Let us suppose that some political party, for the time being in control of the law-making power of the government, should extend the practice of making permanent appropriations to the extreme limit allowed by the Constitution. This would relieve the administration of all financial dependence upon public sentiment except in the management of the army. And if, as the framers of the Constitution contemplated, the President and the Senate should represent the minority, the administration might for years pursue a policy to which public opinion had come to be strongly opposed. For with the system once adopted its repeal could not be effected without the concurrence of all branches of the law-making authority. The President and Congress could, in anticipation of an adverse majority in the House, guard against the withdrawal of financial support from their policy by simply making permanent provision for their needs. Our present system would permit this to be done even after the party in power had been overwhelmingly defeated at the polls, since the second session of the old congress does not begin until after the members of the new House of Representatives have been elected.[123] This would tie the hands of any adverse popular majority in a succeeding congress and effectually deprive it of even a veto on the income and expenditure of the government, until such time as it should also gain control of the Presidency and the Senate. But this last could never have happened if the practical working of the Constitution had been what its framers intended. Whatever control, then, the majority may now exercise over taxation and public expenditure has thus been acquired less through any constitutional provisions intended to secure it, than in spite of those which seemingly made it impossible.