Word: barkleys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Bedroom. The President was jovial. He announced cheerfully he had decided to veto the new tax bill. He proceeded to read excerpts from his veto message. A three-against-one argument promptly boiled up. While Wallace sat silent, Barkley, Rayburn and McCormack vigorously tried to persuade the President to change his mind. A veto, they argued, would simply mean throwing away more than two billion dollars in revenue. Why not let this bill become law without his signature? A veto would stir up fresh bitterness in an already restless and resentful Congress...
...debate grew detailed. Leader Barkley nailed the President's false classification of social-security taxes as general revenue. Bringing up his point against the timber tax, Mr. Roosevelt reminded the leaders that he is a treegrower himself. Politely but firmly, Barkley declared that the President's annual crop of quick-growing Christmas "bushes" cannot be compared with the once-a-generation harvest of slow-growing commercial timber...
...argument remained polite. The President remained adamant. Leader Barkley summed up. On the Senate Finance Committee he had worked on the bill. He had fought against some of its provisions; he knew the bill was far from perfect. But this bill was the work and the will of Congress. He could not assent to throwing away 2.3 billion dollars for the reasons raised by the President. If the President persisted in his veto, he, Barkley, would have to stand up on the floor of the Senate and defend his position. Mr. Roosevelt remarked that this was understandable. The conference broke...
...Leader Barkley read his copy three times, incredulous, shocked, then angry. The temperate words which the President had read aloud the day before were still there. But peppered among them now were other words, phrases, sentences, bitter, taunting, contemptuous words which stung the majority leader like slaps in the face: "unwise," "inept," "indefensible special privileges to favored groups," "dangerous precedents for the future," "disappoint and fail the American taxpayers." Taxpayers' confusion, asserted the President, was not the Treasury's fault but "squarely the fault of the Congress of the United States...
Shaken to the soles of his solid brogues, Leader Barkley quickly checked a dozen other Democratic Senators, found ever)' one livid with rage. The House postponed debate on the message, but off the floor 80-year-old Chairman Robert L. ("Muley") Doughton of the Ways & Means Committee was already spluttering his indignation at the message which "questioned our integrity or intelligence, or both." Alben Barkley kept a tight grip on himself and held his peace. After adjournment at 2:15 p.m., he went to his office and began to think. At his modest apartment on Connecticut Avenue...