“After a long and earnest debate, after numerous votes and reconsiderations, they were obliged utterly to abandon the plan of creating the Chief Executive by means of the National Legislature. I will not stop now to prove the statement by a dozen or more pungent quotations from the masters of political science in that great assembly, in which they declared that it would be ruinous to the liberty of the people and to the permanence of the Republic if they did not absolutely exclude the National Legislature from any share in the election of the President. “They pointed with glowing eloquence to the sad but instructive fate of those brilliant Italian republics that were destroyed because there was no adequate separation of powers, and because their senates overwhelmed and swallowed up the executive power, and, as secret and despotic conclaves, became the destroyers of Italian liberty. “At the close of the great discussion, when the last vote on this subject was taken by our fathers, they were almost unanimous in excluding the National Legislature from any share whatever in the choice of the Chief Executive of the nation. They rejected all the plans of the first group, and created a new instrumentality. They adopted the system of electors. When that plan was under discussion, they used the utmost precaution to hedge it about by every conceivable protection against the interference or control of Congress. “In the first place, they said the States shall create the electoral colleges. They allowed Congress to have nothing whatever to do with the creation of the colleges, except merely to fix the time when the States should appoint them. And, in order to exclude Congress by positive prohibition, in the last days of the Convention they provided that no member of either House of Congress should be appointed an elector; so that not even by the personal influence of any one of its members could the Congress interfere with the election of a President. “The creation of a President under our Constitution consists of three distinct steps: First, the creation of the electoral colleges; second, the vote of colleges; and third, the opening and counting of their votes. This is the simple plan of the Constitution. “The creation of the colleges is left absolutely to the States, within the five limitations I had the honor to mention to the House a few days ago. First, it must be a _State_ that appoints electors; second, the State is limited as to the number of electors it may appoint; third, electors shall not be members of Congress or officers of the United States; fourth, the time for appointing electors may be fixed by Congress; and, fifth, the time when their appointment is announced, which must be before the date for giving their votes, may also be fixed by Congress.