William Howard Taft Quotes
There is only one thing I want to say about Ohio that has a political tinge, and that is that I think a mistake has been made of recent years in Ohio in failing to continue as our representatives the same people term after term. I do not need to tell a Washington audience, among whom there are certainly some who have been interested in legislation, that length of service in the House and in the Senate is what gives influence.
Taft, William Howard. Presidential Addresses and State Papers. Vol. 1, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910.
The implied sarcasm is clear from the broader quote.
The president had served two terms. The Constitution, passed in 1993 and endorsed by him, prohibited a third term. However, by 1999 he was considering a third term. There appeared to be no one in his political party who could beat the opposition who had been very critical of his autocratic Presidency.
This proposal is amazingly close to where we have ended up after the Constitutional amendment limiting the President to two 4 year terms. Mason’s reasoning however was very different. He assumed that the legislature would elect the President.
The President’s party in Congress stands election every two years, so the president only has a little more than a year to get tough things done. The mayor, in contrast, had a four term and because he was a bipartisan independent representing both parties, didn’t need to campaign for his party members on the City Council. Therefore, he thought, that it was easier for him to take a controversial position and spend the time to persuade the people and build support for the position.
The appropriations committee allocates the monitory appropriations of all the agencies and it is a large committee. The appropriations committee members read the reports of the committee with oversight over an agency and makes judgments about the appropriation size compared to what the agency committee has authorized. But with intelligence there is nothing of detail in the report so the appropriations committee have little or no idea of what they are appropriating money for. But the appropriations committee will not delegate the appropriation decision to the Intelligence Committee.
William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913) and the tenth Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.
