ry
want of the government except the expenses of the army, even including
the maintenance of the navy, had been provided for by permanent
appropriations. And it may be added that with the increasing desire for
stability which comes with the development of vast business interests,
the tendency is strongly in that direction.

Let us suppose that some political party, for the time being in control
of the law-making power of the government, should extend the practice of
making permanent appropriations to the extreme limit allowed by the
Constitution. This would relieve the administration of all financial
dependence upon public sentiment except in the management of the army.
And if, as the framers of the Constitution contemplated, the President
and the Senate should represent the minority, the administration might
for years pursue a policy to which public opinion had come to be
strongly opposed. For with the system once adopted its repeal could not
be effected without the concurrence of all branches of the law-making
authority. The President and Congress could, in anticipation of an
adverse majority in the House, guard against the withdrawal of financial
support from their policy by simply making permanent provision for their
needs. Our present system would permit this to be done even after the
party in power had been overwhelmingly defeated at the polls, since the
second session of the old congress does not begin until after the
members of the new House of Representatives have been elected.[123]
This would tie the hands of any adverse popular majority in a succeeding
congress and effectually deprive it of even a veto on the income and
expenditure of the government, until such time as it should also gain
control of the Presidency and the Senate. But this last could never have
happened if the practical working of the Constitution had been what its
framers intended. Whatever control, then, the majority may now exercise
over taxation and public expenditure has thus been acquired less through
any constitutional provisions intended to secure it, than in spite of
those which seemingly made it impossible.

Equally significant was the failure of the Convention to make any
adequate provision for enforcing publicity. The Constitution says "a
regular statement of the receipts and expenditures of public money shall
be published from time to time," and also that "each House shall keep a
journal of its proceedings, and from time to time