Kay Bailey Hutchison Quotes
There are elections in which everyone knows that 'the people have spoken' but they don't always know exactly what the people have said. This November's election was different. Not only did the people speak, they spoke clearly.
United States, Congress, Senate. Senator Hutchison speaking on the Senate Floor. Congressional Record, vol. 141, pt. 1, Government Printing Office, 4 Jan. 1995.
The electoral college had tied between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and under the Constitution, this threw the decision to the House of Representatives. The House was deadlocked politically between Federalists and Democratic Republicans, but Jefferson had won the popular vote by a substantial margin. Morris, a leading Federalist, and one of Jefferson’s political enemies, however argued that the will of the people should be respected, and the man who won the popular should be President. The vote then went to Jefferson who became our third President.
“Vote counting” is done in legislative bodies like Congress by the party leadership, often called the “whip”. The purpose is to determine how many votes they will likely get for a particular piece of legislation. It involved determining and predicting how each member of the legislative body will vote for each variation of a bill and each amendment that has been offered. Paxon himself was one of the Congressmen responsible for doing this for the Republicans when he was in the Congress. . See {624235} for more on vote counting.
This was much more the case in 1840 when this quotation was written. Since then, a much higher proportion of American society has become educated, and the cultures that American immigrants have come from had multiplied. Publications abounded and after radio and television there were more attacks on American majority positions. The major change came with radio call in talk shows, similar TV shows and then the Internet provided a painless way to publicly go against majority opinion. By the first decade of the 21st century, movements of majority rejectionists such as the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement were thriving and “futile contests” received much public attention and showed that there were others with the non-majority views who made it socially acceptable to be outside the norms of the majority.
His faction won on the House and lost with respect to the Senate.
Kay Bailey Hutchison is an American attorney, television correspondent, politician, diplomat and the 22nd United States Permanent Representative to NATO from 2017 until 2021. A member of the Republican Party, she previously was a United States Senator from Texas from 1993 to 2013.
