Word: vetoes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...claimed that nearly 55,000 older Americans who are now being paid to perform community-service jobs, such as driving buses and delivering Meals-on-Wheels, would be thrown out of work. Many Republicans were irked that the White House had not forewarned them in August that Reagan might veto the bill; they approved the legislation then, and now resented being asked to switch their votes on a measure with popular appeal...
Then, just before the vote, Speaker Tip O'Neill attacked Reagan's original rejection of the bill as "a dastardly political move by a man with a stone heart." Added O'Neill, with familiar hyperbole: "By vetoing this measure, the President wants us to make a choice between weapons and handicapped children." The Speaker had sensed the mood of the House: 81 Republicans abandoned Reagan to join 220 Democrats in overriding the veto; only 13 Democrats joined 104 Republicans to sustain...
...Senate, where Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee was caught off guard. He had expected the House to sustain the veto, thus making a Senate vote unnecessary. After the House action, a shocked Baker made a hasty head count. He discovered that the Republicans did not even have 20 votes to block a veto override in the Senate...
Senators balked at supporting the President's veto for the same reasons cited by House members. In addition, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and other Republicans were furious with Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman, who had advised Reagan to veto the measure in the first place; they felt that Stockman had overstated to the President the costs of several items in the bill, including the jobs program for the elderly...
Baker almost pulled it off. In the last moments of the balloting on Friday, the majority leader discovered that he was just one vote shy of sustaining the veto. He tried to engineer a procedural tactic with John Tower-who, much to the anger of Senate leaders, had unexpectedly flown back to his home state of Texas-that would use his vote to block the override, but the ploy failed. Twenty-one Republicans sided with 39 Democrats against the President, while only three Democrats and Independent Harry Byrd of Virginia joined 26 Republicans to support...