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 which followed, of the able and eminent men on both sides who considered the question, arriving, however, at one admitted conclusion, that the remedy was needed and that it did lie in the law-making power of the government to furnish it.