Word: trumans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...time of great prosperity, it went beyond the President's deficit-spending policy in forcing the nation to live on borrowed money. The expected deficit for this year is $5 billion (Harry Truman had estimated it at $873 million). The deficit might yet prove to be the most dangerous bequest of the 81st Congress to a nation which was already $256 billion in debt...
Better Sense. In spite of imposing Democratic majorities, Harry Truman commanded no stable following in either House. Politically, Congress was considerably more conservative than the President. His leadership was frequently overturned on critical issues by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, an unstable alliance which provided no consistent leadership of its own. A Republican-Dixiecrat coalition filibustered and voted to death his civil-rights program. A wider coalition of Democrats and Republicans crushingly repudiated another major Truman election promise: repeal of the Taft-Hartley law. The Senate rejected three of his personal appointees. Congress ignored his request for compulsory...
...refusals, Congress often showed better sense than Harry Truman in his requests, and sometimes it saved him later embarrassment. When he asked for an anti-inflation program (including wage & price controls, Government authority to build steel plants) at a time when deflation was obviously in progress, Congress brusquely threw it overboard, lock, stock & barrel. His demand for $4 billion in new taxes was similarly ignored; so was his request for $800 million for universal military training...
...Strategy. By midterm, the Senate was so demoralized that no major appropriation bill had been passed. Harry Truman was direly threatening to get on a train and take his case to the nation again; Majority Leader Scott Lucas was in the hospital with gastric ulcers...
...canny old Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn: 1) keep Congress in session, let it talk itself out, hold its nose to the grindstone, and blame Republican obstructionism for Congress' inaction; 2) let Congress know that if it got down to work on what was left of the Truman program, it could go home...