Labor & Employment Law

Which President Jumped Out a Window to Prevent a Vote?

By Berry Craig

Here?s a history quiz. What state legislator tried to prevent a crucial vote by hopping out of a window in hopes of depriving the other party of a quorum?

Hint: He?s the same one who said, ?Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.?

OK, last hint: He was a Republican.

Give up? It was Abraham Lincoln.

Scott Walker, Wisconsin?s Republican governor, is still in high dudgeon over the 14 Democratic state senators who have stalled his union-busting bill by seeking refuge in Illinois, you know, the Land of Lincoln.

Walker’s GOP Senate majority has ordered the absent loyal opposition arrested.

Would the Dairy State solons sic the cops on Honest Abe? After all, he was the GOP?s first president. (Given his politics, Lincoln might be a Democrat today.)

Anyway, Lincoln was a Whig when he took a powder from the Illinois House of Representatives in Springfield, the state capital. The date was Dec. 10, 1840; the House was meeting temporarily in a local church.

Anyway, the majority House Democrats aimed to kill a Whig-supported bank bill by adjourning. Ward Hill Lamon’s 1872 book, The Life of Abraham Lincoln; From His Birth to His Inauguration as President, tells what happened next:

To defeat this, the Whigs resorted to every expedient of parliamentary tactics, and at length hit upon one entirely unknown to any of the standard manuals: they tried to absent themselves in sufficient numbers to leave no quorum behind.

Lincoln, who became a Republican when the GOP was founded in 1854, and Rep. Joseph Gillespie were to stay put and count votes.

The Democrats got wise to the scheme and, according to the old history book, dispatched the sergeant-at-arms to round up the AWOL Whigs. Several Whigs were nabbed and brought back to the church, where the door was locked behind them.

But Reps. Lincoln and Gillespie determined to skedaddle. Another Whig lawmaker would make it a threesome. The trio “jumped out, but not until the Democrats had succeeded in adjourning.”

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on March 07, 2011 (boomark / email).