Legislative Service
He was elected to the Iowa House of Representatives in 1857, serving until 1860. Then he was a member of Iowa Senate between 1861 and 1865.
In 1868 he was elected as a Republican to the first of four consecutive terms representing Iowa's 1st congressional district in the U.S. House. In his first month in Congress he received national attention for refusing to support an appropriation for a federal courthouse in Keokuk because the nation was in debt and he could not support such a courthouse in every district. In the House, he chaired the Committee on Elections (in the Forty-second Congress), and the Committee on Railways and Canals (in the Forty-third Congress). He published A Treatise on the American Law of Elections, in 1875. In the Forty-fourth Congress, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, he was the author of a farsighted (but unsuccessful) bill to reorganize the federal courts to enable reasonable and prompt judicial review. He helped create the Electoral Commission to resolve the outcome of the 1876 Presidential Election, and served on the committee that investigated the Credit Mobilier scandal.
Read more about this topic: George W. McCrary
Famous quotes containing the words legislative and/or service:
“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)