Henry Cabot Lodge’s Personal Copy of Reservations to the Treaty of Versailles (1920)
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted Amendments/Provisos
in12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted Amendments/Provisos
in12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted Bills
inTags
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted Bills
in12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted Andrew Johnson Impeachment, Bills
in08 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted Bills
inRep. Samuel Sitgreaves observed on April 19, 1798, that “at a time when we may very shortly be involved in war [with France], there are an immense number of French citizens in our country.” The Federalist-controlled Fifth Congress enacted four controversial statutes to guard against the perceived peril of French émigres and French sympathizers dwelling in the United States at a time when the two nations might soon be at war.
One of the so-called Alien and Sedition Acts was “An Act respecting Alien Enemies,” or the Alien Enemies Act, passed on July 6, 1798. It said that whenever there was a declared war between the United States and another country, or if the United States was invaded or threatened with invasion by another nation, natives and subjects of the hostile nation who hadn’t been naturalized in America were liable to be apprehended and deported as alien enemies in a manner directed by a presidential proclamation. (The Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798 had made it much more difficult to obtain naturalization, increasing the “probationary” U.S.-residence period from five to fourteen years.) The Alien Enemies Act didn’t have a sunset provision, so it’s still on the books.
Here’s a marked-up printed version of the bill that became the Alien Enemies Act:
Our notator seems to have won all but one word (“Provided“) of his requested deletion, but “been” appears in the final statute rather than “existed.”
02 Monday Jan 2012
Posted Resolutions
inTags
In a previous post, I described how the Senate voted in 1834 to censure President Andrew Jackson, only to have Henry Clay’s censure resolution expunged from the Senate Journal three years later when Jacksonians gained control of the chamber.
Here’s what the expungement looks like:
A clerk drew a box around the resolution and overwrote it with this notice: “Expunged by order of the Senate this Sixteenth day of January in the Year of our Lord 1837.” Someone (probably an archivist) later removed this page from the bound manuscript volume, an interesting meta-alteration of the Senate Journal. I love how the affirmative vote wasn’t technically expunged, only the text of the resolution approved.
20 Tuesday Dec 2011
Posted Resolutions
inTags
On March 28, 1834, the Whig-controlled Senate voted 26-20 to censure President Andrew Jackson. This act was entirely without precedent in U.S. history. The final censure resolution, the last in a series of draft accusations penned by Senator Henry Clay, reads as follows: “Resolved that the President in the late Executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and power not confer’d by the Constitution and laws but in derogation of both”:
According to Jackson’s friends, it was the censure resolution that was in derogation of the Constitution. If Jackson’s actions were so egregious, surely the censuring Senators would support an impeachment effort? Yet all 26 of them had prejudged Jackson’s guilt in the event a trial actually occurred. They had set themselves up as accusers, judge, and jury. As everyone knew, though, it was precisely because impeachment was not a political possibility that the Senate had opted to censure Jackson. Democrats controlled the House and made up more than one-third of the Senate, so impeachment was a non-starter. This wasn’t a very principled answer to the prejudgment charge, but it adequately accounted for reality.
Jacksonians also pointed out that censure was nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Whigs conceded that Congress could only exercise those powers delegated to it, but they framed the matter differently. Clay’s censure resolution wasn’t legislation—the Senate was merely issuing its institutional opinion on a matter of high political and constitutional import. Exactly where was it prohibited from doing that?
What had Jackson done “in the late Executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue” to deserve such thundering obloquy? The immediate reason was Jackson’s refusal to provide sufficient documentation related to his premature asphyxiation of the Second Bank of the United States. But the real problem, of course, was the strangling itself—Jackson had ordered his Secretary of the Treasury to remove public deposits from the Bank in 1833, effectively rescinding its legal incorporation (the Bank’s charter was set to expire in 1836). Clay and company were also horrified that Jackson had demanded the resignations of two Treasury Secretaries for no other reason than that they refused to execute a policy Whigs believed to be “in derogation of” an act of Congress.
The various resolutions offered by Clay in the course of finding the right language are affixed to a larger sheet of paper to create a sort of Senatorial condemnation collage. The prototype was less oblique in its reprehension than the final product. Here’s Clay’s original two-part censure resolution:
“1st. Resolved that, by dismissing the late Secretary of the Treasury, because he would not, contrary to his sense of his own duty, remove the money of the U. States in deposite with the Bank of the U. States, and its branches, in conformity with the President’s opinion; and by appointing his successor to effect such removal, which has been done, the President has assumed the exercise of a power over the Treasury of the U. States not granted to him by the Constitution and Laws, and dangerous to the liberties of the People.
2d. Resolved that the reasons assigned by the Secretary of the Treasury [Roger Taney], for the removal of the money of the U. States, deposited in the Bank of the U. States and its branches, communicated to Congress on the third day of December 1833, are unsatisfactory and insufficient.”
Here’s the amended version (sorry for the poor quality):
“Resolved that in taking upon himself the responsibility of removing the deposites of the public money from the Bank of the U. States, the President of the U. S. has assumed the exercise of a power over the Treasury of the U. States, not provided to him by the Constitution and laws, and dangerous to the liberties of the people.”
Missing in the final censure resolution was any justification for the view that Jackson had exercised power not granted to him by the Constitution and laws and the assertion that his actions were “dangerous to the liberties of the people.” New in the voted-on version was the allegation that Jackson had violated the Constitution and laws of the United States in addition to exercising power not granted by them.
This is what the reverse side looks like:
President Jackson responded in equally unprecedented fashion: he formally protested the Senate’s censure resolution. In yet another historical first, the Senate simply refused to receive the president’s message and to print it in its Journal.
Thomas Hart Benton, who’d once dueled Jackson in Nashville, spearheaded a movement in the Senate to have the censure resolution expunged from the Senate Journal. (You guessed it—nothing like this had ever happened, either.) Democrats soon had enough votes for expungement, and the deed was done on January 16, 1837. If censure was aconstitutional, erasing any record of it was arguably unconstitutional—according to Article I, Section 5, “[e]ach House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same . . . and the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question shall     . . . be entered on the Journal.” I suppose Jacksonians were content to bootstrap on their foes’ supposed iniquities when it served to annul the evildoing.
30 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted Resolutions
inTags
On August 4, 1964, in response to one confirmed and one alleged incident between North Vietnamese and U.S. Naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for “a resolution expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and in protecting peace in southeast Asia.” To be sure, “the United States intends no rashness, and seeks no wider war.” (Regarding the second incident, Johnson privately remarked in 1965 that “for all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”)
Congress yielded promptly and fully. On August 7, it passed as a joint resolution text that had been prepared by the administration (save the whereases) six months before the Tonkin Gulf incident(s). The draft Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as introduced by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Fulbright, is stored in the Archives’ Legislative Treasures Vault. It really is a visual delight:
RUSH! 7 a.m., not 9 a.m.! The dominoes are falling!
Johnson treated the explicit Congressional permission “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” as a functional declaration of war. Further aggression against whom? Section 2 announced America’s resolve to “take all necessary steps,” in whatever way the president might determine, even if that might “includ[e] the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”
What has been an endlessly controversial document among historians faced virtually no serious opposition at the time—Congress folded like a cheap suit. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate:
In 1970, by contrast, the Senate voted 81-10 to repeal the Resolution. This outcome was immaterial to Nixon—hundreds of thousands of American troops had been committed overseas, and as Commander in Chief of U.S. armed forces, he would see to their protection, doggone it, as they were (very) gradually brought home.
27 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted Committee Papers
inJoe Cannon was one of the most powerful Speakers of the House in American history. Until a Progressive-Democratic coalition stripped him of the power in 1910, Cannon presumed to appoint all members of all House committees. (I saw one pathetically groveling missive in which a Congressman shamelessly begged Cannon to place him on the Ways and Means Committee.)
This next document isn’t especially significant. It’s merely an attestation from the Clerk of the House that Cannon appointed fourteen named members of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization on December 11, 1905:
Those individuals were Benjamin Howell (R-NJ), Robert Adams, Jr. (R-PA), Augustus Gardner (R-MA), Burton French (R-ID), Robert Bonynge (R-CO), Frederick Stevens (R-MN), Ira Wood (R-NJ), William Bennett (R-NY), Everis Hayes (R-CA), Jacob Ruppert, Jr. (D-NY), John Burnett (D-AL), J. Edwin Ellerbe (D-SC), John (not James) M. Moore (D-TX), and Thomas Bell (D-GA). No historical notables, but I assume the Committee played a major role in drafting the Naturalization Act of 1906, the first major revision of naturalization procedures in over a century.