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The Grand Convention - Sixty Ballots · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season sixteen of American Political History The Grand Convention Sixty Ballots On the morning of july seventeenth, seventeen eighty seven, the first session after the Great Compromise, with the equal Senate not yet a day old, the Convention took up the executive again, and Governor Morris rose against the clause everyone had thought had been settled in June.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Chosen by the National Legislature.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: That was the stranding answer.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Voted on june second and it had already been attacked twice.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: James Wilson had proposed election by electors chosen by the people, saying that at least in theory he was for an election by the people themselves, which experience in New York and Massachusetts showed to be both convenient and successful, and lost eight states to two.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: A week after the June answer, Elbridge Jerry had moved to reopen it.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: The question would not stay closed because every mode of filling the office ran into somebody's nightmare, and on july seventeenth, Governor Morris named that nightmare.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: He will be the mere creature of the legislature, if appointed and impeachable by that body.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: He ought to be elected by the people at large, by the freeholders of the country.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: If the people should elect, they will never fail to prefer some man of distinguished character or services.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Some man, if he might so speak, of continental reputation.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: If the legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue of cabal of faction.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: It will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Real merit will rarely be the title to the appointment.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: A pope elected by a conclave of cardinals, let the Congress choose the executive and the choice would be made in the corridors, bargains, faction, promises of office, and the man chosen would owe his crown to the men he was supposed to check.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Morris moved to strike the legislature and insert the citizens of the United States.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman answered with the practical objection that hung over every popular scheme.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: The people at large, spread over thirteen states, would never give a majority of votes to any one man.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: They will generally vote for some man on their own state, and the largest state will have the best chance of appointment.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: No newspapers reached everywhere, no candidate traveled.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: A Georgia farmer had never heard of the names of Massachusetts men and never would.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Every state would vote for its own favorite son, no one would ever have a majority, and the presidency would simply belong to Virginia forever by arithmetic.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And George Mason, who had spent july eleventh defending the people's census against Governor Morris, now turned the room's inconsistency into an opening and then delivered the sentence of the day.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: It is curious to remark the different languages held at different times.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: At the moment we are told that the legislature is entitled to thorough confidence and to indefinite power.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: At another, that it will be governed by intrigue and corruption and cannot be trusted at all.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: He conceived it would be as unnatural to refer to the choice of a proper character for the chief magistrate to the people as it would be to refer a trial of colours to a blind man.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Not because the people were fools, but because they were blind to geography.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: The extent of the country, Mason argued, made it impossible for the people to judge the candidates the candidates' respective pretensions.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: They cannot see the men they would be choosing among.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: The question was put on election by the people, one state for it, Pennsylvania alone, nine against.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Election by electors was then tried and lost.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the old answer, chosen by the national legislature, was reaffirmed without a single dissenting state.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Before the popular election vote died, James Wilson took apart the argument that had killed it since June.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Poland.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Two arguments were urged against election by the people, he said.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: The first was the example of Poland, where the election of the supreme magistrate was attended with the most dangerous commotions.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The cases were totally dissimilar.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: The Polish nobles had resources and dependence enabling them to appear in force, and to threaten the Republic as well as each other, and the Polish electors all assembled in one place, which would not be the case for us.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: An American election happened everywhere at once, and nowhere in particular.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was no square for the armies to fill.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: The room voted him down one state to nine.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: The same afternoon produced the summer's strangest moment.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: If the legislature must choose the executive, then the executive's independence had to come from somewhere else.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And Dr.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: James McClerg of Virginia, Madison's own colleague, followed the logic to its end.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: He moved that the executive's term be struck and that he serve during good behavior for life, unless removed.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Hamilton's June proposal, back on the floor as a formal motion, and this time it was voted on.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Four states said I, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It failed, four to six.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the count stood in the records.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: A third of the states present, ready for a magistrate for life rather than a magistrate owned by Congress.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Two days later the room revisited itself.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Morris opened on july nineteenth.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: The executive magistrate should be the guardian of the people, even of the lower classes against the legislative tyranny, against the great and the wealthy, who, in the course of things will necessarily compose the legislative body.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature would be the rich, he told them.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It always was everywhere.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: The one officer chosen by the whole country was the poor man's magistrate.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Elbridge Jerry, no friend of popular elections, added to the officeholder's argument for independence.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: A good executive who did his duty against the popular current would be turned out for it, as Governor Badoyne had just been turned out of Massachusetts for putting down the rebellion, and Governor Sullivan of New Hampshire likewise.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth moved the middle course, electors chosen by the state legislatures, and it carried six states to three for five days in June until the United States had an electoral system.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then the convention immediately fell to haggling over the ratios.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry moving an allotment state by state, New Hampshire one, Massachusetts three, Virginia three, Delaware one.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: In the middle of that five day electoral experiment on Friday, july twentieth, the Convention settled the question underneath every other question about the office, whether the man could be removed at all.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: The clause on the table made the executive removable on impeachment and convictions for malpractice or neglect of duty, and Charles Pickany and Governor Morris moved to strike it out.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Pickany observed that he ought not to be impeachable while in office.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: William Davy of North Carolina answered with the incentive it would create.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: If he not be impeachable while stin office, he will spare no effort or means whatever to get himself re-elected.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Morris pressed the strike.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: The executive could do no criminal act without co adjudicators who may be punished.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: If he should be reelected, that would be sufficient proof of his innocence.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Besides, who is to impeach?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is the impeachment to suspend his functions?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: If not, the mischief will go on.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: If it does, the impeachment is nearly a displacement and renders the executive dependent on those who impeach.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason answered with two questions.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Shall a man be above justice?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Shall that man be above it who can commit the most extensive injustice?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: A candidate might procure his very election by corrupting his electors, and the man who had practiced corruption to get the office would be suffered to escape punishment by repeating election.
• 9:10
  unknown: Dr.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin argued that impeachment was in the executive's own interest.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: History furnishes one example only of a first magistrate being formally brought to public justice.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody cried out against this as unconstitutional.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: What was the practice before this?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: In cases where the chief magistrate rendered himself obnoxious?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why recourse was had to assassination, in which he was not only deprived of his life, but of the opportunity of vindicating his character.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Better the doctor concluded to provide in the Constitution for the regular punishment of the executive where his misconduct deserved it, and for his honorable acquittal, where he should be unjustly accused.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Madison thought it indispensable that some provision defend the community against the incapacity, neglect, or perfidy of the chief magistrate.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: He might pervert his administration into a scheme of fraud or oppression, or betray his trust to foreign powers.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph named the moment of greatest danger.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: The executive will have great opportunities for abusing his power, particularly in time of war when the military force and in some respects the public money will be in his hands.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Rufus King held the opposing line on principle.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: The branches should be separate and independent, and a legislature holding impeachment would destroy the executive's independence.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then Governor Morris stood up again.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: His opinion, Madison recorded, had been changed by the arguments used in the discussion.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: The executive should be impeachable for treachery, for corrupting his electors, for incapacity.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: The magistrate is not the king.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: The people are the king, the mover of the strike voted against his own motion, and impeachability carried eight states to two, Massachusetts and South Carolina opposing.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: It lasted until July 23rd, when the convention voted to reconsider the whole subject, and on the 24th, William Houston of Georgia moved to hand the choice back to the legislature.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Capable men, he argued, would never undertake the service of electors from the more distant states.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry answered that the elections would be considered of vast importance and would excite great earnestness.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: The best men, the governors of the states themselves, would not hold it derogatory to serve as electors.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Houston's motion carried anyway.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: The convention was back at the legislature again.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: The room was rehashing itself.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Hugh Williamson of North Carolina moved to return to the original ground, seven years, ineligible twice, told the convention where he thought the whole road ended, whatever they built.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: He will be an elective king and will feel the spirit of one.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: He will spare no pains to keep himself in for life, and will then lay a train of succession for his children.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: An elective king.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Pickany's phrase from june first, George Mason's from June fourth, now Williamson's, said not as a warning to be heeded but as a fate to be delayed.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was pretty certain, he concluded, that America would at some time or other have a king.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: He wished only that no precaution be omitted that might postpone the event as long as possible.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: If the legislature chose the executive, and he could never be rechosen, then perhaps the term should simply be long.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Martin proposed eleven years, Mr.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry proposed fifteen, mister Davy proposed eight, Rufus King proposed twenty, and Madison's notes preserve King's reason.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is the medium life of princes.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: James Wilson, the great advocate of popular election, was reduced to proposing chance.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let the executive be chosen by electors taken by lot from the national legislature itself.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Names drawn, the drawn men marched out to vote immediately before anyone could reach them.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Cabal cannot corrupt what Cabal cannot predict.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry objected that they were committing too much to chance.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: The drawing might produce a set of men who would fix on an unfit character.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: The convention, Madison recorded, was unwilling even to discuss it seriously, and Governor Morris summed up the eight weeks of circling in a sentence.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: It is the most difficult of all rightly to balance the executive.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Make him too weak, the legislature will usurp his power.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Make him too strong, he will usurp on the legislature.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: On july twenty fifth, Madison rose and surveyed every door the Constitution had opened and shut, appointment by legislature, by state legislatures, by state executives, by electors, by the people, and settled his own weight on the last two.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in weighing popular elections he named out loud the regional arithmetic underneath the whole question.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: There was one difficulty, however, of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: The right of suffrage was much more diffuse in the North than the southern states, and the latter could have no influence on the election on the score of negroes.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: The substitution of electors evaded this difficulty.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And against every scheme that lodged the choice in any standing body, Madison raised one more specter of the day.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: The ministers of foreign powers.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: The ministers of foreign powers, he warned, would have and would use the opportunity to mix their intrigues and influence with the election.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: A small, known, permanent set of choosers was a target list for every court in Europe.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: In a direct popular election, a slave counted for nothing, no ballot, no weight, no three fifths, the South's paper population vanished at the polls.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Electors, apportioned to the states by their counted numbers, carried the federal ratio into the choosing of the executive, and the difficulty, as Madison put it, was removed.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: The fraction of Article I carried into Article II.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: On July 26, George Mason stood in every stage of the question relative to the executive, the difficulty of the subject and the diversity of the opinions concerning it have appeared.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Nor have any of the modes and constituating that departments been satisfactory.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: It has been proposed that the election should be made by the people at large, that the election should be made by the legislatures of the states, by the executives of the states, by the electors chosen by the people.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: This was at first agreed to, but on further consideration has been rejected.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Every mode proposed, every mode objected to, every mode tried and unwound.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Mason's conclusion was to go home to the original answer and stop.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the convention did, chosen by national legislature seven years, ineligible for a second term.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: The whole apparatus was handed back with everything else to a five man committee of details to be written into the draft constitution.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the convention adjourned for ten days while the committee worked.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: The draft came back with the old answer in it, and through late August the Convention tore it open again, fights over a joint ballot of two houses over states voting equally in choice, day after day, motions after motions.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: By the end of August, the question of the executive was exactly where it had been on June first, open.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention had balloted on the mode of choosing the executive across the summer some sixty times.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: On august thirty first, the Convention swept every postponed and unresolved question, the executive at the head of the list into one final committee, a member from each state to report on the parts of the Constitution not yet acted on.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: The Committee on Postponed Parts.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: In the chair, Judge David Barley of New Jersey, the man who had once proposed erasing the state boundaries and redrawing America into thirteen equal parts.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: On september fourth, Judge Barley rose and read out the committee's answer to the summer's unanswerable question, a mechanism nobody had proposed assembled from the pieces of everything everyone had.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: The report's words Each state shall appoint, in such manner as its legislature may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of senators and members of the House of Representatives to which the state may be entitled in the legislature.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: The electors would meet and vote, but never as one body.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: They would assemble in their own separate states, all on the same day, cast their ballots for two persons, one of whom at least could not be an inhabitant of their own state, and disband.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: The ballots would travel sealed to the seat of government and be counted before the Congress, a majority of all the electors made a president.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: If no man had a majority, the choice fell to the legislature from the five highest names on the ballot.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the person with the second greatest number of votes, a man for whom the Constitution had no other use, was something no plan all summer had contained, an office invented in committee, the vice president.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Electors were not novel.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: One elector process was actually running in America, and every man in the room knew it.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maryland chose its state senate through a college of electors, two chosen by the voters of each county, meeting to select the senators for five year terms.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And Maryland's Senate had a reputation as the most respectable upper house in the Union.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: The committee had scaled up the one American president that worked.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: The architecture answered the summers' fears piece by piece.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Electors apportioned like Congress, the federal ratio and the equal state's bonus both carried in, and Connecticut's compromise and the three-fifths rule extended into Article II.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Electors chosen fresh for one day's work, holding no office, men with nothing to trade.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: King and Mr.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Jerry added the lock two days later, without a dissenting state.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: No member of Congress and no officer of the United States could be an elector.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: The choosing body that Governor Morris feared, the standing conclave that could be courted for years, never existed.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: It assembles in thirteen places at once, votes, and evaporates in the same day.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: There is nobody to bribe because until the day itself there is nobody.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the double ballot answered Sherman's question, every elector voting for two men, one of them necessarily from another state.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Every state's favored son canceled against each other's, and the second vote forced outward toward the men of continental reputation.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph and Charles Pickany asked for a particular explanation on the reasoning of changing the mode, and Governor Morris, a member of the committee, said he would give the committee's reasons and his own.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: The danger of intrigue in faction, if the appointment lay with the legislature, the inconvenience of the ineligibility that mode had required, the difficulty of finding any proper court of impeachment for a president the legislature had appointed, that nobody had appeared satisfied with an appointment by the legislature, that many were anxious even for an immediate choice by the people, and the indispensable necessity of making the executive independent from the legislature.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then he explained the machine's central trick.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: As the electors would vote at the same time throughout the United States, and at so great a distance from each other, the great evil of Cabal would be avoided.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: It would be impossible also to corrupt them.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: The objections came at once, and they came at the contingency, which, in the committee's report, lodged the eventual choice in the Senate.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason said I confess that the plan of the The committee had removed some capital objections, particularly the danger of cabal and corruption.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was liable, however, to this strong objection that nineteen times in twenty the president would be chosen by the Senate, an improper body for the purpose.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Mason conceded, but the back door led to the Senate, and with thirteen favorite sons splitting every count, the back door would be the real entrance, nineteen of twenty elections.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Pierce Butler, who sat on the committee, defended its work in the summer's oldest vocabulary.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: The mode was not free from objections, but it was far freer than an election by the legislature, where, as an elective monarchy, cabal faction and violence would be sure to prevail.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: On september fifth, the attack widened.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Edmund Randolph looked at the Senate's contingent powers and named a pattern.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: We have, in some revolutions of this plan, made a bold stroke for a monarchy.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: We are now doing the same for an aristocracy.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Mason went further.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: He would prefer the government of Prussia, he said, to the one which put all the power into the hands of seven or eight men and fixed an aristocracy worse than an absolute monarchy.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: And on the sixth, James Wilson weighed the whole design and pronounced it bent.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: I am obliged to consider the whole as having a dangerous tendency to aristocracy, as throwing a dangerous power into the hands of the Senate, in allowing them thus to make the executive and the judiciary appointments, to be the court of impeachments, and to make treaties which are to be the law of the land.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature, executive, and judiciary powers are all blended in one branch of the government.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman saw the same structure and read it as a feature.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: The plan balanced the sections of the Union, the large states with the advantage in the electors' first count, the small states with the advantage wherever the choice devolved.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then, on September 6th, Roger Sherman, the author of the first compromise, produced the last one.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Move the contingency from the Senate to the House of Representatives, but let the House, in that one act, vote by states, each state's delegation casting a single vote.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: The People's Chamber voting by the small states rule.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: Both jealousies fed with one clause.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: It carried ten states to one.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: The invented office got its own argument on September 7th, making the vice president, the Senate's presiding officer, struck Elbridge Jerry as a wire run between the branches.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: We might as well put the president himself at the head of the legislature.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: The close intimacy that must subsist between the president and the vice president makes it absolutely improper.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason agreed it mixed too much of the legislative and executive.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sherman answered with the office's whole design problem in a sentence.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: If the vice president were not to be the president of the Senate, he would be without employment.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: On Saturday, september eighth, the convention wrote the words the office would be judged by.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: The report made the president removable on impeachment and conviction for treason and bribery, and George Mason rose against the shortness of the list.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Why is the provision restrained to treason and bribery only?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Treason, as defined in the Constitution, will not reach many great and dangerous offences.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Hastings is not guilty of treason.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: Attempts to subvert the Constitution may be treason, as above defined.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Warren Hastings, the Governor General of British India, whose impeachment for the oppressions of his administration had opened in London that very year, and whose name needed no explanation in the room.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason moved to add after bribery the words of maladministration, and Jerry seconded him.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Madison killed the vote in a single sentence.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: So vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during pleasure of the Senate.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Morris added that an election every four years would prevent maladministration anyways, and George Mason on the spot withdrew the word and substituted another phrase high crimes and misdemeanors against the state.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was agreed to eight states to three, and in a tidying vote afterwards the word state was struck and the United States inserted, unanimously to remove the ambiguity.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thirty seconds of floor exchange between two Virginians, and the standard was fixed.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: The same morning settled the courtroom.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: The Committee of Detail had given the trial of impeachments to the Supreme Court.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Barley Committee had moved it to the Senate, and Madison objected on the eighth, moving to strike the Senate out.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: A president tried by the Senate was made improperly dependent on the very body he was supposed to check, and he preferred the Supreme Court or a tribunal of which it formed a part.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman answered with the flaw in that the Supreme Court was improper to try the president because the judges would be appointed by him.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: A man should not be tried by his own appointees.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Madison's motion lost two states to nine, and the trial stayed in the Senate, on three conditions written to the text.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Senate on oath or affirmation, no conviction without concurrence of two thirds of the members present, and when the president of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside, not the vice president, whose chair it otherwise was.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: The man who would inherit the office could not preside over the court which could promote him.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: The term came out of the committee at four years, and the ineligibility clause, the fixture of every scheme since June, silently vanished.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: A president chosen by no standing body needed no ban on serving again.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: He could be rechosen as long as the electors kept choosing him.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: The length of his service left, like everything else, in the mechanisms to the country.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: The executive now needed two more pieces and got them with almost no debate.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: Succession.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: In case of the president's removal, death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the office, the same shall devolve on the vice president, and the Congress may provide by law for the case of both offices failing at once.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the oath.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thirty-five words written into the Constitution itself, ending on a clause George Mason and James Madison motion for in late August.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: I do solemnly swear or affirm that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not an oath to the people or the Union or the laws, an oath to the document.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: The Constitution never names the mechanisms.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: The words electoral college appear nowhere in it, only electors meeting each in their own states on one day, choosing the one officer of the government that every part of the country chooses together.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share this show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.