Today is the first Monday in December. Prior to the passage of the 20th amendment in 1933, the start date of each Congress was controlled by Article 1, section 4 of the Constitution, which says that the Congress:
shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.
As I’ve written about at length before, this accidentally created a highly consequential (and somewhat ridiculous) situation in which the congressional elections and the sessions of Congress were very serious out of sync. For example, if the old calendar was in place right now and no special session had been generated by law or by Presidential call, today would be the first day of the 112th Congress. Yes, that’s right. Today would be the first meeting of the Congress elected in November 2010. And yes, the second session of the 112th Congress would not, under normal conditions, happen until next December, after the 2012 elections had been.
A more direct reason today was so important is that in the early days of the union, Speakership contests in the House were quite common, due to lack of party control over backbencher voter and the persistent existence of small factions of 3rd and 4th party Members of the House holding the balance of power. Whereas today the organization of the House on the first day of Congress is largely pro forma, it was often an unknown and fluid situation in the pre-civil war union. These could be protracted battles: on a number of occasions, the House failed to organize for a month or more. Charles Stewart has done some excellent work in this area if you are interested in reading more.
One of the longest Speakership battles actually occurred 152 year ago today, December 5, 1859, the first day of the 35th Congress. The Republicans for the first time had the plurality of seats (113), but still not a majority (there were 234 total seats, 118 for a majority). Neither did the Democrats (96), who also had the problem that a large number of the few remaining northern Democrats had declared themselves as anti-LeCompton or Independent Democrats and were not going to necessarily align with the southerners. The balance of power sat with the the American party (9 seats) and the Opposition Party (16 seats), both reflections of the breakdown of the Whigs in south and north.
A two-month deadlock ensued over the election of the Speaker; the Democrats could not coordinate on a viable candidate, each wing finding candidates from the other unacceptable. Neither could a majority be mustered to pass a rule allowing for election by plurality. One of the original Republican candidates, John Sherman, probably could have gotten over the top except for one problem: he, along with about half of the Republican Members, had endorsed The Impending Crisis of the South, which I’ve written about before. This made him too radical for the minor party voters to touch him, and the Republicans eventually substituted William Pennington of New Jersey, who proved able to win the necessary votes, but less capable of effectively leading the 35th Congress under what eventually became crisis conditions in 1860.
