Life — September 11, 1924 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

U.8.GovT CONTEST ? CASH PRIaeS ToR pestis sy (DENT y OTHER. 250 HER A NATION-WIDE PRIZE CONTEST MIGHT BRING OUT SOME GOOD ID WASHINGTON, September 8.— The possibility of a deadlock in the Electoral College added a pleasant element of surprise to the elec- tions this year, because the voter, when he casts his ballot, won't have the faint- est idea for whom he is voting. A vote for Coolidge may be the very one to elect Bryan; and a heavy showing for La Follette may sweep anybody, from J. P. Morgan to Mr. Hearst, into the White House. It is, I confess, a little confusing—the sort of election that Alice might have found in Wonder- land. has So many letters have come to me, ranging all the way from inquiries whether the Electoral Col- lege would be a good place to send a boy with a taste for mechanical engincer- ing to queries as to what effect a deadlock would have on Debs'’s chances, that I feel it my duty to the Nation to make the situation, once and for all, perfectly plain. In 1801 the Electoral College threw an election into the House of Representatives, which, after thirty-six ballots, elected Jefferson over Burr. The procedure was obviously much too simple Unlocking the Deadlock Sounder Has the Key to the Situation to be compatible with the usual Con- gressional routine, and accordingly the Twelfth Amendment was adopted. The procedure now is merely this: upon a deadlock the election is thrown into the House, which for the sake of variety votes not individually, but by states—one vote to a state. If a state has three representatives, cach of whom wishes to vote for a dii- ferent candidate, there are two alterna- tives: lock the three representatives into one of the committee rooms and let the survivor cast the vote for the state; or else throw the election back to the Electoral College and let them worry. (I do not know why they should always speak of “throwing” elections around, like a medicine ball; perhaps it suggests that the body which has most recently been deadlocked is anxious to get the election off its hands as quickly as possible.) If I have now reached the point I think I have, we are ready to consider the next step, when the House, failing to obtain a majority, throws the clec- tion to the Senate. This puts the Senate in a very awkward position, It cannot without loss of dignity take up a second- hand matter which has already been ——— GUILTY oF WILFULLY thrashed out in the lower House; and yet under the Constitution it has to do something. So it elects a Vice- President, who acts as President—in precisely the same spirit in which we rejected the League because they would not let us call it an Association of Nations. her because they did not foresee a Senate as it is constituted to-day, or because they just got tired, the framer: of the Twelfth Amendment left the matter there with no provision what ever as to where the clection was to be thrown next. In considering so vital a matter my colleagues in the Senate cannot fail thoroughly to review the oil scandals, to press relief for the farmer, and to demand a minute in- vestigation of the Federal Reserve Bank, so that by the time a candidate is finally elected he will very prob- ably have died of old age, which, to my way of thinking, would be awkward. On the other hand, there is always the possibility that the Senate will not be able to get a majority at all. The situation has now become so intricate that even [ find it very hard to follow. The Secretary of State could call a special session of the incoming Congress, (Continued on page 30) DELAYING THE ORDERLY PROCEDURE OF GOVERNMENT comicbooks.com