Besides, a practice has grown up of late years to legislate in appropriation bills at the last hours of the session on new and important subjects.  This practice constrains the President either to suffer measures to become laws which he does not approve or to incur the risk of stopping the wheels of the Government by vetoing an appropriation bill.  Formerly such bills were confined to specific appropriations for carrying into effect existing laws and the well-established policy of the country, and little time was then requited by the President for their examination.

For my own part, I have deliberately determined that I shall approve no bills which I have not examined, and it will be a case of extreme and most urgent necessity which shall ever induce me to depart from this rule.  I therefore respectfully but earnestly recommend that the two Houses would allow the President at least two days previous to the adjournment of each session within which no new bill shall be presented to him for approval.  Under the existing joint rule one day is allowed, but this rule has been hitherto so constantly suspended in practice that important bills continue to be presented to him up till the very last moments of the session.  In a large majority of cases no great public inconvenience can arise from the want of time to examine their provisions, because the Constitution has declared that if a bill be presented to the President within the last ten days of the session he is not required to return it, either with an approval or with a veto, “in which case it shall not be a law.”  It may then lie over and be taken up and passed at the next session.  Great inconvenience would only be experienced in regard to appropriation bills, but, fortunately, under the late excellent law allowing a salary instead of a per diem to members of Congress the expense and inconvenience of a called session will be greatly reduced.

I can not conclude without commending to your favorable consideration the interest of the people of this District.  Without a representative on the floor of Congress, they have for this very reason peculiar claims upon our just regard.  To this I know, from my long acquaintance with them, they are eminently entitled.

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State of the Union Address
James Buchanan
December 6, 1858

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives: 

When we compare the condition of the country at the present day with what it was one year ago at the meeting of Congress, we have much reason for gratitude to that Almighty Providence which has never failed to interpose for our relief at the most critical periods of our history.  One year ago the sectional strife between the North and the South on the dangerous subject of slavery had again become so intense as to threaten the peace and perpetuity of the Confederacy.  The application for the admission of Kansas as a State into the Union fostered this unhappy agitation and