Word: rayburn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There have been three great Speakers in American history: Thomas Brackett Reed (1839-1902), Joseph Cannon (1836-1926) and Sam Rayburn (1882-1961). For almost two decades, Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy. But whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker. His power over one branch of government was so immense that it spilled over into the other branches...
...ambitious attempt to continue Franklin D. Roosevelt's activist domestic agenda. Truman found himself blocked by Roosevelt's nemesis: a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. The economy, although sound, was plagued by a black market and strikes. A meat shortage was so bad that House Speaker Sam Rayburn dubbed the 1946 debacle "a damned 'beefsteak election!' " But '46 was also, says Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley, "a referendum on Truman," whom contemporaries regarded as too small-town, too intellectually limited and too amiable to command "the fearsome respect" that should attend his office. They couldn't vote...
...soon as the briefing book from Feinstein arrived at his Rayburn Building office, Hyde pushed aside the chaos on his desk, settled into reading the thick document with its seven sections and quickly came to the one made up solely of murders in Chicago, whose suburbs Hyde represents. There was Gerome Allen, a local basketball player who was shot with an AK-47 by another teenager outside a supermarket; the 7-year-old fatally wounded while walking to school with his mother; the Chicago Housing Authority police officer who was killed by an AR-15 as he walked back...
...Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey. With the embarrassing Aldrich Ames spy case spread across the nation's front pages last week, Woolsey had to go up to Capitol Hill for one of his public sessions before the House Select Committee on Intelligence. The small hearing room in the Rayburn Building was jammed, and Woolsey's bald head reflected the glare of television lights as he announced he would have nothing to say in open session about the details of the Ames case. The committee chairman, Democrat Dan Glickman of Kansas, accepted that, but he put Woolsey on notice that...
Maybe the Democrats need some charismatic leaders in the Congress to have a truly united liberal front. Gone are the days of Sam Rayburn, Tip O'Neill, and Robert Byrd. Maybe those politicians are just too worried about being re-elected by now-defunct Reagan Democrats. As for the "I need a new term to do even more good" excuse, it basically describes campaign rhetoric for the last hundred years...