re according to unbroken usage and
established precedent.

Mr. President, the debate from which I have read took place in 1857
and was long and able, the question there arising upon the proposed
rejection of the vote of the State of Wisconsin, because of the
delay of a single day in the meeting of the electors. A violent
snowstorm having prevented the election on the third of December, it
was held on the fourth, which was clearly in violation of the law of
Congress passed in pursuance of the Constitution requiring that the
votes for the electors should be cast on the same day throughout the
Union. That debate will disclose the fact that the danger then
became more and more realized of leaving this question unsettled as
to who should determine whether the electoral votes of a State
should be received or rejected when the two houses of Congress
should differ upon that subject. There was no arbiter between
them. This new-fangled idea of the present hour, that the presiding
officer of the Senate should decide that question between the two
disagreeing houses, had not yet been discovered in the fertility of
political invention, or born perhaps of party necessity. The
question has challenged all along through our country's history
the ablest minds of the country; but at last we have reached a point
when under increased difficulties we are bound to settle it. It arose
in 1817 in the case of the State of Indiana, the question being
whether Indiana was a State in the Union at the time of the casting
of her vote. The two houses disagreed upon that subject; but by a
joint resolution, which clearly assumed the power of controlling the
subject, as the vote of Indiana did not if cast either way control
the election, the difficulty was tided over by an arrangement for
that time and that occasion only. In 1820 the case of the State of
Missouri arose and contained the same question. There again came the
difficulty when the genius and patriotism of Henry Clay were brought
into requisition and a joint resolution introduced by him and
adopted by both houses was productive of a satisfactory solution for
the time being. The remedy was merely palliative; the permanent
character of the difficulty was confessed and the fact that it was
only a postponement to men of a future generation of a question
still unsettled.

It is not necessary, and would be fatiguing to the Senate and to
myself, to give anything like a sketch of the debate