Forecast is right on schedule. Rain and more rain. The front will ease into the area and get stuck in the southern portion of the viewing area. If you can, imagine the front as a big wedge, similar to a cow catcher on the front of an old west steam engine. In this case, the front bottom edge of the cow catcher is where the surface front is and then it slopes upward as you move farther north. When you get to about 5000 feet, you are back over the southern part of Indiana. It is typical that the heaviest rain in this type of set up would be directly under that 5000 foot level. Therefore, its most likely that the heaviest rain totals will be in Southern Indiana and lesser amounts across the rest of the viewing area. 1-3 inches for much the area seems about on target with the higher amounts for the northern part of the viewing area. The rain will most likely end by midday on Tuesday. After a period of drying, its possible the event may end as a few insignificant snow showers. With all of the hub-bub surrounding this Tuesday snow nonsense, some folks may have lost focus on the latter part of the week. We will be cold after Wednesday and an upper system comes in Friday that may be more interesting than this sloppy, yuckadoo rain. Don’t fret about severe weather as that will be the claim for the Dixie States. The latest map from the boys at the Severe Storms Lab is above.
On This Date in History: Congress has the Constitutional right to pass a budget….they get to spend our money. They even get to pay themselves and set their own salaries. Whenever they give themselves a raise, some people are likely to cause a ruckus. On this date in 1873, Congress outdid itself. They gave themselves a raise. They gave themselves a 50% raise. They made the 50% raise retroactive to two years prior. Perhaps as a bit of subterfuge, Congress also doubled the salary of the President and that of the Supreme Court justices. Not just some people, but a whole lot of people were quite upset. Those people are called citizens and those citizens have the right to vote on Congress.
The act passed became known to the general public as the “Salary Grab Act.” It took effect on March 4, 1873 which coincided with the beginning of President Grant’s second term. 1874 was a Congressional election year and I suppose the members of Congress got a snootful from their constituents for the rest of 1873 as on January 20, 1874 Congress repealed the part of the act that applied to them but kept the raises for the President and the Supreme Court. I suppose one might surmise that this event was pivotal because the Democrats regained control of Congress in the 1874 elections.
Now, that in itself was significant because the Republicans had been following some sort of plan for Reconstruction and the Democrats controlling Congress put a monkey-wrench into those plans. It’s possible that the “Salary Grab Act” was partly responsible for the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of civil strife that would last until the 1960′s.
See…the next presidential election in 1876 ended with a controversy, similar to the 2000 election. Democrat Sam Tilden received 250,000 more votes than Republican Rutherford B Hayes and initially he led the electoral count 184 to 165 with 20 votes in dispute. Those 20 votes came largely from 3 states in which both sides claimed to have won the electoral vote. Ultimately a deal was cut in which the electors in dispute would be awarded to Hayes and give him the victory 185 to 184 and in return, Hayes agreed to effectively end Reconstruction and pull Federal troops out of the states of the former Confederacy. Had the Republicans retained control of the Congress in the previous election, then they may not have been forced to trade the White House for Reconstruction and that may have altered the course of Civil Rights in this country for the next 100 years.
Another fine example of how a relative blip in history can cause a potential big bop down the road.
