Thomas Brackett Reed

The house that he's going to enter contains some extraordinary future figures.

Thomas B. Reed was there, three years away from his becoming Speaker.

Joe Cannon was there, 17 years from when he's going to become Speaker.

Robert La Follette is there in Congress.

William B.E. Blackstone calling on the United States government in 1891 to use its influence to give Palestine back to the Jewish people as a homeland.

It was presented to President Benjamin Harrison, signed by 413 Americans, including John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Melville Fuller, Speaker of the House Thomas Reed, future President William McKinley, and many other prominent Americans.

Again, this was before Theodor Herzl founded the political Zionist movement, which, while many ultra-Orthodox Jews opposed, and Herzl sadly lost his life because he gave his health.

He just worked himself to death trying to make this happen.

Um, you know, we're ...

Democrats are in the minority in Congress, and as Thomas Brackett Reed famously said, "It's the duty of the majority to govern, and it's the right of the minority to collect their pay."

Mm-hmm.

You know, there's, there's not a lot of leverage there for the minority.

Democrats gave them a nickname: the Billion Dollar Congress, the first legislature in American history to pass a billion dollar budget.

And the Speaker of the House, Thomas Reed of Maine, offered a response that should have been carved into the wall of every government building constructed since.

He said, "This is a billion dollar country." That sentence is the moment the philosophy of American governance changed.

The question was no longer whether the government should spend what it collects.

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For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tori Felder The Democracy of the Constitution and Other Addresses and Essays by Henry Cabot Lodge Thomas Brackett Reed Thomas Brackett Reed In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, which is as entertaining as it is neglected, Dr. Johnson says in his finest manner, The poet of whose work I have undertaken the revision may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration.

He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit.

I have often thought that if the period of time fixed by Dr. Johnson as the test of literary merit were applied to certain other directions, it might be productive of good results.

The instinct of humanity for the really great, for the man who has made an ineffaceable mark on the history of his time, who has done some worthy deed or rendered some lasting service, is generally sound and true when death has once set all things even.

This is conspicuously the case with the statue of Mr. Reed, which has recently been unveiled in Portland with appropriate ceremonies and with an excellent address by Mr. McCall of Massachusetts.

Thomas Brackett Reed was not only a distinguished, but he was also a remarkable man, remarkable and unusual both in intellect and character.

He left a deep mark on the history of his time, and he rendered a very great public service in rescuing the House of Representatives from the condition of helpless insanity into which it had fallen and by which the right of the majority to rule and the responsibility without which representative government must fail had both been well-nigh destroyed.

Right.

That definition was narrowed even further by Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed in 1890 and again by Speaker Joseph Cannon in 1906.

The modern, unbroken formulation of congressional rules is that a quorum is a majority of those members who are chosen, sworn, and living.

I am fascinated by the mechanical nature of this.