Blood on the Marble

 For Tuesday, read Davidson, ch. 3 and 4. 

The book on violence in the antebellum Congress:

The title comes from this line, which provides the book's epigraph: In a letter to Senator Charles Sumner (MA) Rev. John Turner Sargent wrote that "blood would flow—somebody’s blood, either yours or Wilson’s, or Hale’s, or Giddings’— before the expiration of your present session on that field of blood, the floor of Congress.” 

Sargent was alluding to the burial place of Judas: "And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day" (Matthew 27:6-8 KJV).

It was literally an atmosphere conducive to violence:

All this in a room that was hot, stuffy, and smelly. At the end of a typical day, with the galleries full and hours of body heat trapped in the chamber, [Benjamin Brown] French thought that reading aloud to members was like reading “with his head stuck into an oven.” ...  Ongoing whimpering from the floor produced another study, this one demonstrating that it was thirty degrees warmer inside than outside and that the chamber smelled of sewage from the basement. Visiting the new chamber not long after it opened, French wasn’t impressed. The idea of “shutting up a thousand or two people in a kind of cellar, where none of God’s direct light or air can come in to them . . . does not jump with my notions of living,” he groused. Thirty years later, members still declared the House “the worst ventilated building on the continent."

Professor Freeman explains how hard it was to research the violence (Start at around 9:30):

In 1856, Senator Sumner delivered his famous "Crime Against Kansas" speech.  He attacked the absent Andrew Butler (SC), saying he had " a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean," the harlot, Slavery."

Two days later, Butler's cousin, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, responded:




The Drunk History version:

You can see the cane in a Boston museum:

Fast Forward to 2020-21

From the J6 report:

Then he pressures the Georgia secretary of state to change the count.

Team Trump organizes fake electors

Trump pressures the Justice Department:

The President pushed the claim that Pennsylvania had reported 205,000 more votes than there were voters in the state.“We’ll look at whether we have more ballots in Pennsylvania than registered voters,” Acting Attorney General Rosen replied, according to [acting deputy attorney general Richard] Donoghue. They “[s]hould be able to check that out quickly.” But Rosen wanted President Trump to “understand that the DOJ can’t and won’t snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election. It doesn’t work that way.” 

“I don’t expect you to do that,” President Trump responded. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen."

Donoghue explained this “is an exact quote from the President.” 

From the Eastman Memo:

1. VP Pence ... begins to open and count the ballots 
2. When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States.  
3. At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment -- is 454. ... A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected. 
4. Howls, of course, from the Democrats, who now claim, contrary to Tribe’s prior position, that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12th Amendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where the “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote . . . .” Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well. 

Pence declined to go along.

The rally:

The violence:

They came damn close to Pence

A mysterious White House document outlined a plan for the Defense Department to seize voting machines.

Congress reformed the Electoral Count Act late last year:

• Choice of electors must follow the laws of the state enacted prior to election day.
• Each state's governor (unless otherwise previously identified in the laws or constitution of a state ) is responsible for submitting the certificate identifying the state's electors. 
• The role of the Vice President is merely ministerial.  
• The objection threshold in Congress is at least one-fifth of the House of Representatives and Senate.