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Discover Latest #Assyria News, Articles and Videos with Contenting
Assyria Assyria is an ancient civilization situated in the northern part of what is now Iraq. It was once one of the most powerful and influential empires in the ancient world, and its legacy is still evident today. The Assyrians were a Semitic people who spoke the Akkadian language and practiced ancient Mesopotamian religion. They are known for their powerful military, advanced architecture, and sophisticated art. Assyria was one of the earliest civilizations in the world, with its first settlements dating back to the 25th century BC. Its capital, Nineveh, was the largest city in the world at its peak. The city was sacked by the Babylonians in 612 BC and eventually fell to the Persian Empire in 605 BC. The Assyrians were renowned for their use of iron weaponry and their highly organized military which allowed them to create a vast empire stretching from Egypt to modern-day Iran. The Assyrian Empire was eventually conquered by the Medes and later by the Achaemenid Persians in 539 BC.
Objection Day | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
During the 33rd Congress (1853–1855), a Texas man named Joseph Clymer launched what would become a quarter-century effort to petition Congress for financial redress after the U.S. Army broke the terms of a multiyear shipping contract he had signed with the government. A few years earlier in 1851, Clymer had won a bid to transport military supplies from Fort Leavenworth on the Kansas-Missouri border to locations in Texas and New Mexico. Clymer subcontracted part of the job with another shipping outfit, and the Army agreed to pay Clymer and his associates at least $112,908 over two years to move goods and supplies by wagon train during the spring and summer of 1851 and 1852. After successfully making the deliveries in 1851, Clymer received notice from the Army in March 1852 that he would not be required to ship any goods at all that year. By then, Clymer had already prepared 30 wagons and hired three dozen teamsters and hundreds of work animals to transport the goods and materials that the Army had stipulated in his contract. Clymer protested the decision and noted that without the freight “he would lose much, and be put to great stress.”In 1854, Clymer’s case went before an auditor at the U.S. Treasury Department who determined that Clymer had been “greatly damaged, and a heavy loser” after the Army reneged on its contract. Another Treasury official agreed with the auditor’s conclusion and outlined the next steps: “Mr. Clymer, sustained damage and injury by the non-fulfilment of contract on the part of the government, and that in such a case Congress alone can afford redress.”On Friday, February 23, 1855, the House Committee on Military Affairs reported Clymer’s petition seeking that redress as House Joint Resolution 59, “for the relief of Joseph Clymer,” a private bill that dealt solely with his claim; private bills are different from public bills, which concern the country’s general citizenry. The committee, which supported Clymer’s claim, reported the bill with a requirement “authorizing the accounting officers of the treasury to settle the claim upon the principles of equity and justice.” The House placed it on the calendar for the next day’s debate, but the chamber adjourned for lack of a quorum and lawmakers never considered it.Clymer’s petition had been the victim of unlucky timing in 1855. But as a private bill, it faced long odds from the start because it was also subject to a requirement in the legislative calendar called “objection day,” during which opposition from just one lawmaker would kill a bill. From the time the House created objection day in 1839 until Members ended it four decades later, the House had effectively created a legislative veto over private bills. In an institution where the majority would eventually be able to exercise almost unchecked power, House Rules for a time governed the private calendar under the tyranny of the smallest possible minority: one. Clymer’s bill lingered in Congress, off and on, for more than a quarter century. Objection day had not killed his petition in 1855, but it nearly did 26 years later, when, in 1881, timing was finally on Clymer’s side.Private BillsBy the time the House considered Clymer’s petition in 1855, much of the legislation Congress passed came in the form of private bills. In the 33rd Congress, when Clymer first requested help from Congress, lawmakers approved almost twice as many private bills (352) as public bills (188). Before the creation of America’s social safety net in the twentieth century, private bills were the primary way everyday Americans sought help from their government. Private bills often came in the form of relief bills—money that Congress appropriated on a case-by-case basis for widows, wounded veterans, people experiencing hardship, or those like Clymer who had claims against the government. While many Members saw petitions and private bills as an extension of their constituent services, others saw them, in the words of one nineteenth century Georgia congressman, as “mediated robberies” of the federal purse.In 1810, lawmakers began blocking out time in the legislative calendar for the consideration of private bills when the House met in the Committee of the Whole. That year, on the motion of Representative Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, the House reserved Fridays for debate on “reports and bills originating from petition,” giving private bills priority over all other matters in the House’s schedule that day. Sixteen years later, in 1826, as the demands on lawmakers grew, the House approved a new rule submitted by William Leigh Brent of Louisiana, that reserved both Fridays and Saturdays “for the consideration of private bills and private business, in preference to any other.”In early 1839, the House changed its rules again, creating what became known as “objection day.” The House reserved the first and fourth Fridays each month for the private calendar and stipulated that on those days “the calendar of private bills shall be called over, and the bills to the passage of which no objection shall then be made, shall be first considered and disposed of.” Bills that were objected to, however, were sent to the back of the private calendar, buried under a mountain of other legislation.“Vigilance” and “Long Delayed Justice”It’s not clear when the term objection day gained traction, but it is first mentioned in the Congressional Globe on Friday, June 2, 1848—“‘objection day,’ on which bills could be passed that were unobjectionable,” noted the editors of the Globe. Thirty years later, in 1877, the Boston Daily Globe newspaper highlighted perhaps the truer nature of the term. On December 7, the House went into the Committee of the Whole. “As this was what is known as ‘objection day,’ nearly all of the bills on the calendar were objected to.”For at least one reporter, objection day had both costs and benefits. On occasions when the Committee of the Whole cleared a large number of bills on objection day, consideration was “necessarily loose and imperfect,” wrote a New York Tribune correspondent in January 1849 after witnessing the proceedings in the House. “Great reliance must be placed on the vigilance and rectitude of the Committee reporting the bills.” But the author was confident that “seven eights” of the bills on the private calendar “were right, and that much long delayed justice was secured, much undeserved suffering relieved” during objection day proceedings.Reporting on a subsequent objection day, the Tribune was surprised that more private bills “were objected to than allowed to pass, there being a number of particularly hard cases on the Calendar.” The author suspected that some bills that deserved to pass ended up failing but ultimately concluded that objection day was “remarkably well done.” Most of the measures that succeeded “were grants of small pensions to men who lost their health or limbs in the public service, to widows of deceased Revolutionary soldiers, &c. &c.”Deserving though these cases may have been, the Tribune observed that there was always “some Member . . . with a sour stomach” who would object on Fridays and Saturdays, dashing the hopes of a downtrodden petitioner in the process. There were always Members “who grudge the days devoted to” the private calendar and vote to adjourn as soon as possible; always Members “who seem to detest most heartily the lobby influences with which these bills surround Congress and distract the attention of its Members.” The cumulative effect meant that “very dubious claims go through with a rush” one day, while “fair and just” claims get smothered the next day.“I am inclined to think there are a great many unjust claims presented before the Government,” Representative Alexander Stephens of Georgia said during consideration of a House Rules change in December 1852, “but I think there are a great many just ones which have been sleeping here for a half century, perhaps longer.” For Stephens—who would go on to serve as Confederate vice president during the Civil War—the problem wasn’t the type of private legislation the House considered, it was objection day itself. “That is a useless day,” he said. “No discussion is allowed. A claim is taken up, the Clerk reads a long report to the House until he is horse, to which perhaps not more than fifteen Members of the House are listening. Then someone says ‘I object!’ and thus ends the matter for that day.”For many years, Cave Johnson of Tennessee reportedly made it regular practice to oppose legislation on the private calendar, protecting “Uncle Sam’s strong box with the fidelity of a dog and the snarling combativeness of a genuine Cerberus,” the Louisville Daily Courier remembered in 1855, a decade after Johnson left the House. With the Tennessean gone, the role of chief objector fell to John Letcher of Virginia. Letcher “honestly” believed, the Daily Courier said, that “every man who seeks redress at the hands of Congress, or asks to be paid what he (the claimant) considers a just demand upon the government, is a dishonest man; not to say a rascal, and has a deliberate design to defraud the treasury.”Because objection day allowed just one Member to determine the fate of a bill, some observers found the practice, well, objectionable. In 1854, an editorial published under the penname “Jefferson,” critiqued the legislative mechanism as it existed in the House Rules, highlighting objection day as the most egregious example of the how “the rules work most onerously.” Under objection day, “Jefferson” observed, the good faith recommendation of a House committee to approve a private claim could be struck down by one lawmaker without a good faith debate on the floor. “The veto power is conferred by the constitution upon the President of the United States alone, but by the Rules of the House of Representatives each member can exercise this power as effectually as the President.” Some of the claims came from “widows and children imploring justice for years,” the author observed, and deserved to be considered. “An objection on the part of a single member should not be sufficient to defeat a just claim. The character of the country is involved in this matter.”In 1860, the House made a final adjustment to the objection day rule, giving bills that had already been objected to another chance at passage. On March 16 that year, the House approved an amendment that raised the number of objections required to effectively kill a private bill from one to five.The House ended objection day with a major overhaul of the rules in 1880 that, among other reforms, sought to better standardize the House Calendar. In a last-minute attempt to salvage objection day, Harry White of Pennsylvania offered an amendment to keep it on the books. Joseph Blackburn of Kentucky quickly snuffed out his effort. “What reason is there for continuing a practice which allows any bill on the Private Calendar to be passed over because of a single objection, when if by chance or luck it comes upon the next Friday it is not amenable to that objection at all?” he asked. “I would rather have the judgement of one of the standing committees of this House as to the merit or equity of a matter specially committed to it than to have the single unsupported opinion of any member on this floor.” White’s amendment to keep objection day was voted down overwhelmingly.Clymer’s PaydayA year later, in 1881, the House once again resurrected Joseph Clymer’s $18,325 claim against the government for lost revenue after the Army broke its shipping contract with him in 1852. Clymer’s bill had come up so often and been around for so long that in 1878 the House Claims Committee wrote that it was “most remarkable that a claim with so many recognitions of its justice should have been so long delayed of payment.” But some Members remained unwilling to approve Clymer’s claim, and Philip Hayes of Illinois rose to object when it was put to a vote. “It seems to me that bill ought not to be passed,” Hayes said. “If this claim has been running for twenty-five years, I think if there was any justice in it it would have been settled long ago. I wish to ask the Chair whether, under our new rules, there is an objection day, and if this be objection day?”“Under the present rules there is no objection day,” the presiding officer replied.Two other Members rose to defend Clymer’s claim, pointing out that it had already passed the Senate on two separate occasions but always failed in the House “for want of time.” Unable to wield veto power without the authority of objection day, Hayes lost the argument. The private bill compensating Clymer for $18,325 finally became law on March 2, 1881.Sources: House Journal, 11th Cong., 2nd sess. (22 January 1810): 189; House Journal, 19th Cong., 1st sess. (26 January 1826): 197; House Journal, 25th Cong., 3rd sess. (25 January 1839): 374; House Journal, Appendix, Standing Rules and Orders, 37th Cong., 3rd sess. (1863): 639; Annals of Congress, House, 11th Cong., 2nd sess. (19 January 1810): 1247; Annals of Congress, House, 11th Cong., 2nd sess. (22 January 1810): 1253; Congressional Globe, House, 25th Cong., 3rd sess. (25 January 1839): 446; Congressional Globe, House, 46th Cong., 2nd sess. (2 June 1848): 810; Congressional Record, House, 32nd Cong., 2nd sess. (20 December 1852): 98; Congressional Record, House, 46th Cong., 2nd sess. (24 February 1880): 1089; Congressional Record, House, 46th Cong., 3rd sess. (14 January 1881): 635; House Committee on Military Affairs, Joseph Clymer, To Accompany Joint Resolution No. 59, 33rd. Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 110 (1855); House Committee on Claims, Joseph Clymer, 45th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Rept. 425 (1878); An Act for the Relief of Joseph Clymer, of Texas, 21 Stat. 637 (1881); Boston Daily Globe, 8 December 1877; Louisville Daily Courier, 12 January 1855; National Intelligencer, 11 January 1854; New York Tribune, 29 January 1848, 5 February 1849, 12 February 1849, 28 December 1858; Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol. 10, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1876); Richard S. Beth, “Private Bills: Procedure in the House,” 21 October 2004, Report 98-628, Congressional Research Service; Joseph Cooper and Cheryl D. Young, “Bill Introduction in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Institutional Change,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, 14, no. 1 (Feb., 1989): 67–105; George B. Galloway, History of the House of Representatives, ed. Sindey Wise (1962; rev. Thomas Y. Crowell Company: New York, 1976).
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Edition for Educators: The House and Shakespeare | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives
Since the early nineteenth century, congressional debate has been recorded and distributed for public consumption. Congress initially entrusted this job to journalists working for the National Intelligencer and other newspapers. But in the years around the Civil War, lawmakers professionalized the responsibility, creating the Government Printing Office in 1860—now the Government Publishing Office—and printing speeches near verbatim in the Congressional Record starting in 1873. Debate can take many shapes on the House Floor. Members use their time to demonstrate their positions on legislation or current events. In some cases, they insert into the Congressional Record full speeches or remarks. To liven up their orations, legislators sometimes sprinkle in literary references. Before the internet became ubiquitous, the Congressional Research Service received so many requests for certain quotations from lawmakers that it published a book in 1989 titled Respectfully Quoted, which compiled more than 2,000 of the most frequently cited quotations by Members of Congress. Among the texts most quoted by legislators were the works of William Shakespeare, the famous sixteenth-century poet, playwright, and tormentor of twenty-first century high school students. Quotes from the Bard are often used to illustrate a point during congressional debate or to serve as a vehicle to tell a story. Second only to biblical references, the various works of Shakespeare are some of the most quoted or cited in congressional publications. To quote, or not to quote. That is the question Members of Congress must consider. The following Edition for Educators highlights examples of various works of Shakespeare found in the Congressional Record from debate on the House Floor and in the Extensions of Remarks.Earth Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday On Earth Day 1999, Representative Connie Morella of Maryland noted, I consider environmental protection to be national priority. I pledge to work with my colleagues to ensure the preservation of our natural resources and the protection of the public’s health. And this Earth Week, as we also celebrate the 435th birthday of William Shakespeare, we remember his words, ‘to nature none more bound.’ Today, as we observe Earth Day, let us reaffirm our commitment to a cleaner world. In this instance, Representative Morella is quoting Henry VIII, act 1, scene 2, line 129, when King Henry VIII, amid a discussion on taxation, refers to the Duke of Buckingham and calls for his execution: It grieves many: The gentleman is learn’d, and a most rare speaker; To nature none more bound; his training such, That he may furnish and instruct great teachers. Representative Morella, however, focused on the concept of being obligated to protect nature rather than the context of the play. Read more about Henry VIII from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Yielding the Floor to Shakespeare At the end of a five-minute special order speech titled “Truth in Speaking,” concerning the 1996 Whitewater investigation into President William J. Clinton, the Congressional Record captured an interesting back and forth between two Members. Representative Robert Kenneth Dornan of California yielded time to Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas by referencing Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: "Mr. Speaker,” he said, “I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas, the Portia from the other side of the aisle." Representative Jackson-Lee, however, questioned the reference and replied, "Mr. Speaker, I do not know if I will accept that. I am the gentlewoman from Texas.” The Congresswoman went on to acknowledge that she nevertheless, “appreciate[d] the gentleman from California in his sincerity." Dornan felt he needed to explain. “Just to clear the record,” he said, “for those who were not forced to take 4 years of Shakespeare in school, that Portia, because I well know the gentlewoman’s distinguished name, means a lady lawyer of exceeding skill, as in Portia from the Merchant of Venice, who gave us the great soliloquy: The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice bless’d: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. Afterward, Jackson-Lee showcased her own Shakespearian knowledge. Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas: Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, Shakespeare also said: The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers. Mr. DORNAN. That was in Henry VI. The barber said that. I do not want any part of that. Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate very much the gentleman’s compliment. I want it to be acknowledged I am just a humble servant from the 18th Congressional District of Texas. But I appreciate the kindness of the gentleman from California. Jackson-Lee’s quip about the lawyers comes from a brief line in Henry VI that focuses on the struggle for royal control and the British War of the Roses, which was a contest for power between to English families. The scene focuses on a plot against King Henry. Henry VI, part 2, act 4, scene 2, line 75:Dick (the butcher): The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. Cade (leader of the Kentish rebellion): Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings, but I say, ’tis the beeswax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. Learn more about Henry VI and The Merchant of Venice from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Great Tragedy On April 21, 1936, Representative Ulysses Guyer of Kansas gave a stirring address in the House Chamber during a Memorial Program held in honor of seven lawmakers (two Senators and five Representatives) who had recently passed away. Not constrained by time since the House had recessed for the ceremony, Guyer’s remarks filled nearly two pages of the Congressional Record. In his speech, Guyer quoted excerpts from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Shakespeare, in his tragedy of greatness, puts upon the lips of Marc Antony the naked truth concerning human greatness. Antonius was standing above the body of his assassinated friend and comrade, that ‘piece of bleeding earth’, that pathetic clay that but yesterday was Julius Caesar, ‘whose word might have stood against the world.’ As he gazed upon this prostrate form he exclaimed: ‘0 Mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure? The phrase “piece of bleeding earth” derives from Julius Caesar act 3, scene 1, line 280, when Marc Antony, a close confidante of Ceasar, looks upon his dead compatriot following Ceasar’s murder. In act 3, scene 2, line 130, Marc Antony begins his eulogy of Ceasar: But yesterday the word of Caesar might Have stood against the world. Now lies he there, And none so poor to do him reverence.” Guyer’s final quote is from act 3, scene 1, line 164 where Marc Antony meets with Brutus and Cassius following the death of Ceasar:O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils Shrunk to this little measure.If Shakespeare had intended to underline the tragedy and treachery of Ceasar’s death in the play, Guyer’s use of quotations from Julius Caesar was instead intended to honored his deceased colleagues. Learn more about Julius Caesar from the Folger Shakespeare Library.Memorial Day On May 20, 1970, Representative William Bray of Indiana inserted a speech into the Congressional Record in honor of Memorial Day. To commemorate the service members who made the ultimate sacrifice by laying down their lives for their country, Bray cited a large portion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, act 5, scene 8, lines 44 through 63. Said Bray: “Probably nowhere else in the English language is this so movingly described than in the last scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth”: Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt: He only liv’d but ‘til he was a man; The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d In the unshrinking station where he fought, But like a man he died. Then he is dead? Ay, and brought off the field: your cause of sorrow Must not be measur’d by his worth, for then It hath no end. Had he his hurts before? Ay, on the front. Why, then, God’s soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death: And, so his knell is knoll’d. . . . They say he parted well, and paid his score: And so, God be with him! In this passage, Bray quotes verbatim the characters Siward (commander of the English Army) and Ross (a Scottish Noble) from Macbeth. Bray also cited musical compositions and 11 other authors including, Plato, Herodotus, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Gospel of Mathew, Plutarch, Ecclesiticus, Abraham Lincoln, Allan Seeger, the Sioux leader Low Dog, Sir Edward Creasey, and Robert Ingersoll. Bray closes his tribute repeating the Macbeth line, “They say he parted well, and paid his score: And so, God be with him!” In 1989, the Congressional Research Service noted Respectfully Quoted “will be helpful to Members of Congress in their task of expressing our national purpose and in their debating the public issues.” With more than 38 plays to his name, Shakespeare has provided a very large and quotable body of work with which to illustrate modern events. Sources: Congressional Record, 21 April 1936, congress.gov; Congressional Record, 20 May 1970, congress.gov; Congressional Record, 05 May 1996, congress.gov; Congressional Record, 22 April 1999, congress.gov; Folger Shakespeare Library, https://www.folger.edu/; Suzy Platt, Library Of Congress, Congressional Research Service, Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989).