But even panics and politics cannot go on forever, and the discussion on the Clay resolutions had covered “the longest period which had been occupied in a single debate in either House of Congress since the organization of the Government.”[725] Thus, on March 27th the Senate, by a vote of 26 to 20, placed the stigma of a censure upon the action of the President. Jackson was now to have his inning. VI With mass meetings being organized against him in all sections, with the capital crowded with hostile delegations, and with the Senators thundering their extravagant philippics at the tyrant responsible for the widows’ and the orphans’ woes, Jackson remained serene and unafraid.[726] But with the adoption of the resolutions of censure, he determined to strike back in such a way as effectively to reach the people. There were men in those days who thought that a senatorial censure would wreck any reputation. They had not yet sensed the spirit of the times. Three weeks after the Senate acted, Major Donelson appeared in the Chamber with the famous Protest. Nothing could have been more merciless than the cold logic with which the iron man pounded the resolutions of condemnation; nothing more biting than his reference to those Senators supporting them, who had thus “deliberately disregarded the recorded opinion of their States.” He solemnly protested “against the proceedings ... as unauthorized by the Constitution, contrary to the spirit and to several of its express provisions, subversive of that distribution of powers of government which it has ordained and established, destructive of the checks and safeguards by which those powers were intended on the one hand to be controlled and on the other to be protected, and calculated, by their immediate and collateral effects, by their character and tendency, to concentrate in the hands of a body, not directly amenable to the people, a degree of influence and power dangerous to their liberties and fatal to the Constitution of their choice.”