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Full List
Top 10 Heated Legislative Battles
- Social Security, 1935
- Bleeding Kansas, 1854 , July 6, 1854 First state Republican Party officially organized in Jackson, Michigan, to oppose Democrats’ pro-slavery policies. Secession Crisis
Bleeding Kansas "Competition For Virgin Territory" 1854-1861
With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854, the stage was set for murderous mob rule in the territory of Kansas. The act pitted Northern abolitionists against proslavery Southerners and undermined any chance of compromise.
Repealing the demarcation line between slave and free territory established by the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act declared that the question of whether slavery would be allowed in a new state would be determined by popular sovereignty- the vote of the settlers of the territory. The contest for control of the territorial legislature and thus the state would be determined by which side of the slavery issue could rush the most settlers into the territory. Northern abolitionists and Emigrant Aid Societies encouraged and sponsored Free-Soil settlers, while proslavery factions flooded the territory with slave owners. The neighboring slave state of Missouri was a funnel into Kansas for the proslavery faction, which quickly gained the upper hand in population.
Kansas was a powder keg that exploded into a bloody civil war, characterized by lynching, bushwhacking, and burning- a continuous stream of violence that could not be contained by federal or territorial authorities. The area around the town of Lawrence, Kans., was settled by Free-Soilers who harbored fugitive abolitionists, slaves, and newspaper editors indicted for treason by the proslavery territorial government.
In May 1856, an 800-man "posse" made up of border ruffians from Missouri sacked Lawrence, wrecking the newspaper offices and burning the hotel and the home of the Free-Soil governor. Four days later, fanatic abolitionist John Brown and four of his sons seized five proslavery settlers from their homes along Pottawatomie Creek and, in front of the settler's families, hacked them to death with broadswords. More than 200 men would be killed in the era known as "Bleeding Kansas".
Fascinating Fact: Brown and his sons evaded capture and were never indicted or punished for the Pottawatomie massacre.
- Asbestos, 2005
- Medicare, 1965,
The gravity of America’s health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century’s bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole, though the truth of it is often lost in abstract talk of insurance company profits, treatment costs, and other cold, inhuman analyses.
Today’s health system condemns 50 million Americans to ill health and death while guaranteeing health care to the economic privileged. It cannot stand.
About 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. That’s more than a third the number of lives lost in battle during each year of the four-year Civil War. Members of Congress without the moral clarity to recognize this equivalence will be condemned by history. Their spinelessness and lack of will when confronted with the power of the insurance industry is just as morally bankrupt as the American congressmen who bowed to Southern slave-owners.
The morally compromising efforts to pass health care reform that insurance companies might like is as insane as the compromises over slavery. Those compromises — the First and Second Missouri Compromises of 1820, their repeal by the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, and the notorious Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 led to the War Between the States.
War is what happens when morality is sacrificed to political expediency. The stupid compromises over slavery ducked the fundamental moral question at hand. The compromises were doomed to fail, as all such moral cowardice ultimately fails. That’s no original thought. It’s a central message of authentic Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In fact, those traditions only bought blood and trouble for themselves when they forgot this fundamental teaching about moral courage.
The ugly consequences of the Missouri Compromise, which tried to balance the power of slave and non-slave states, are still with us. How different it would be if the Framers had banned slavery, or if moral courage had been in greater supply in our nations first few, fragile decades.
The political protectors of insurance industry profits aren’t short of words. But every utterance from Washington like "we don’t have the votes for a public option" is so cowardly and disgusting that the stomach turns. Imagine a husband impotently watching a brutal assault on his wife. "Honey, I would have protected you but I just wasn’t sufficiently armed." That’s what the excuses from Congress sound like.
America has the economic ability to save 18,000 lives each year and end the suffering of millions of more who struggle with illness and disease. The only reason we don’t do it is that insurance companies haven’t yet figured out how to do it at a profit.
The health insurance industry earns its profits from the denial of coverage and benefits. It’s not so different from the Southern plantation owners who earned their profit from slave labor. The latter had their economic justifications for their immorality. So do the insurance companies.
False arguments about "government-run" health care ignore the fact that the current system is run by unaccountable insurance company bureaucrats. Hollow arguments about the cost of saving 18,000 lives a year are morally twisted, too. There’s no reason for these premature deaths except the protection of insurance company profits.
That makes it blood money, some of which makes it back into the campaign coffers of politicians who protect their insurance industry masters.
Disease and death are unavoidable, of course. But we are talking about unnecessary, premature deaths. In other words, people are dying because our political leaders are afraid of the insurance industry.
Condemning Americans to premature death and ill health so some can earn profits is the moral equivalent of slavery. Some may find the comparison extreme, others distasteful. But history will record it as a fact.
And members of Congress who ignore that fact can be certain that their descendants will be haunted by their blindness and cowardice.
- Clinton vs. Gingrich, 1995
- Health Care Reform, 2010, Being a person who has studied Sociology in America, I can only say that the experience of slavery has affected EVERYONE. This is also true in Denamrk, where I live today. The Danes ran the ships that brought the slaves to America from Africa.
For the descendants of all of those involved, the violence, the way people were forced to be married, have children with others than they have chosen- many whites had black children that they did not acknowledge (Thomas Jefferson!), people lost their families in Africa and later in America…read Toni Morrison’s BELOVED.
Yes, slavery was a terrible, terrible crime agianst many people and the racism that followed in its wake is still affecting the lives of a lot of people who are still the last in line for everything and do not blog or listen to the BBC – or even know that it exists.
That is why Barack Obama’s election is such a defining moment for the US and the world in a time of crisis. In America, you always get a black man in to clean up the mess the whilte people make. And like somebody said about a police chief in Dallas, Texas, “And once he’s done the job, you fire him”.
Slavery has affected and infected everything and everybody. That’s what crimes against humanity do.Finally slaves wer let lose w/out any benefits monies health exams and to say nothing was passed down for generations is Ludicrous(Posttraumattic slave stress syndrome)
- The Brady Bill, 1993, Brady bill.7 Mostly white, the "gun rights" movement claims a Constitutional "right to keep and bear arms" supersedes any government regulatory power.8 The tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Waco are rallying cries for the "gun rights" movement.
The Wise Use "property rights" movement that seeks to make property owners a higher class of citizen. 9 The "takings" issue that Wise Use pushes is a distorted reading of the Fifth Amendment -- a legal interpretation last used by slaveholders to demand compensation as a precondition for emancipation. 10 In many Western States, Wise Use is second only to the Christian Right as a cohesive right-wing voting block. From its inception, Wise Use has had an ugly history of terrorism, violence, harassment and smear attacks on environmentalists. 11 In many areas throughout America, Wise Use groups were the prime point of contact for militia organizing. 12
The violent anti-abortion underground has repeatedly committed indiscriminate mass murder, bombings, arson, harassment, intimidation and physical assault in an attempt to deny the civil rights of medical patients. 13 In 1992-1993 alone, 27 abortion clinics were fire-bombed, 229 clinics were vandalized and 50 clinics were victims of anti-abortion blockades. In the past 21 months, assassination attempts against abortion clinic personnel have left five dead, and five seriously injured. 14 Homophobia is a prime candidate for the next cross-over by the extreme Christian Right to murderous violence. The potential spur to murder is the failure of political action to radically restrict the civil rights of homosexuals. With the impending collapse of the gay-bashing initiative campaigns, the most radical members of the Christian homophobic movement may turn to apocalyptic terrorism.
The Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA), an organization that promotes a supposed "right" of jurors to "nullify" laws by moving for acquittal even though the facts of the case would justify conviction. 15 In fact, juries have always had the ability apply the law as they see fit. In effect, consensual jury nullification is one of the main reasons that few white men have been convicted of racial murder. "No jury would ever convict..." expresses jury nullification in a nutshell. Jury nullification and the inability of local prosecuting attorneys to press charges for racially motivated crimes was the major impetus for federal intervention in civil rights law enforcement. FIJA's proposal is a "get out of jail free card" for local majorities to attack minorities or anyone to ignore the law. FIJA has successfully mainstreamed its appeal to a wide audience -- even Alexander Cockburn, a left-wing columnist, has sung their praises. 16
The "County Supremacy" movement which is expressed in the Catron County strategy of "custom and culture" ordinances and the more extreme posturing of Dick Carver, a county commissioner from Nye County, Nevada. 17 County supremacy ordinances seek usurp control of the public's lands under federal and state trusteeship. The National Federal Lands Conference, a Wise Use organization that promotes the Catron version of county supremacy has endorsed militias in their literature. Dick Carver has sought alliances with white supremacists and the racist Christian Identity movement. 18
The "right-wing tax resistance" movement that serves as a cover for white supremacy, anti-semitism, and a horrifying array of paranoid conspiracy theories that center on taxes, banking and the Federal Reserve. Also known as "constitutionalists," the roots of right-wing tax resistance trace back to the Posse Comitatus, the Minutemen and the Christian Patriot movement. 19
These components of anti-democratic militancy exist do not as separate movements. There is a substantial -- and in many cases total -- overlap between them.
It is not unusual to find literature promoting all of the above issues at a single "Patriot" meeting. The overlap between Wise Use and white supremacy has been noted in anti-Indian activities in particular. Purchasers of tribal trust land who obtained title to Indian land under the General Allotment Act of 1887 are often recruited under the banner of "property rights" to both Wise Use and white supremacy. 20
The typical anti-democratic "model citizen" is a white property owner in a suburban or rural fringe area. As one woman at a county secession meeting put it, "Those [non-white, non-property owning] people in the city think they have the same rights as we do and they don't even own a stick of property!" 21
The anti-democratic movement has one clear point of unity: a distorted legal doctrine that once plunged this nation into a fratricidal Civil War. A war that some of the most irresponsible militias are preparing to fight again.
The History of Angry White Guys with Guns
The doctrine of nullification has a two hundred fifty year history that reaches from John Peter Zenger's celebrated 1735 trial for seditious libel, 22 to the Anti-federalist arguments against the passage of the Constitution, 23 through Shays' Rebellion in 1787, into Jefferson and Madison's battle against the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, 24 and finally to South Carolina's attempted nullification of the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832. 25 With Daniel Webster and Andrew Jackson's destruction of the fallacious doctrine in the 1830's, the supporters of nullification turned to secession and civil war in their fury.
The final form of nullification doctrine came from John C. Calhoun, perhaps the last significant political philosopher in American history. Born in the frontier area of South Carolina in 1782, Calhoun married a rich cousin, acquired a plantation and became the leading defender of the Southern aristocracy. He led South Carolina's opposition to federal tariff laws which favored Northern industry over the agricultural South. This struggle against "the Tariff of Abominations" produced the final form of the doctrine of nullification. After the 1833 nullification battle Calhoun became a leading apologist for slavery. His ideas are not widely discussed these days, since the nullification extremists went on to secession and civil war.
Instead, the person most frequently quoted by today's "Patriots" is Thomas Jefferson. The militias frequently justify their seditious fantasies with the last two sentences (underlined here for emphasis) from a letter by Jefferson complaining about the British propaganda surrounding Shays' Rebellion:
"...Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? [Shays' Rebellion] And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honorably conducted? I say nothing of its motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, a forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and half for each state. What country before, ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
- Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 13, 1787 26
Jefferson wrote this about the time that Shays' Rebellion was over and done with. At the conclusion of the rebellion, President Washington pardoned most of the convicted rebels. While clearly empathetic to the rebels' distress, Jefferson did not support them. The "Patriot" reading would use Jefferson's words as a defense of their seditious efforts to "uphold the Constitution" -- their coded way of saying "treason."
The fourth to last sentence deserves attention, where Jefferson succinctly states the proper way for a democracy to handle such occurances:
"The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them."
It is still good advice.
Just as Jefferson saw the need for a federal system to remedy the failings of Confederation, so did he see the need to protect against the abuses of centralized authority. He steered a middle course, neither Federalist nor anti-Federalist. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were seen by him as an abuse of federal authority with his party as the target.
Jefferson's arguments provided the foundation for Calhoun's compact republic theory and nullification doctrine. The compact republic is an attempt to turn back the clock to the period of the Articles of Confederation, prior to the Constitution and the establishment of federal supremacy as the basic law of the land. The compact republic is also the basis for the racist State's Rights doctrines which played such a strong role in opposition to Civil Rights.
The notion of the compact republic claims that the ultimate meaning of the Constitution is that the states have entered into a compact (or contract) voluntarily and without surrendering any sovereignty. Under the Articles of Confederation, each state retained absolute sovereignty. 27 The key to the doctrine of the compact republic is the assertion of the voluntary nature of cooperation between the states and the federal government. It is a refusal to recognize federalism and an insistence that the principles embodied in the Articles of Confederation take precedence over the Constitution.
The federal government in a compact republic exists only on the sufferance of the individual states. Since the states retain their absolute sovereignty, and only voluntarily accede to federal law, no state need comply with a federal law with which it disagrees. A state's agreement to participate in the federal government is voluntary and may be withdrawn by secession.
The main conflict between the compact republic and modern federalism is the relationship between majorities and minorities. In the compact republic, a minority may exempt itself from the decisions of the majority -- just as the slave-holding minority attempted to justify human slavery as a "property right" protected by the Fifth Amendment against the majority opinion of the Federal Republic. Nullification in the broadest sense allows a subunit of government to unilaterally declare a law passed by a supreme authority null and void.
Jefferson's 1798 recourse to the nullification of federal law by state assemblies was a faltering step towards the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. The contest for the power to interpret the Constitution was settled by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803). 28
The ruling in Marbury v. Madison firmly established judicial review -- the power of interpreting the Constitution -- in the hands of an independent judiciary, not the contentious and self-interested state legislatures. Nullification has been a dead letter since 1803. The legal argument over nullification was finished before Calhoun entered the scene. Currently, all attempts at applying nullification doctrine have run aground on the shoals of the Supremacy Clause in Article 6 of the Constitution. Politically, however, nullification is still alive.
The Constitution -- which succeeded the Articles of Confederation in 1789 -- does not set forth an absolute sovereign, but rather delineates and restrains the powers of government. Sovereignty under the Constitution is a shared sovereignty of citizens, states and federal government. The federal constitution is declared in the Supremacy Clause of Article 6 to be the basic and ultimate law of the land. The power and authority of the federal Constitution flow from it to the states and thence to the citizens. Likewise, there is a similar flow of consent and affirmation from the citizens to the local, state and federal government by the process of frequent and orderly elections.
The Illogic of Unreason
Nullification underlies attempts by the anti-democratic Right to deny, challenge and subvert the authority of the federal government to defend the rights of the people as a whole against the transgressions of the propertied elite minority. Thus does the "sovereign citizen" unilaterally declare the 16th Amendment (federal income tax) null and void; the "sovereign" county claim control over the public's state and federally administered land; and the "sovereign" states exempt themselves from "unfunded mandates."
The "Patriots" claim that sovereignty is not shared and distributed, but absolute. Under the false notion of absolute sovereignty, compliance with any law is ultimately voluntary and refusal to obey the law is sufficient to nullify it. Once nullified, it becomes "unconstitutional" and may be resisted by violent force.
Nullification arguments have little legal force behind them. 29 Attorneys and constitutional scholars dismiss them out of hand. The usual reaction of an attorney to a "custom and culture" ordinance is to say, "Pfui -- this is clearly nonsense." This dismissal ignores the tremendous force that these theories have on public opinion. It may be nonsense, but it is nonsense that is now incorporated in hundreds of county ordinances all over the country. The nullification arguments may be legal nonsense, but they have been around for a very long time -- long enough to have become part of the mythology of American politics.
The "Patriots" marshal plenty of supportive quotations, arguments, and reasons in support of nullification -- most of them distortions, lies, or outright fabrications. 30 The fury of their emotion in attacking critics shows the tenuousness of their position. Ultimately, the threat of force and violence is the "Patriots" final argument.
It does little good to say "these constitutional theories are ridiculous and the people who hold them are crazy." The argument of dismissal is neither persuasive nor effective. The root issues must be faced squarely and dealt with directly. The threat of force must be met with courage and resolution, not equivocation and appeasement.
The basic rights and freedoms on which this county is founded are not negotiable. If the "Patriots" wish to take up arms, let them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?
Rhetoric without Reason
"Patriot" ideology consists of absolutist beliefs rather than considered opinions. Challenging an absolutist belief is felt by the believer to be a form of attack, which in turn justifies conflict as the basic mode of discourse. The substitution of belief for reasoned opinion has severely eroded civility in political discourse. The goal for many "Patriots" is not to persuade, but to silence opposition -- by force and terrorism if they can get away with it.
Consider the following list of extremist episodes in American politics: 31
1795-1800 Anti-Illuminism
1828-30 Anti-Masonic Party
1854-60 Know Nothing Party
1890-94 American Protectionist Association
1920-25 Ku Klux Klan (II)
1932-38 Black Legion
1948-54 Anti-Communism (McCarthyism)
1958-Present John Birch Society
1954-72 Ku Klux Klan (III)
1961-68 Minutemen
1969-Present Posse Comitatus
1973-Present Aryan Nations
1979-Present New Christian Right (anti-abortion / homophobia)
1983-86 Bruders Schweigan / Order Strike Force II
1984-Present Wise Use Movement
1984-1988 Committee of the States
1992-Present Patriot "Militia" Movement
The nation is still in a state of shock and denial following the bombing in Oklahoma City. No one wants to live in a country where such things happen. Few are willing to admit that the political establishment has been powerless to prevent the current drift towards tyrannical intolerance and hatred. Once more, the leaders have failed the country and the citizens must look to themselves to protect each other.
The current resurgence of anti-democratic extremism is another cycle in the struggle for peace, justice and equality. Extremists have repeatedly attacked democracy in America, a country characterized by a profound ignorance of its own history. Across America, people are beginning to assert their right of voluntary association to defend the rights of all. It is only a glimmer at present -- the effort may fail.
The paralysis of the liberals has caused many people of progressive sentiment to step outside party politics and turn to social organizing. Here and there, small groups of concerned citizens are banding together. Most noticeable in rural areas, these groups are motivated by a sense of fairness and human dignity. In one area, the issue may be attacks on abortion providers. In another, the harassment of environmentalists. In my county, the catalyst was a cross burning in front of a migrant labor camp.
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, she was thinking of her sore feet and how tired she felt. It is from these small things that social movements grow.
Once again, America's true patriots must put aside their comfort, their wealth, and even their safety to defend true freedom, true liberty and true justice. It is the same burden that was borne by the Abolitionists, the Suffragettes, the Grangers, the Progressives, the Wobblies, the Bonus Marchers, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Riders, the Civil Rights marchers, the Free Speech protesters, the Moratorium Day Committee, the Earth Day organizers, the Sanctuary movement and the abortion clinic defenders -- those who go first, not those who reap the public honors.
Carl Schurz vastly improved on Decatur's toast, when he said in an address to Congress, "Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right." So should it be with us.
- Civil Rights Act, 1964 ,
As co-blogger David Bernstein has pointed out, numerous prominent conservatives, including many associated with National Review, actively defended racial segregation throughout the 1950s and 60s. They supported Jim Crow not only on “states’ rights” grounds but also because, as a 1957 National Review editorial put it, whites were “the advanced race” and could deny the franchise to blacks in order to protect “civilization.” By contrast, as David also notes, most leading libertarian writers of the time — including Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand — were on the other side of this issue. Rand, for example, wrote that “[t]he Southern racists’ claim of ‘states’ rights’ is a contradiction in terms: there can be no such thing as the ‘right’ of some men to violate the rights of others.” She also denounced racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”Many 1960s libertarians can reasonably be criticized for underemphasizing the importance of ending segregation relative to other issues. But their record on these matters was considerably better than that of most conservative intellectuals of the day. Even if you think that libertarians were wrong to be skeptical of restrictions on purely private sector discrimination, the conservatives of the time were no better. And unlike in the case of the conservatives, libertarian opposition to private sector anti-discrimination laws was motivated by general support for a right of free association, whereas most of the conservative opponents were perfectly willing to support Jim Crow laws forbidding blacks from voluntarily associating with whites.
Some of the conservative support for segregation was simply a product of the racism endemic throughout much of society at the time. It is too often forgotten that many segregationists were big government liberals on economic issues, such as George Wallace and the recently departed Bob Byrd. But some was also linked to specific weaknesses of conservatism, such as excessive deference to tradition. Roger Clegg, today’s National Review editors, and other modern conservatives should not be blamed for the mistakes of their predecessors fifty years ago. But black civil rights is not a good issue to focus on if you want to assert that conservatism is superior to libertarianism.
UPDATE: In an e-mail that he asked me to post, Roger Clegg writes:
My point was that, in 2010, the fact that conservatism is less ideological than libertarianism and more willing to acknowledge that circumstances matter makes it is easier for conservatives (like me, notwithstanding my libertarian streak) than libertarians (like Rand Paul, notwithstanding his later retraction) to acknowledge the need for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I was not suggesting that conservatives in the 1960s had a better record than libertarians;indeed, my suggestion was that the good instincts that both had also led both to the wrong conclusions then.
I appreciate the clarification. It certainly narrows the differences between us. But I still don’t agree with Clegg’s position. As I pointed out in the post, conservatives in the 1960s were far more wrong on Jim Crow than libertarians, and this was for reasons related to some general shortcomings of conservatism. Most libertarians had reached the conclusion that Jim Crow laws were unjust and should be abolished, while most conservatives had not. I also don’t agree that conservatism takes better account of circumstances than libertarianism in 2010. As comments by such scholars as Richard Epstein (quoted by Clegg himself), and co-blogger David Bernstein demonstrate, few serious libertarian commentators deny the need for the Act back in 1964, and virtually none deny that it was at least far superior to the pre-1964 status quo. Even Rand Paul, in his initial statement, didn’t reject the latter. In sum, nothing about the civil rights issue — either in 1964 or in 2010 — supports Clegg’s broad general claim that “conservatism is superior to libertarianism because it is less ideological and more readily acknowledges that circumstances matter.” And the evidence from the former period actually suggests ways in which conservatism — especially in its traditionalist variant — is in fact inferior to the libertarian alternative. The Election of 1824, The 1824 Election and the "Corrupt Bargain"
 Henry Clay was thrice a candidate for the Presidency and the chief architect of the Compromise of 1850 which moved slavery to the forefront of Congressional debates.
The 1824 presidential election marked the final collapse of the Republican-Federalist political framework. For the first time no candidate ran as a Federalist, while five significant candidates competed as Democratic-Republicans. Clearly, no party system functioned in 1824. The official candidate of the Democratic-Republicans to replace Monroe was William H. Crawford, the secretary of the treasury. A caucus of Republicans in Congress had selected him, but this backing by party insiders turned out to be a liability as other candidates called for a more open process for selecting candidates.
The outcome of the very close election surprised political leaders. The winner in the all-important Electoral College was Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, with ninety-nine votes. He was followed by John Quincy Adams, the son of the second president and Monroe' secretary of state, who secured eighty-four votes. Meanwhile Crawford trailed well behind with just forty-one votes. Although Jackson seemed to have won a narrow victory, receiving 43 percent of the popular vote versus just 30 percent for Adams, he would not be seated as the country's sixth president. Because nobody had received a majority of votes in the electoral college, the House of Representatives had to choose between the top two candidates.
 After losing the Presidency to Andrew Jackson in 1828, John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives where he served until his death in 1848.
Henry Clay, the speaker of the House of Representatives, now held a decisive position. As a presidential candidate himself in 1824 (he finished fourth in the electoral college), Clay had led some of the strongest attacks against Jackson. Rather than see the nation's top office go to a man he detested, the Kentuckian Clay forged an Ohio Valley-New England coalition that secured the White House for John Quincy Adams. In return Adams named Clay as his secretary of state, a position that had been the stepping-stone to the presidency for the previous four executives.
This arrangement, however, hardly proved beneficial for either Adams or Clay. Denounced immediately as a "corrupt bargain" by supporters of Jackson, the antagonistic presidential race of 1828 began practically before Adams even took office. To Jacksonians the Adams-Clay alliance symbolized a corrupt system where elite insiders pursued their own interests without heeding the will of the people.
The Jacksonians, of course, overstated their case; after all, Jackson fell far short of a majority in the general vote in 1824. Nevertheless, when the Adams administration continued to favor a strong federal role in economic development, Jacksonians denounced their political enemies as using government favors to reward their friends and economic elites. By contrast, Jackson presented himself as a champion of the common man and by doing so furthered the democratization of American politics. The Gag Rules, 1844 ,Gag Rule
In the system of checks and balances, the citizens of the United States were given the right to petition the House of Representatives for redress in the First Amendment to the Constitution ("...petition the government for a redress of grievances"). It was only fitting that the first petition under this amendment was given to the House by Benjamin Franklin and it was regarding the gradual Abolition of Slavery.
In 1831 some abolitionists favoring the immediate abolition of slavery in Washington, D. C. began forwarding petitions to the House. These were referred to the sub-committee who reported to the House that the petitions should not be granted. What had been a trickle in 1831 became a flood in 1835, mostly because the American Anti-Slavery Society began printing and distributing petitions. The sub-committee simply ceased reporting on the numerous petitions it was handling. This bothered some Representatives, most notably former president John Quincy Adams (Adams was presenting many of the petitions).
In December, 1835, the House returned to hearing the petitions and each one was voted down by lopsided votes. By February, 1836, the House had tired of these votes. South Carolina's Henry Laurens Pinckney offered three resolutions on February 8, 1836, essentially moving all incoming abolition petitions to a sub-committee with instructions that the Congress could not interfere with slavery and should not interfere with slavery in the District of Columbia. At the request of the committee, all petitions dealing with slavery would be tabled, without printing, hearing, or reference in the Congressional Record.
Pinckney's Resolutions, and the additional resolution by the committee, were passed into law in May, 1836. Since the gag rule could only be placed into law for a single session of the House, passing a new gag rule became one of the first orders of a new session. The renewal of Pinckney's Resolution came on January 18, 1837, and of course, Adams steadfastly argued against the gag rule, but the House passed the new rule anyway.
On February 6, 1837, Adams tried a different approached. He claimed to have a petition signed by 22 slaves and wanted to present it on the floor (not in committee). Since petitions on slavery would normally go the clerk, Adams, in a parliamentary move, asked if he could send it to the Speaker. Joab Lawler of Alabama immediately objected to the petition not going to the clerk. Pandemonium broke out on the floor, with Southern members asking the House to censure the member from Massachusetts for "Gross disrespect to this House." On February 9th the resolution was rejected.
In December, 1838 the Patton Resolution (named for Virginia's John Patton) replaced Pinckney's Resolutions and in December, 1839, the Atherton Resolutions was passed to create the gag rule. The vote on the gag rule resolution, which actually tabled any abolition petition, passed 126-73, roughly the same ratio as the previous gag rules.
When the House considered the gag rule for 1841 it was renamed the Twenty-First (21st) Rule. With the Whig win in the Election of 1840 more pro-abolition Members had been seated and the vote on the gag rule ran 114-108, considerably different than the vote in earlier years. An Adams motion to omit the twenty-first from the Rules of the House failed, but he had been energized by the shift towards abolition. To quantify the pro-abolition shift, the number of signatures on petitions covered by the gag rule was 34,000 before the gag rule. In 1839, under the Patton Resolutions it was 300,000 and in 1841, under the Twenty-First rule it was "uncountable."
Twice more, called the Twenty-third (23rd) in 1842 and the Twenty-fifth Rule (25th) Rule in 1843 the gag rule passed in the House. On December 3, 1844 the House once again considered the gag rule. This time John Quincy Adams successfully marshaled the pro-abolition forces and the House voted to reject the gag rule by a vote of 108-80.
The House officially changed its procedure on receiving petitions in 1853. No longer were petitions presented on the floor but were given to the clerk, who would note their receipt in the Congressional Record and assign them to a committee.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1974334,00.html#ixzz1FSLqXZ4G |
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