Still Another Giddy Measure

 Still another giddy measure came before the House in the course of the session [the first of the Sixth Congress], the Ross Election Bill for a "Grand Committee" of House and Senate to pass upon the validity of electoral votes from the several states in the coming presidential election. [John] Marshall moved against this too, this time with success. But although he thereby helped save his Federalist colleagues from more short-wittedness, they were hardly  disposed to thank him for it. The joint committee envisioned by the Ross bill was to have the final determination on any question concerning the election; any "irregularity" would be whatever the committee said it was; and so it would rest with this body of thirteen men, chosen by a Federalist-dominated Congress, to decide who should be the next President of the United States. Nor was it any secret that the bill had been especially shaped to deal with what the state of Pennsylvania was likely to do in the election, that state's government having just turned Republican, or that such a committee would be peculiarly receptive to any plausible ground for counting out Thomas Jefferson. Marshall had as little use for Jefferson as any Federalist in the House. But this scheme as he saw it was not only unconstitutional, it was disreputable, and politically demented. What he then did with his influence, on the floor and in committee, was to get the bill altered to a form in which it could no longer carry out the function its originators had designed it for, whereupon the Senate would have no more to do with it.

Section 6, Federalism and the "Campaign" of 1800The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, Chapter XV, "The Mentality of Federalism in 1800", Section 6, "Federalism and the 'Campaign' of 1800".