First Veto

There were Democrats to the right of him, and Democrats to the left of him. Into the jaws of the Kerr bill rode Harry Truman.

The President's good friends and Democrats in the Southwest, including Oklahoma's oil-rich Senator Robert Kerr and Texas' Speaker Sam Rayburn, spoke up for free enterprise. The Kerr bill would specifically remove any right of the Federal Power Commission to regulate the price charged for natural gas going into interstate pipelines. And it wouldn't cost consumers "a single red penny," promised Rayburn.

Oh yes it would, replied the mayors of 18 big cities; it would cost consumers millions. Producers called such assertions nonsense, but nonsense or not, the issue--in political terms--had become "the interests" v. "the people." Democratic National Chairman Bill Boyle urged Harry Truman to veto the bill. And last week he did.

Because "pipeline companies, and in turn the consumers of natural gas, are bound to the producers" by the "physical location of their pipelines," the President wrote, he could not agree that competition would work to keep prices down to a reasonable level. It was possible that the FPC might have to step in. Hence his first veto of 1950. Said Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas, who had led the opposition: "God bless the President of the United States."

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