Nation Holds Election; Congress Selects Different Winner to Save Everyone the Trouble
Just Filed Nation Holds Election; Congress Selects Different Winner to Save Everyone the Trouble Andrew Jackson took the most votes and the most electors. The House, applying the higher mathematics of patronage, made John Quincy Adams president instead. Read the case →✦ A Register of Grievances
Congress Permanently Settles Slavery Question by Drawing Line, Vowing Never to Look at It Again
The fix: The Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one, preserving the Senate's tidy equilibrium, and ruled slavery permitted below the line of 36°30′ north and forbidden above it. The crisis passed. The country exhaled.
★★★★★ SevereRead the case → The Economy · The First BustBank Founded to Steady the Economy Steadies It Directly Into a Ditch
The fix: Congress had chartered the Second Bank of the United States in 1816 expressly to bring order to the currency. The Bank instead joined the revelry — lending freely, printing notes to match — until its managers looked at their thinning reserve of gold and panicked.
★★★★★ NotableRead the case →What Wasn’t Broken
We start with the thing that was working fine — boring, dependable, doing its job.
The "Fix"
Then the improvement: bold, expensive, announced with confidence. Usually unrequested.
The Result
And the receipts — what it cost, what broke, and the citations to prove it.