The Constitution mandates that the president "shall from time to time give the Congress Information on the State of the Union." President George Washington delivered his first "state of the union" address to a joint session of Congress meeting in the Senate Chamber of New York City's Federal Hall on this day in 1790. President Thomas Jefferson in 1801 chose instead to send a written message, a precedent followed by presidents until Woodrow Wilson personally appeared before Congress in 1913. Since that time nearly every president has followed Wilson's example.
On this day in 1924 "one of the most stubborn fights over a chairmanship in the history of the Senate" reached a bitter and exhausting conclusion when members of the Senate's majority party helped the minority part gain the chairmanship of one of the body's most important committees. Progressive Republicans vigorously opposed reelection of Albert Cummins as chair of the Committee on Interstate Commerce. Conservative Republicans, with equal tenacity, fought the candidacy of progressive Republican Robert La Follette. Unable to secure enough votes for La Follette, progressive Republicans joined with minority party Democrats to award the chair to Ellison Smith, a conservative Democrat.
Shortly after the Senate convened for the first time in 1789, it adopted a code on 20 rules of procedure. As the Senate grew increasingly complex in the decades that followed, it approved major revisions of its rules of five occasions. On January 11, 1884, senators tried to impose order and coherence on the latest code, reducing its 78 rules to 40. A measure of their success is that the 1884 code remained largely intact for nearly a century. Although it was revised in 1979, much of its language appears in the rules that guide today's Senate.
The 1918 election to fill a Michigan Senate seat proved to be one of the most bitter and costly contests of that era. In May 1919, the Senate provisionally seated Republican industrialist Truman Newbery, who narrowly defeated Democratic automaker Henry Ford, pending investigation of charges that Newberry had violated campaign-spending laws. A year later, a federal court found Newberry guilty, but the Supreme Court overturned the conviction. On January 12, 1922, the Senate affirmed that Newberry had been duly elected, but "severely condemned" his excessive campaign expenditures. Facing continuing controversy, Newberry resigned from the Senate later that year.
In a case concerning the 1989 impeachment trial of Judge Walter Nixon, the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1993 ruled that the Senate's constitutional power to try impeachments is not subject to judicial review. This decision set aside the 1992 finding by Federal District Judge Stanley Sporkin that the Senate had improperly conducted the 1989 trial of Federal District Judge Alcee Hastings by receiving testimony before a committee rather than the full Senate. Sporkin had remanded the Hastings case to the Senate "for a trial that comports with constitutional requirements," but stayed his order pending the Supreme Court's decision.
