U.S. Senate
In 1882, the Iowa General Assembly elected Wilson to the U.S. Senate. His first initiative as a U.S. Senator was to propose an unsuccessful constitutional amendment to more explicitly authorize the federal government to adopt laws that protect civil rights from violations by private citizens, to nullify the Supreme Court's ruling two months earlier in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). The General Assembly re-elected him in 1888 to a second six-year term. In the Senate, Wilson served as chairman of the Committee of Mines and Mining (in the Forty-eighth Congress) Committee on Expenditures of Public Money (in the Forty-eighth Congress), Committee on Revision of the Laws of the United States (in the Forty-ninth through Fifty-second Congresses), and the Committee on Education and Labor (in the Fifty-second Congress).
In 1890, Wilson was one of three Senators mentioned as potential nominees to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Samuel F. Miller of Iowa. President Benjamin Harrison instead picked Michigan judge Henry Billings Brown, who would later write the Supreme Court's opinion upholding "separate but equal" racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson,163 U.S. 537 (1896).
Read more about this topic: James F. Wilson
Famous quotes containing the word senate:
“We have been here over forty years, a longer period than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, coming to this Capitol pleading for this recognition of the principle that the Government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. Mr. Chairman, we ask that you report our resolution favorably if you can but unfavorably if you must; that you report one way or the other, so that the Senate may have the chance to consider it.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“It took six weeks of debate in the Senate to get the Arms Embargo Law repealed—and we face other delays during the present session because most of the Members of the Congress are thinking in terms of next Autumn’s election. However, that is one of the prices that we who live in democracies have to pay. It is, however, worth paying, if all of us can avoid the type of government under which the unfortunate population of Germany and Russia must exist.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)