Senate's Rejection Research Articles

Libel or Not? The War of Words between Lajos Kossuth and New York Editor James Watson Webb

Although three notable American editors opposed Lajos Kossuth before and during his visit to the United States in 1851-52, the most influential was arguably James Watson Webb, editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer (NYCE). Webb had been appointed by President Zachary Taylor to be Charge d’Affaires to Vienna in 1849 but had neglected to wait for confirmation by the Senate before traveling to Vienna. When the Senate rejected his appointment by an overwhelming vote, an embittered Webb was obliged to return to the United States. Although Webb had made many political enemies, the public reason given for his Senate rejection was that body intended to keep the post vacant as a “punishment” for Austria’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian rebels after their defeat in August 1849. Webb allegedly held Kossuth responsible for his rejected nomination, and upon returning to the United States and resuming the day-to-day operations of the NYCE, the paper's coverage of Hungary and Kossuth turned negative. During his visit to New York, Kossuth hinted that the Austrians might have bribed a certain New York editor to publish falsehoods about the Hungarian War of Independence. Webb took this hint as a personal attack and demanded an explanation from Kossuth, who never clearly explained which editor he was referring to.

Was the Great War a Good War?

Was the Great War a Good War? Michael Kazin (bio) Michael S. Neiberg. The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 313 pp. $32.50. G. J. Meyer. The World Remade: America in World War I. New York: Bantam, 2017. 651 pp. $30.00. Reading these two books together makes one appreciate how fundamentally historians still dispute whether U.S. intervention in the First World War was either necessary or moral. To their credit, neither Michael S. Neiberg nor G. J. Meyer leaves any doubt about where they stand. Neiberg decisively argues that it was, while Meyer, just as resolutely, disagrees. Both authors are vigorous proponents of their particular points of view. But as in legal briefs, their books neglect aspects of the problem that would weaken their case. According to Neiberg, "A German victory would impose a European and global order unacceptable to the American people" (p. 212). His narrative ends with the declaration of war by Congress in April, 1917. Until that point, he describes those who opposed building a larger military as utterly naïve about the malevolence of German intentions and portrays Woodrow Wilson as an overly cautious politician whose indecisiveness "highlighted the nation's essential weakness" (p. 87). For Neiberg, the president, prominent "isolationists" like William Jennings Bryan, and any Americans who followed their lead only postponed the inevitable and probably prolonged the war. Neiberg concludes, "by failing for so long to confront reality they had put themselves in an even more dangerous position" (p. 229). Meyer would undoubtedly view this argument as a species of retrospective jingoism. For him, the decision to go to war was the result of "two and a half years of unrelenting anti-German propaganda and self-censorship by the American press" (p. 192). His Wilson is a vain, self-righteous figure who finally resolved, despite a lack of public enthusiasm, to take the U.S. into Europe's bloody cauldron because, for him, "the thought of being on the outside while other men decided the fate of the world would have been unbearable" (p. 212). Meyer devotes two-thirds of his book to what occurred after the U.S. joined the Allies—government repression, six months of combat, the influenza epidemic, [End Page 267] the Versailles conference, and the Senate's rejection of the peace treaty. But his interpretation of those events only deepens his cynical approach to the role the U.S. played in the conflict and the post-war world. Unfortunately, each writer takes less care with the factual construction of his narrative than he does to present a vigorous argument. Neiberg's largest failing is his penchant for making bold assertions about the state of popular opinion while offering little or no evidence to back them up. He claims that, in 1915, backers of an arms embargo "did not … represent the views of the American people" but cites just two newspapers and one magazine, all of which were published in New York City (p. 61). Later, writing about the Armenian genocide, he writes that "Americans grew increasingly frustrated at either the inability or the unwillingness of the government to act" (p. 97). His evidence for that statement consists of a report by an Episcopal missionary who was living in Armenia and Theodore Roosevelt, who despised Woodrow Wilson. When Neiberg turns to the critical issue of whether to the U.S. military should have expanded, he claims "Most Americans in 1915 saw Preparedness as a way to avoid war through the creation of military strength that the nation would hopefully never have to use" (p. 124). To support that assertion, he cites two newspapers and former Secretary of War and State Elihu Root, whose advocacy of preparedness was nearly as strong as Roosevelt's. There are as many as a dozen other examples of such unsubstantiated confidence in what the majority of Americans believed. Any historian who tries to gauge public opinion in the U.S. about a contentious matter from any era before the 1930s (when serious polling began) must rely on a range of sources, nearly all of which took one side or another. During...

A strategic approach to reduce climate change risks for the LNG industry

The Senate rejection of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 (CPRS) for the second time in December 2009 caused key sections of Australia’s big business to express concern. The stalled legislation and the challenges associated with the Copenhagen Accord to deliver a clear post-2012 global climate change agreement have only fuelled uncertainty surrounding the future of climate change policy. This uncertainty will come at a cost for the Australian LNG industry where a raft of new projects are fast approaching final investment decisions and the real impact of a carbon impost is difficult to quantify. Despite this uncertainty, subsequent negotiations between the Government and the Opposition regarding the LNG industry, led to an amended version of the CPRS Bill. One of the amendments accepted by the Government was related to the allocation rate and states that LNG is expected to be a moderately emissions intensive trade exposed (EITE) activity and therefore eligible to receive free permits at a fixed rate per tonne of LNG produced. Should this version of the CPRS become legislation in 2010, LNG producers will at least be able to calculate their liability under the scheme and confirm their compliance strategy. Given the significant value at stake with existing and new investments, oil and gas businesses should act with urgency to develop strategies to respond to a carbon constrained future, irrespective of the final legislative design. Scenario planning is an important step in considering the range of regulatory outcomes—both domestic and international—that will impact on the supply and demand of carbon assets.

Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr.: New Perspective on His Nomination to the Supreme Court

Most people know Judge Haynsworth as someone who was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1969 by President Richard Nixon and who was one of the few Supreme Court nominees in the 20th century to be rejected by the Senate. The Senate's rejection of Judge Haynsworth, followed immediately by its rejection of Judge Carswell's nomination, focused attention on the relative roles of President and Senate in the judicial selection process in a way they had not been focused on previously and were not to be focused on again until the Senate's 1987 rejection of the nomination of Judge Robert Bork.1 After the rejection of his Supreme Court nomination, Judge Haynsworth remained on the Fourth Circuit. This continued service distinguished him from subsequent nominees G. Harrold Carswell and later Robert Bork, who both left the bench soon after their nominations were rejected. Judge Haynsworth's own correspondence, which we are pleased to be able to make available, provides some insight into his decision to remain on the Fourth Circuit and on an aspect of the controversy surrounding his nomination to the high court. In this brief Article, we touch on two matters related to Judge Haynsworth's nomination to the Supreme Court and to his subsequent work. One concerns a point of historical interest; the other concerns the relative roles of ideology, partisanship, and ethical considerations in the confirmation process. Correspondence from Judge Haynsworth, not previously publicly available, is central to our treatment of both matters and the raison d'etre for this Article.

In the name of war: judicial review and the war powers since 1918

For more than a century, in settings where the political branches of government were unable or unwilling to exercise self-restraint, the Supreme Court was disposed to treat federal war powers legislation as exempt from judicial review, an attitude that permitted numerous abuses from Prohibition to press censorship. Though the First World War officially ended in 1918, the Senate's rejection of the Versailles Treaty kept the United States in a legal state of war until late 1921. Exploring the interplay between political and social events and the evolution of legal theory Christopher May tells how during this challenging three-year period, the government invoked the war powers to pursue ends otherwise beyond its reach: with the backing of Congress and seemingly free from judicial scrutiny, the Wilson administration took over the country's rail and communications systems, outlawed profiteering, prosecuted strikers, suppressed radicals' and censored the leftist press. None of these measures bore any true relation to the war, says the author, who then describes the course through which the Supreme Court, confronted by this pattern of abuse, finally abandoned its long-standing refusal to review the constitutionality of war powers legislation. In the Name of War explores the roles played by Woodrow Wilson, Joseph Tumulty, Albert Burleson, and A. Mitchell Palmer--men whose personal ambitions frequently shaped official policy in the late Progressive Era. After analyzing the Court's more recent record, including the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, May draws some practical conclusions about the use of judicial intervention in time of crisis that are sure to attract the attention of lawyers, legal scholars, historians, and students of the Constitution.

Van Buren's Mission to London, 1831–1832

Martin van buren's mission as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James's lasted a mere six months; but its importance transcends its brevity. Inception and conclusion alike were central elements in explosions of the first magnitude in domestic American politics the dissolution of President Andrew Jackson's first cabinet, and, later, the senate's rejection of Van Buren's nomination to London by the casting vote of his enemy, the vice president, John C. Calhoun. Matters of high drama, these have been thoroughly explored by historians of the period; but the mission itself has been altogether neglected. This is unfortunate because it sheds much light on Martin Van Buren, one of the most elusive figures in American political history, and, more significant, on important new developments in BritishAmerican relations. Under Jackson's presidency, the ill-tempered exchanges of John Quincy Adams and Great Britain's foreign secretary, George Canning, gave way to warm cordiality, mutual respect, and confidence. In effecting this fresh point of departure in his country's foreign policy, Martin Van Buren, both as Jackson's secretary of state and later his minister to London, played a major role. His partner for much of this time was the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston. Taken as a whole, Van Buren's career is remarkable for its almost unbroken upward sweep to the highest office in the land : from small-town legal practice to the purlieus of New York state politics, the United States senate, the governorship of New York, the state department in Jackson's first administration, the London legation, the vice presidency in Jackson's second administration and then the summit, the presidency itself, in 1836. Post-presidency years aside, the sole deviation in this meteoric rise was the London mission. In accepting it, Van Buren stepped down the ladder and became subordinate to Edward Livingston, his replacement as secretary

American Ambassador to the League of Nations—1933: A Proposal Postponed

Ever since Adolph Hitler's invasion of Poland, American and European interwar diplomacy has, with good reason, been judged a failure. Analyzing what went wrong, American historians have been quick to note their own nation's withdrawal from European affairs following the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Consequently, they have focused great attention on the Senate's rejection of United Statesmembership in the League of Nations, an act which has been seen as both cause and effect of the ensuing years of isolation. Indeed, nonmembership in the Geneva-based international organization came to have—for contemporaries and historians alike—deep symbolic and emotional overtones as well as diplomatic significance, appearing as the quintessence of isolationism itself.