{"id":2900,"date":"2022-04-28T14:55:38","date_gmt":"2022-04-28T14:55:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=2900"},"modified":"2022-04-28T14:55:40","modified_gmt":"2022-04-28T14:55:40","slug":"a-record-to-be-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=2900","title":{"rendered":"A Record To Be Broken"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m getting really tired of reading, and hearing, about the arguments in Congress. It sure seems as if all of the disagreements are based on \u201cwhat\u2019s best for me, or my party, the country be damned.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve probably gathered from reading this blog, that my opinion of our elected officials has continued to deteriorate over the years and is currently at an all time low. I don\u2019t ever remember issues that are important to our country and citizens becoming \u201call about me\u201d until relatively recently. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my working years, I spent some amount of time in meetings with various Senate committees. A high percentage of these committee members were more interested in just getting their name in the record rather than working the problems\/issues. A few were always present in order to \u201cbreak the record\u201d for attendance by their predecessors.\u00a0
Actually, Senate members have always\u00a0 taken some satisfaction from setting records \u2014 just like baseball or football players. This brings me to my topic for the day\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One Senator, back in 1859, established a record that hasn\u2019t been broken to this day \u2014 and very possibly will never<\/em> be broken.
California Senator David Broderick, in September of 1859, became the only sitting senator to die in a duel.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Broderick was born in Washington, D.C. in 1820 \u2014 the son of a stonemason who worked on the Capitol. His family later moved to New York City, where he worked as a stonemason and a saloon keeper. He was an avid reader and became a shrewd student of human nature, and observed the super heated political culture of New York City\u2019s ward politics.\u00a0
He joined the 1849 gold rush to California and settled in San Francisco, where he quickly made a fortune in real estate. He was elected to the California\u00a0 state senate, where he became a power broker within the Democratic Party\u2019s antislavery wing and set his eyes on a seat in the U.S Senate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the campaign for the Senate, California chief justice David Terry denounced Broderick as no longer a true Democrat. In Terry\u2019s opinion, Broderick was following the \u201cwrong Douglas.\u201d (He had abandoned Democratic Party leader Stephen Douglas in favor of \u201cblack Republican\u201d leader Frederick Douglass.) Broderick angrily responded that Terry was a dishonest judge and a \u201cmiserable wretch.\u201d Because of these words, Terry challenged Broderick to a duel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The two met early on the morning of September 13 at Lake Merced, south of San Francisco. Broderick\u2019s pistol discharged prematurely \u2014 and Terry cooly aimed and fired into Broderick\u2019s chest. The senator\u2019s death three days later established Broderick as a rough-and-tumble political operator with a martyr\u2019s crown, and accelerated the downward spiral to civil war. David Terry was acquitted of the crime and went on to serve the Confederacy. Years later, in 1869, Terry was gunned down after threatening the life of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field.
\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m getting really tired of reading, and hearing, about the arguments in Congress. It sure seems as if all of the disagreements are based on \u201cwhat\u2019s best for me, or my party, the country be damned.\u201d  You\u2019ve probably gathered from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2900"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2900"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2902,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2900\/revisions\/2902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}