Washington Letter

Democrats attempt to manipulate Congress in order to fulfill their agenda, and the implications of the Breckenridge Trials, regarding the infidelity of a Democrat Senator, reaches Capitol Hill.

Ex speaker reads takes his new honor easily, as he does everything that comes to him. He has never had a doubt that the counting of a quorum would eventually become one of the fixed rules of the house, no matter which party is in power. If he felt any surprise at all at the action of the democratic caucus in directing the committee on rules to prepare a rule providing for the counting of members present and not voting, in order to make a quorum, it was not because the caucus had come around to his ideas but because as many as 40 democrats should have voted against the proposition. While the Republican members of the House are there row Believers in the principle of counting a quorum it is not yet certain that they will support the row reported by the committee on rules, or that they will vote at all to help the Democrats get a quorum to adopt it. The principal reason for this uncertainty is that the caucus resolution also directed the committee to report a rule to compel the attendance of absent members. It will depend upon how the Democrats intend to accomplish the proposed reforms what position the Republicans will take.
Another Democratic senator has placed himself in the doubtful column. Senator Smith of New Jersey, in his speech on the Tariff bill, which Senator Quay correctly called a “ measure of mingled malice, compromise and sectionalism,” renewed the cold shivers which Senator Hill Cent up and down the spines of the free Traders last week. It has been agreed that the debate on the bill as a whole shall end next Monday.
Then the contest over the individual schedules will begin and the fighting Bill be forced by the Republicans from the 1st to the last. The Democratic managers of the bill are in doubt as to the status of at least six Democratic senators, not to mention the successor to the late Senator Vance, of North Carolina, who died here Saturday night.
Senator Hill and Voorhees no longer speak when they pass each other….

“Washington Letter,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed May 12, 2025, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/1574.