There was at least one moment of greater drama still, when an enraged [Senator Thomas] Benton left his desk and advanced on diminutive southern Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi during an especially angry exchange, and Foote drew a pistol; the old frontier brawler did not pause but continued striding toward him, shouting, "I have no pistols. Let him fire! Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!" until finally Senator Dickerson of New Jersey took the pistol out of Foote's hand.^*

When members of the legislature are moments away from shooting each other, that's a bad sign the government may be unraveling. The moment described above was on the eve of the Civil War, so it can show how it's a rapid descent to the nadir of a country. Although we're all complaining about how poorly congress is functioning today, at least with all their partisan bickering no one's killed anyone else. That was one of the first steps toward the end of the Roman Republic: The Gracchi brothers tried to change the property laws in Roman to favor the poor and other members of the Senate literally beat them to death on the street. Once you've stepped over that line, political assassinations became commonplace until finally an emperor had to come out on top to stop all this quarreling and Rome never went back.

Still, when I read this I couldn't help but feel this shit would've been much more entertaining than anything I see on C-SPAN today. Man, Benton had fucking balls. I'm trying to think of a single senator nowadays who would just walk toward a guy pointing a gun at him and I'm not coming up with anyone.

^* Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 21.