Mr. HOWE. Mr. President, this bill concerns the power of the POTUS to remove from office those who have been appointed by him with the advice and consent of the Senate. That power is not derived from the Constitution. By the Constitution of the U.S. the President has no more right to remove such an officer than he has to butcher him: not a whit. And I will tell you how I know it; for I assert it as much as a matter of fact as I do as a matter of law. I know it because I have read in the Constitution itself the enumeration of the powers which are granted to the President, and this is not among them; and there is nothing among them which bears the slightest similitude or likeness to the power in question. And to convince the Senate of that, if the Senate care anything about that, I propose to read this enumeration of powers. It is said: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the U.S., and of the militia of actual servthicee several.States, when called into the of the U.S. ” There is nothing in that bearing the slight est similitude to the power in question. “ He may require the opinion, in writing, of principal the officer in each of the Executive boart.mentsupon any subjectrelating to the duties of their respective offices.” To require a written opinion upon any subject from an officer of the Government is a very different thing from dismissing the officer from the public employ. “He shall have power to grant g and pardons for offensesagainst the U.S., except in casesof impeachment. “He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided 2/3rds of the Senators Present conqur; and he shall nominate and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint embassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of Court, and all other officers of the UnthiteedSupSrtaetmees whoseappointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congressmay by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers as they think proper in President alone, the in the courts of law, or in the he of Depts. “The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of Senate, by granting the commissionswhich shall expire at the end of their next session..He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of thestate of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of respect disagreement between them, with to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive embassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully, executed, .sholl commission all the officersof the U.S. There is an enumeration of the powers which by the Constitution are vested in the President, an enumeration of the whole of them. As I said before, this power to remove from office is not there, and nothing in the likeness of that power is there; and because I do not find it there, I say, as I said before, that the President has not that power in the Constitution. But that is not the only reason why I say this power is not conferred upon him by the Constitution. I find by reading the Constitution precisely where this power of removal is vested by o instrument. By reading the 4th section of this same article, article two, you find where this power of removal is That section declares that vested. "The President, VEEP, and all civil officersof the U.S shall be removed from officeon impeachment for, and conviction of, trea son, bribery, or ors. other high crimes and misdemean There is where the power of removal is. It is in the court of impeachment, and by this instrument it is nowhere else. The Constitution, I say to you as a fact, left the power to remove a postmaster precisely where it left the power to remove a judge, and nowhere else; and why did it do this? For a good reason. The Constitution of the U.S. intended that men living under it should be free men, that conduct should be free, above all that opinion should be free; and they meant that this freedom should be enjoyed as much by the men who hold office as by a men who do not hold office; and therefore every office that the Constitution created had assigned to it a fixed term, and every incumbent of such. an office was exempt from this summary power of removal. The President has a fixed term; and you cannot remove him but through the court of impeachment. The VEEP has a fixed term. The judges have a fixed term of office. RePresentatives and Senators in Congress have severally fixed terms assigned to their offices; and although it was designed that RePresentatives and Senators should be pri marily the advocates, not so much of their own opinions as of the opinions of their constituents, yet it was not provided that there should be a summary power of removal of even these officers by their constituencies. They may fail or refuse to rePresent the views of their constituents, and yet for the time being during the continuance of their term they are independent of the power of their constituents. But, Mr. President, the framers of the Constitution could not foresee all the officers who might be required to administer this great Government of ours. They actually created but few offices. They left the work of creating others which might be found necessary to the legislative dept of the Government. I think the framers of that Constitution supposed that the legislative dept would imitate their example, and so often as they created a new office would fix the term of it and secure to the incumbent of it an estate in it during tohe existence of the term, ated leave him inde in that office, subject to removal only y the intervention of that great tribunal which can remove a President, a VEEP, or a judge. But it so happens that the very 1st office created after the Government was instituted was that 1st called the Dept of Foreign Affairs and now called the Dept of State, created during the 1st session of the 1st Congress which assembled under our Constitution. I find it was the 4th act enacted by that body. I regret to say that that Legislature did not follow the example set by the Constitution, did not assign to that office a fixed term, did not secure the indepen dence of the incumbent for a day. The language of that act is very peculiar and extraor dinary. I read only the 2nd section. The 2nd section is as follows:.That there shall be in the said Dept an inferior officer, to be appointed by the said principal officer, and to be employed therein as he shall deem proper, and to be called the chief clerk in the Dept of Foreign Affairs, and who, wheneverthe said officer shall be removedfrom officeby the residentof the U.S., or in any other case of vacancy, shall, during such vacancy, have the chargeand custody of appertaining all records, books and papers to thesaid Dept.” The F. of that section apparently is simply to determine who shall have charge of the office in case of vacancy; but, into this section is injected terms which made the in cumbent the mere creature of the President, and limited the duration of his term to the pleasure of the President. It was not in the terms of grant, because to have employed terms of grant would have been a plain denial that the Constitution did grant that power to e the President. If it had been the judgment of that Congress that the Constitution conferred this power of removal upon the President, then they would have said nothing about his being removed by the President, but they would have employed the ordinary terms and have said that in case of resignation, death, or vacancy occasioned by other cause, the chief clerk joi have charge of the Dept. But the members of that Congress knew it would not do to employ that language, because they knew that the Constitution had conferred no such power on the President to create a vacancy, and they meant to inject this power into this statute, and yet avoid the use of language which would amount to an exPress grant. not hesitate to say that that is a dishonest statute. There were not men enough in that Congress who believed the Constitution gave this power, to the President to affirm that doctrine; there were not men enough in that Congress who thought the President ought to have the power to grant it to him; and they combined the 2 ideas, they combined the 2 factions, those who thought or pretended to think that the Constitution gave the power to the President, and those who thought the President ought to have the power, and comromised by the use of the language which I have read to you. Mr. President, I say that is a dishonest statute, and I say further, that that very cow ardly and skulking statute has done more to debauch American polities and American life than any other one cause; and I seriously doubt if it has not done more than all other causes combined; for that is the parent of this whole doctrine. It all sprung from that little source. Following upon this cowardly precedent have come all those statutes which have relinquished the whole control of the immense patronage belonging to this Government to the POTUS The effect of this has been most disastrous everywhere and upon everybody. Office hold ers, the subordinates of the President, have been reduced to a sort of spanielism that is contemptible to behold anywhere. You see it everywhere. I do not mean that you see it in every office holder. I thank my God and congratulate the country that we have gradu ally, in spite of this, educated up a class of men who love principle, who love individual honor, and who love the public welfare even better than they love office; and we have seen a host of them during the last sad 12 months laid upon the altar because they did love principle, honor, and country better than office; but in their places have come a host of these very tools to whom I referred, who love office and place and emoluments better than t.hey love honor, better than they love better than they love country, better than they love all put together. You saw and you read and you heard a great deal of the movements of what were called the deptal clubs organized here out of mere office holders in the city of Washington during the last political canvass. You have seen another consequence growing out of this: you have seen men, good men, men who would not change their principles to hold on to an office, but would cushion them, stifle them, men who would not give up a conviction, but would hold on to it and keep still over it. And you have seen another class of men: you have seen a class of men who were all things to all men, who were always in agreement with the very man or the very society they were talking with and conferring with on both sides of all questions. That is the effect of this system upon men holding office; but upon men outside, men who do not hold office, it has had a most disastrous effect, a most demoralizing tendency. You have, all of you, seen it during last sum mer. Office has been employed, patronage has been employed during. last summer in a way that it was never employed before, and for purposes for which, j. it was never Smployed before, not as the reward of a party, but for the purpose of purchasing reenforce.ments for a party. Offices have been held out as, baits in every community to induce men to betray their convictions, to desert one party and to adhere to another. Whoever has practiced the profession of an angler knows very well that the moment he drops his bait and hook into the water it will be surrounded by a school of fish, larger or smaller, nimbler or more lubberly, all striving to get the bait, and all anxious to avoid the hook. The struggle is to get the bait if they can without taking the hook, while the effort of the angler is to get a fish when he loses his bait; sometimes the bait goes and no fish is caught; sometimes a lubber gets hold of the hook and is drawn to shore. You have seen that process enacted over and over again, in every community in the U.S. during the past summer where you have been. Every one of these offices has been held out as a bait, and you have seen a little school, a very small number I admit, of politicians gathered around it; every one of them manifestly animated by the desire to get the office if he could without giving up his principles, without giving up his party associations, his party affiliations, but determined to get the office. Some very shrewd and active ones ran off with the office and did not give up their party associations; but some more clumsy fellows took the offices, took the principles, took the conditions, and were landed on the President's policy. But, then, that is not a happy state of things in American society nor in any other society. It is not a state of affairs which ought to be perpetual, which anybody ought to be ambitious to perpetuate. It is one which I am not ambitious of perpetuating. But, Mr. President, while it has had this effect upon subordinates in office, this disastrous effect upon society generally, it has had a more evil tendency still, I think, upon the office of the President himself. It has made the President, instead of an honest and faithful and laborious servant of the American." the captain of a great band, numbering from 30 to 40,000 office holders; not merely the captain of that great band, but the confessor to it, the man or the priest, if you please to whom they go, regularly or irregularly, to make confession of faith, and I dare say of conduct also. Mr. President, in the earlier and happier days of the Republic the questions. about an aspirant for office were: is he honest? is he faithful? is he capable? Those questions are no longer put to anybody. The only question put now is: does he support the President's policy?