The paper before us has grown out of this interference.  It is a paper which cannot be treated with indifference.  The doctrines which it advances, the circumstances which have attended its transmission to the Senate, and the manner in which the Senate may now dispose of it, will form a memorable era in the history of the government.  We are either to enter it on our journals, concur in its sentiments, and submit to its rebuke, or we must answer it, with the respect due to the chief magistrate, but with such animadversion on its doctrines as they deserve, and with the firmness imposed upon us by our public duties.

I shall proceed, then, Sir, to consider the circumstances which gave rise to this Protest; to examine the principles which it attempts to establish; and to compare those principles with the Constitution and the laws.

On the 28th day of March, the Senate adopted a resolution declaring that, “in the late executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue, the President had assumed a power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.”  In that resolution I concurred.

It is not a direct question, now again before us, whether the President really had assumed such illegal power; that point is decided, so far as the Senate ever can decide it.  But the Protest denies that, supposing the President to have assumed such illegal power, the Senate could properly pass the resolution; or, what is the same thing, it denies that the Senate could, in this way, express any opinion about it.  It denies that the Senate has any right, by resolution, in this or any other case, to express disapprobation of the President’s conduct, let that conduct be what it may; and this, one of the leading doctrines of the Protest, I propose to consider.  But as I concurred in the resolution of the 28th of March, and did not trouble the Senate, at that time, with any statement of my own reasons, I will avail myself of this opportunity to explain, shortly, what those reasons were.

In the first place, then, I have to say, that I did not vote for the resolution on the mere ground of the removal of Mr. Duane from the office of Secretary of the Treasury.  Although I disapprove of the removal altogether, yet the power of removal does exist in the President, according to the established construction of the Constitution; and therefore, although in a particular case it may be abused, and, in my opinion, was abused in this case, yet its exercise cannot be justly said to be an assumption or usurpation.  We must all agree that Mr. Duane is out of office.  He has, therefore, been removed by a power constitutionally competent to remove him, whatever may be thought of the exercise of that power under the circumstances of the case.

If, then, the act of removing the Secretary be not the assumption of power which the resolution declares, in what is that assumption found?  Before giving a precise answer to this inquiry, allow me to recur to some of the principal previous events.