titution and for that very reason the founders of our government
rejected it. They clearly saw that to make the President's veto
effective, he would have to be protected in its exercise. To have
adopted the English practice and allowed a mere majority of the Senate
to convict in impeachment cases would have given Congress power to
destroy the President's veto by impeaching and removing from office any
executive who dared to use it. This was guarded against by making, a
two-thirds majority in the Senate necessary to convict any official
impeached by the House. And since this two-thirds majority is one which
in practice can not be obtained, the power to impeach may be regarded,
like the power to amend, as practically non-existent. Only two
convictions have been obtained since the Constitution was adopted. John
Pickering, a Federal district judge, was convicted March 12, 1803, and
removed from office, and at the outbreak of the Civil War a Federal
district judge of Tennessee, West H. Humphreys, who joined the
Confederacy without resigning, was convicted. William Blount was
acquitted in 1798 on the ground that, as a United States senator, he was
not a "civil officer" within the meaning of the impeachment provision of
the Constitution, and so not liable to impeachment. Samuel Chase,
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, President Andrew
Johnson, and Secretary of War, William W. Belknap, would have been
convicted but for the extraordinary majority required in the Senate.

The practical impossibility of removing a public official by means of
impeachment proceedings has made the executive and the judicial veto
thoroughly effective, since it has deprived Congress of all power to
punish by removing from office those officials who thwart its purpose.
It has made the President and the Supreme Court much stronger than the
House of Representatives--a result which the framers of the Constitution
no doubt desired.

In addition to the President's qualified veto on laws about to be
passed, which, as we have seen, amounts in practice to an unlimited
negative, he has what may be called an absolute veto on their execution.
This is the necessary consequence of his complete independence, taken in
connection with his power of appointment and removal. Controlling the
administrative arm of the government, he can execute the laws of
Congress or not as he may see fit. He may even fail to enforce an act
which he himself signed, ina