Spend time discussing presidents with John Hood, and you’re bound to hear his theories about the greatness of James Knox Polk.
Thumbing through The Heritage Guide to the Constitution (2005), I found an example John is bound to like. It involves Polk’s 1847 veto of an internal improvements bill:
Polk vetoed a bill strikingly similar to much of the pork-barrel legislation to which we have grown accustomed in modern times. It provided $6,000 for projects in the Wisconsin territory — constitutionally permissible because of Congress’s broader powers over federal territories — but it also included $500,000 for a myriad of projects in the existing states. Polk contended that to interpret the Spending Clause to permit such appropriations would allow “combinations of individual and local interests [that would be] strong enough to control legislation, absorb the revenues of the country, and plunge the government into a hopeless indebtedness.”
