President Grover Cleveland

' Cleveland laid out his approach as very different from what Americans are witnessing today. “In the discharge of my official duty I shall endeavor to be guided by a just and unstrained construction of the Constitution,” he wrote, “a careful observance of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the states or to the people, and by a cautious appreciation of those functions which by the Constitution and laws have been especially assigned to the executive branch.” ...

Cleveland recognized that “The public Treasury…should only exist as a conduit conveying the people’s tribute to its legitimate objects of expenditure,” and so studied every bill Congress passed. He vetoed over 300 of them, more than double the 132 vetoes of all the Presidents before him, combined. As part of that due diligence, he was the first President to veto bogus pension claims and pension pork (from the Civil War). One veto message, of a bill to provide federal aid to drought-stricken Texas farmers, reveals a central reason: “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.” ...

Cleveland tried, though unsuccessfully, to eliminate burdensome and inefficient tariffs, “the vicious, inequitable, and illogical source of unnecessary taxation.” He even devoted his entire annual message to Congress one year to attacking protective tariffs.

He also resisted political pressures to inflate, even when facing a serious recession, since “nothing is more vital to…the beneficient purposes of our Government than a sound and stable currency.” '

- rest at Remember an Underappreciated Honest Politician | AIER

 

Being that he was philosophically what we now call a classical liberal(libertarian), I would think he would be a member of the Libertarian Party.