his constituents, who included several distillers. He also believed the income tax, first enacted during the Civil War, was being administered unfairly, with large refunds often accruing to powerful business interests. On this point, Randall was successful, and the House accepted an amendment that required all cases for refunds over $500 to be tried before a federal district court. He also worked toward the elimination of taxation on tea, coffee, cigars, and matches, all of which Randall believed fell disproportionately on the poor. Relief from taxation made these items cheaper for the average American, while increasing reliance on tariffs helped the industrial owners and workers in Randall's district, as it made foreign products more expensive. Tariff legislation generally found favor with Randall, which put him more often in alliance with Republicans than Democrats. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, Randall worked to raise tariffs on a wide variety of imported goods. Even so, he sometimes differed with the Republicans when he believed the tariff proposed was too high; biographer Alfred V. House describes Randall's attitude as supporting "higher tariff rates... largely because he believed that the benefits of such high rates were passed on to the labor population." In 1870, he opposed the pig iron tariff as too high, against the wishes of fellow Pennsylvanian William "Pig Iron" Kelley. Randall called his version of protectionism "incidental protection": he believed tariffs should be high enough to support the cost of running the government, but applied only to those industries that needed tariff protection to survive foreign competition. Appropriations and investigations While the Democrats were in the minority, Randall spent much of his time scrutinizing the Republicans' appropriations bills. During the Grant administration, he questioned thousands of items in the appropriation bills, often gaining the support of Republicans in excising expenditures that were in excess of the departments' needs. He proposed a bill that would end the practice, common at the time, of executive departments spending beyond what they had been appropriated, then petitioning Congress to retroactively approve the spending with a supplemental appropriation; the legislation passed and became law. The supplemental appropriations were typically rushed through at the end of a session with little debate. Reacting to the large grants of land given to railroads, he also sought unsuccessfully to ban all land grants to private corporations. Investigating appropriations led Randall to focus on financial impropriety in Congress and the