RUSH TRANSCRIPT: MARK LEVIN’S REMARKS (Aired 8/6/2023)
History is lost on prosecutors. It’s lost on all these debate shows. It’s lost among lawyers.They talk about January 6: “Oh, it was an insurrection? No, it wasn’t.
We had contentious presidential elections in the past, I mean, really contentious. Some almost led to civil wars. One did.
1800
Thomas Jefferson and his chosen V.P. pick, Aaron Burr, tied for first place [back then the ballots were separate for president and vice-president, even though they might run in the same party] 73-73 due to a communication error among Democratic-Republican electors (or a Burr-led conspiracy, depending on whom you believe). President John Adams, a member of the rival Federalist Party, managed only 65 votes.
For the first of only two times in history, the election went to the House of Representatives.
They had over 30 votes, back and forth, and back and forth. The House was to choose the next president. Alexander Hamilton had enormous power. He disliked Jefferson immensely, but he hated Aaron Burr.
So finally what happens is:
Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first treasury secretary, turned the tide by lobbying his fellow Federalists to throw their support to Jefferson.
Couple years later – the famous duel that took place between Burr and Hamilton where Burr killed Hamilton and then Burr fled the country.
It seems a little more contentious than what took place on January 6th in the last [presidential] election. But there’s more here.
1824
By this time, the Federalist Party had dissolved, and all four candidates for president were Democratic-Republicans. “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson, hero of the War of 1812, won the popular vote by fewer than 39,000 ballots, and captured 99 electoral votes; Secretary of State John Quincy Adams took 84 electoral votes, with 41 going to Treasury Secretary William Crawford and 37 to House Speaker Henry Clay. As no candidate earned a majority of electoral votes, the election again went to the House of Representatives. Clay was eliminated from contention (only three candidates could be considered) but still controlled the House.
After a month of back-room negotiations, Clay’s supporters largely threw their weight behind Adams[.]
Even though he got less votes than Jackson, less electoral college votes than Jackson. So Adams would become president.
When Adams chose Clay as his secretary of state soon after his inauguration, an enraged Jackson called it a “corrupt bargain.” Quitting his Senate post, he vowed to come back and win in 1828, which he did at the head of a new Democratic Party, toppling Adams (by then leader of the National Republican Party) after only one term.
This almost led to a civil war.
1860
The presidential election of 1860 wasn’t just contentious—it tore the nation apart. Abraham Lincoln, the chosen nominee of the fledgling Republican Party and a steadfast opponent of slavery, wasn’t even on the ballot in most Southern states. While the Democratic Party went with Lincoln’s Illinois rival, Senator Stephen Douglas, as their candidate, the southern branch of the party defected, choosing sitting Vice President John Breckenridge as its candidate. Sen. John Bell of Tennessee rounded out the race on the ticket of the new Constitutional Union Party. Lincoln won only 40 percent of the popular vote but took most of the electoral votes in the North, along with California and Oregon. Breckenridge won the electoral votes in most of the South, along with Maryland and Delaware; Bell won Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia, while Douglas captured only Missouri, despite finishing second in the popular vote. Just weeks after Lincoln’s victory, South Carolina voted to secede. Six more Southern states followed, forming the Confederate States of America in February 1861, with Jefferson Davis as president.
I’d say that was pretty contentious, but also gave us Abraham Lincoln.
1876
Democratic Governor Samuel Tilden of New York won 250,000 more ballots in the popular vote than his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, and snagged 19 more electoral votes. But Tilden was still one electoral vote short of the required majority (185), and 20 votes remained uncounted: Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina remained too close to call, as each party accused the other of fraud, while in Oregon an elector was declared illegal and replaced, with controversial results. As the crisis mounted, threats of another civil war loomed.
So you had a crisis here – the greatest electoral crisis in American history. So what happened here?
Congress established a 15-member commission of senators, congressmen and Supreme Court justices (including seven Republicans, seven Democrats and an independent) to decide the election.
So they said, “We can’t figure this out; let’s have a commission.”
So this is about as far from the popular vote and the electorate that you can get. But keep something in mind: Congress is making all these decisions. Not the Department of Justice, not a prosecutor. Every one of these cases where a fraud is alleged – whether there is lobbying, whether there is pressure on legislatures, so forth and so on. Is the give and take of politics.
Congress has the final say under the Constitution. Congress and nobody else.
Congress established a 15-member commission of senators, congressmen and Supreme Court justices (including seven Republicans, seven Democrats and an independent) to decide the election.
(…)
After the swing vote turned in Hayes’ favor, he was awarded all 20 electoral votes from the disputed states, giving him the necessary 185. After the Democrats threatened to filibuster and block the official vote counting, the issue was settled in negotiations at D.C.’s Wormley Hotel in February 1877. The Democrats would accept Hayes’ victory provided that Hayes remove all federal troops from the South, among other conditions. The compromise consolidated Democratic control of the region, effectively ending Reconstruction and reversing the gains that African Americans had made during the post-Civil War era.
So the Democrats not only did that, they undermined the efforts that had been undertaken by a Republican president earlier, Ulysses S. Grant, to send the U.S. army into the South to destroy the klan. All that changed as a result of the 1876 election.
Later they would pass a statute to try to work all these things out.
But it’s amazing. Nobody was indicted, nobody was charged with anything. It’s just incredible.
2000
The election of 2000: Al Gore, George W. Bush. All came down to Florida. Couple hundred votes. Al Gore brings the first lawsuit. It becomes litigation hell. Different districts throughout the state, …by both sides, trying to find judges that would uphold this part of law, that part of the law. Meanwhile, the radical left-wing controlled Florida Supreme Court steps in and keeps changing the law, changing the law, changing the law to try and get Gore over the fence.
Then, the U.S. Supreme Court steps in and says, “It’s enough. That’s enough. The voting has to stop at some point. The Florida Supreme Court can’t keep changing the rules. They are destroying one person, one vote – the entire concept.” And so, George Bush winds up being the winner and he wins the Electoral College by 5 votes. He also lost the popular vote by over half a million votes.
It was a very contentious election and we all know it.
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