free to say that I think this amendment upon
the question of removal and re-instatement of officers leaves the
Tenure-of-office Act as though it had never been passed, so far as
the power of the President over the Executive officers is concerned."
It was certainly an extraordinary spectacle, without precedent or
parallel, that the report of the conference should have one meaning
assigned to it in the Senate, and a diametrically opposite meaning
assigned to it in the House, and that these antagonistic meanings
should be made on the same day, and put forth by the conferees whose
names were attached to the report. Such a legislative proceeding
cannot be too strongly characterized.

But the popular understanding among Democrats and Republicans alike
was that the Tenure-of-office Act had been destroyed, and that Mr.
Trumbull's technical construction of the amendment was made merely to
cover the retreat of the Senate. By the new enactment, the provisions
which had led to the dispute between President Johnson and Congress
were practically extirpated; and thus a voluntary confession was
recorded by both Senate and House that they had forced an issue with
one Executive on an assumed question of right, which they would not
attempt with his successor. The members of the present House who in
the preceding Congress had voted to impeach the President, and the
great mass of the senators who voted to convict him, now voted to blot
out the identical clause of the Act under which they held the President
to be deserving of removal for even venturing to act upon his own fair
construction of its meaning. With all the plausible defenses that can
be made for this contradictory course, the fact remains that the
authors of the law precipitately fled from its enforcement the moment
a President with whom they were in sympathy was installed in office.
They thereby admitted the partisan intent that had governed the
enactment, just as they admitted the partisan intent that now led to
the practical repeal. Casting off all political disguises and
personal pretenses, the simple truth remains that the Tenure-of-office
Law was enacted lest President Johnson should remove Republican
office-holders too rapidly; and it was practically repealed lest
President Grant should not remove Democratic office-holders rapidly
enough.

While President Grant did not find himself in the least degree
embarrassed by the Tenure-of-office Act as amended, he did not