Word: rankins
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...Rankin expected them to do: an ignominious somersault. On two roll calls, the House reversed itself, voted to keep Rankin's proposition alive. Crowed Rankin: "A revival of righteousness...
With the air of a man who is sure of his own strength, Mississippi's wily old demagogue John E. Rankin rolled his stupendous veterans' pork barrel onto the floor of the House, and defied the quaking Congressmen to throw it out. What old John wanted was $90 monthly at 65 for every veteran, whether he needed it or not. The cost would add up to something like $125 billion over the next 50 years. But determined John Rankin had posed his colleagues an agonizing choice between conscience and constituents...
...Democrat John Carroll, veteran of both World Wars, started the fight. Protesting the unprecedented scale of the bill, he moved to kill it outright. In the first showdown, the House voted twice to do so, but on standing and teller votes in which names are not recorded. Slick Parliamentarian Rankin was not to be licked so easily. Immediately, he demanded a roll call...
...third day of bitter debate, a thrice-wounded World War II veteran, Texas Democrat Olin Teague, moved again to kill the bill. His white hair on end, ranting John Rankin demanded a roll call and pleaded: "Do not shut the door of hope in the faces of those old men who fought World War I." As the ayes and nays of the final roll call droned on, the House was so tensely quiet that the click of the clerk's mechanical hand-counter was audible in the galleries. By a single vote, 208 to 207, the House had finally...
...John Rankin's justification for his monstrous $150 billion veterans' pension bill [TIME, Feb. 28] is that he would rather see the money go to ex-servicemen than to have it thrown down the "sinkholes of Asia, Europe and Africa...