services, or whether in the 

 next fiscal year the country really needs money 

 for this purpose." 



Mr. Hawley, of Connecticut: "Mr. Chair- 

 man, I am glad the House has decided to take 

 up this bill. It contains some twenty-seven 

 items supplying deficiencies in the service, and 

 they are all, in the judgment of the Appropria- 

 tions Committee, in which I as a member most 

 heartily concur, immediately indispensable to 

 the service. To pass the bill is a work of ne- 

 cessity, I might say of mercy ; that is to say, I 

 speak of the bill as reported from the commit- 

 tee. 



"The proposed section for the payment of 

 marshals is to pay the marshals and their gen- 

 eral deputies. We have a bill pending before 

 the House, reported, I believe, from the com- 

 mittee, proposing to devote $600,000 to the 

 marshals and their general deputies, and con- 

 taining a proviso forbidding the use of any of 

 this money for the payment of expenses under 

 the national election laws. I understand it is 

 proposed to drop the latter clause ; but, never- 

 theless, by retaining the term ' general ' the 

 same effect is reached. None of the money 

 can be appropriated for the payment of ex- 

 penses incurred under the general election 

 laws save as marshals or general deputies may 

 have been engaged, and most of the marshals 

 so employed are special marshals. Therefore, 

 dropping the prohibitory proviso is nearly im- 

 material so far as the practical effect is con- 

 cerned. 



"It appears, therefore, Mr. Chairman, that 

 at the very first opportunity the Democratic 

 majority of this House renews the tactics that 

 compelled the long, excited, and expensive ex- 

 tra session of last summer. And it does not 

 appear thus far that the Democratic party has 

 learned anything from the debates of that ses- 

 sion or from the public opinion of the country. 

 The leaders seem determined to prove all that 

 was charged against the party. 



" I propose very briefly to review this prac- 

 tice of tacking or of attaching political legisla- 

 tion to appropriation bills. The attempt was 

 made to justify this by reference to the history 

 of Great Britain. There can be found prece- 

 dents in that history previous to 1688, when 

 Great Britain was engaged in a great political 

 revolution. Since 1688 it has not been British 

 practice. And since 1710 there has been an 

 absolute rule of the House of Lords prohibiting 

 it. It is regarded there as revolutionary and 

 destructive of the rights of the House of Lords, 

 barring that House from a free expression of 

 its opinion upon bills of supply. 



" It is sought to justify it by reference to 

 precedents in the legislation of Congress while 

 it was under Republican control. That can not 

 be done, in my opinion ; because while the Re- 

 publicans, when they had a majority of both 

 Houses, and the President, also, on their side, 

 were in the very bad habit at times of putting 



gene'ral legislation on appropriation bills, it had 

 not the effect then of thumb-screwing the Ex- 

 ecutive. And when some of the most illus- 

 trious examples of this bad habit occurred they 

 had a two-thirds vote in both Houses, and it 

 was therefore, as far as compelling the Execu- 

 tive was concerned, a mere matter of form ; 

 they could pass the bill, whether he approved or 

 disapproved. 



u The practice, however, is not justifiable be- 

 cause Republicans were at times guilty of it. 

 The only example furnished by Republicans, 

 which is in reality applicable to the present 

 discussion, is that occurring during the great 

 Kansas agitation, when they proposed to forbid 

 the use of the army in Kansas to enforce cer- 

 tain wicked legislation. In that instance the 

 Republicans, having brought about an extra 

 session and come to a serious consideration of 

 the subject, abandoned the attempt, being sat- 

 isfied that they were wrong in proposing to 

 coerce the Government in that way ; and among 

 the protests against tacking, against thumb- 

 screwing legislation, there are none more logi- 

 cal and impressive than those made by eminent 

 Democratic Senators. 



"The judgment of the country is against 

 this. The history of constitutional legislation 

 is against it. Some of the States of the Union 

 condemned it as early as 1776. In their first 

 Constitutions they emphatically condemned it, 

 and for the very reasons that we are in the 

 habit of assigning on this side. As time passed, 

 Constitution after Constitution has been so al- 

 tered as to prevent it. Twenty-eight of the 

 State Constitutions rendered it impossible by a 

 variety of provisions, but a great many of them 

 containing this simple rule: 'Bills shall con- 

 tain but one subject, which shall be distinctly 

 described in the title.' Other Constitutions 

 permit the Executive to veto some while ap- 

 proving other sections of appropriation bills. 

 And, when the Confederates came to adopt a 

 constitution, they took the existing Constitu- 

 tion of the United States with certain modifi- 

 cations. Among the modifications which their 

 veteran politicians and legislators thought it 

 necessary to make are clauses that rendered it 

 utterly impossible to do what the Democratic 

 party of this House is seeking to do here to- 

 day. We have the history of the State Con- 

 stitutions, the general progress of constitu- 

 tional legislation in the country, the judgment 

 of the Houses of Congress before this agitation 

 in repeated instances, and what I am sure will 

 weigh strongly with some gentlemen, and 

 which weighs somewhat with all, the thought- 

 ful action of the Confederate Convention con- 

 sidering the defects of the Federal Constitu- 

 tion. 



" Under this policy of the Democratic party 

 there can be nothing like deliberate legislation. 

 The work becomes a farce ; we are not free to 

 vote as we please ; bills become a patchwork 

 of general and political legislation and appro- 

 priations ; the freedom of voting becomes the 



