Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I hear for the 1st time that party considerations enter into this provision of the bill. Certainly, if I am permitted to refer to the deliberations of the committee, I can say that no such considerations influenced them, and I speak with positive certainty that no such influenced me then or can influence me ever in relation to appointments of this description. I did not know, therefore, that it was supposed, or that the fact was so, that the bill as it came from the House in this respect was the result of a compromise a compromise founded upon some doubt as to the integrity or the ability or the party fealty of the judges of the circuit or district courts, and a greater confidence in the integrity and party fealty of the Chief Justice of the U.S. But I suppose that that is one of the “existing circumstances” to which my frieud from Oregon adverted. Now, sir, in concurring with the committee in rejecting that part of the bill, as it came from the House, which required the appointments to be made upon the nomination of the Chief Justice, I was governed solely by this consideration: I thought it altogether unfit for that officer. I have no doubt whatever that he would, if the law should pass in that form, discharge the duty which would be imposed upon him with perfect integrity and with perfect fairness; but I do not think that the Chief Justice of the U.S. should be required to appoint inferior officers, scattered all over the Union. I should just as soon think of devolving upon him the duty of appointing the messengers of the courts or the clerks of the courts throughout the Union. As Chief Jus tice of the U.S. his duties should be confined in my opinion and I am sure he would wish to have them so confined to the high matters of constitutional law which are often brought before that tribunal, and to the legal questions, other than constitutional ones, which arise in disputes between parties whose cases are brought into that forum. And if this provision be retained I should consider it a degradation of the office I have no fear that it will be so degraded by him if in making these appointments he should be governed by any such party considerations. To be so governed is to make him a party man in the strongest sense in which that term can be used. It tends, however, he may incline against that tendency, to make him hold uneven the balance of justice; and it does what is quite as pernicious; it will create a belief in the mind of the country that the administration of that high office is more or less to depend upon party considerations. I agreed substantially for the reasons stated by the honorable member from Vermont, that it was better to leave the appointment to the district judges; but in doing so, and in agreeing to change the bill as it came from the House in that particular, I certainly had no idea of reflecting upon the circuit judges of the U.S. I did not understand my friendfrom Iowa as stating that that was the purpose of the committee. I understood him merel as saying that it might be so construed. It was very far from my purpose, and I am equally certain it was entirely foreign to any purpose of any member of the committee. I have compar.atively little choice I have a choice, as I stated whether the appointments are submitted to the district judges or to the circuit judges; but I have an insuperable objection to requiring the appointments to depend upon the nomination of. Chief Justice of the U.S., both because I think it is an unfit duty to impose upon him, and which, I presume, he would be very unwilling to have imposed upon him, and because I believe that the reason for imposing it upon him which, if the bill should pass in that form, will be considered to be the reason for imposing it upon him, is calculated very to diminish the influence which he ought to have in the judgment of all the country not of a party, but of all. However great may have been the perils through which we have passed or are now passing owing to sectional differences giving rise to party politics, I believe as I believe in my existence that the SCOTUS has never lent itself to any such considerations in the least particular. If there be a tribunal in the world, in the past or in the present, which discharges its high judicial functions from a pure sense of what the laws and the Constitution of their country require, I believe it to be the present tribunal and the past tribunal of the SCOTUS. Errors of judgment I think they have fallen into; errors upon questions of constitutional law I think they have fallen into; but that is inseparable from the fact that they are at last but men; but that any such errors, if errors they be, have been brought about by any such motive as that to which I have. luded I do not believe; and if I could believe it, or should be brought in the future to believe it, I should conclude that the destinies of our country are not to be what we should all hope.