to read, "The President of the
Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of
Representatives, open and count the votes." Why resort to this
other, strained, awkward, ungrammatical, unreasonable transposition
of additional words to grant one power distinctly and leave the
other to be grafted upon it by an unjust implication? No,
Mr. President, if it were a deed of bargain and sale, or any
question of private grant, if it did not touch the rights of a great
people, there would be but one construction given to this language,
that the expression of one grant excluded the other. It was a
single command to the President of the Senate that, as the
custodian, he should honestly open those certificates and lay them
before the two houses of Congress who were to act, and then his duty
was done, and that was the belief of the men who sat in that
convention, many of whom joined in framing the law of 1792 which
directed Congress to be in session on a certain day and that the
votes should be counted and the persons who should fill the office
of President and Vice-president ascertained and declared agreeably
to the Constitution.

The certificates are to be opened by their custodian, the President
of the Senate, in the presence of the Senate and the House of
Representatives. Let it be noted this is not in the presence of the
Senators and Representatives, but it is in the presence of two
organized bodies who cannot be present except as a Senate and as a
House of Representatives, each with its own organization, its own
presiding officer and all adjuncts, each organized for the
performance of a great duty.

When the first drafts of the Constitution were made, instead of
saying "in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives,"
they called it "the Legislature." What is a Legislature? A
law-making body organized, not a mob, but an organized body to make
laws; and so the law-making power of this Union, consisting of these
two houses, is brought together. But it seems to me a most
unreasonable proposition to withhold from the law-making power of
this government the authority to regulate this subject and yet be
willing to intrust it to a single hand. There is not a theory of
this government that will support such a construction. It is
contrary to the whole genius of the government; it is contrary to
everything in the history of the formation of the government; it is
contrary to the usage of the government