Word: caucus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...morning last week, in the caucus room of the Old House Office Building, there opened a Congressional investigation as suave, sophisticated, polite and cynical as a Somerset Maugham comedy. It was the beginning of the Smith Committee hearings of the Wagner Act-that most crucial piece of New Deal legislation, passed to safeguard labor's historic right to bargain collectively through unions of its own choosing...
Every year after Congress goes home, a few members remain to conduct Investigations, between-sessions sparring shows, in the big marble-pilastered caucus rooms of the House and Senate office buildings at Washington. The inquisitors are financed by their colleagues (out of the Treasury) to improve the public weal and make political capital. Above are the three main attractions scheduled for the dog days, the Dies show beginning this week...
Imposing silence on his own colleagues, especially upon Idaho's sonorous constitutionalist, Wild Bill Borah, was Leader McNary's hardest job. Every morning he summoned them all to the green-baize table of his caucus room and made them vow tongue-holding again. "Let the boys across the aisle do the talking," he would say, smiling dreamily as he shot his cuffs. So it was not Borah or California's Johnson or Michigan's expletive Vandenberg who took the headlines in the Court debates. It was Virginia's red-hot Glass, Montana's Wheeler...
Reference was to a sudden caucus of House Democrats early last week, designed to sink differences and combat with united front the lethally effective tactics of Minority Leader Joe Martin in blocking or steering legislation. Leader Martin's tactics have been simplicity itself: to keep his little band (ratio: 2 to 3) together until the disunited Democrats divide on an issue, then plug home a solid bloc of votes to which enough Democrats may add themselves to constitute a majority. Last week's proposed Democratic strategy was equally simple: to arouse Democrats, who have a 92-vote majority...
...legislative bodies informed about each other. Another $10,000 from Congress provides one of the juiciest bits of junket on the Washington political platter: an annual trip for a delegation to the union's meeting (last year at The Hague, this year at Oslo). A supposedly non-partisan caucus of the whole Congress picks the head of the delegation, who then, by hallowed custom, dishes out the junket to his party mates...