Arguably THE most progressive Republican prior to the arrival of George W Bush, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 vetoed a plan laid out by then-Civil Governor to the Philippines, William H Taft. Having recently acquired the Philippines via The Treaty of Paris at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, Taft was appointed to his position towards the effective establishing of a Filipino-led, independent, self-governing Philippines. Taft’s plan, subsequently vetoed, called for the reinstating of the Spanish opium monopoly, a plan that would have established Congress essentially as opium merchants. Taft would have seen the American government collecting revenue via the marketing of opium to the merchants of the barbiturate, similarly as had the Spanish colonial government, had Roosevelt not intervened.
