of judicial power, either in form, in substance, or in intent.  Everybody knows that the Senate can exercise no judicial power until articles of impeachment are brought before it.  It is then to proceed, by accusation and answer, hearing, trial, and judgment.  But there has been no impeachment, no answer, no hearing, no judgment.  All that the Senate did was to pass a resolution, in legislative form, declaring its opinion of certain acts of the executive.  This resolution imputed no crime; it charged no corrupt motive; it proposed no punishment.  It was directed, not against the President personally, but against the act; and that act it declared to be, in its judgment, an assumption of authority not warranted by the Constitution.

It is in vain that the Protest attempts to shift the resolution to the judicial character of the Senate.  The case is too plain for such an argument to be plausible.  But, in order to lay some foundation for it, the Protest, as I have already said, contends that neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives can express its opinions on the conduct of the President, except in some form connected with impeachment; so that if the power of impeachment did not exist, these two houses, though they be representative bodies, though one of them be filled by the immediate representatives of the people, though they be constituted like other popular and representative bodies, could not utter a syllable, although they saw the executive either trampling on their own rights and privileges, or grasping at absolute authority and dominion over the liberties of the country!  Sir, I hardly know how to speak of such claims of impunity for executive encroachment.  I am amazed that any American citizen should draw up a paper containing such lofty pretensions; pretensions which would have been met with scorn in England, at any time since the Revolution of 1688.  A man who should stand up, in either house of the British Parliament, to maintain that the house could not, by vote or resolution, maintain its own rights and privileges, would make even the Tory benches hang their heads for very shame.

There was, indeed, a time when such proceedings were not allowed.  Some of the kings of the Stuart race would not tolerate them.  A signal instance of royal displeasure with the proceedings of Parliament occurred in the latter part of the reign of James the First.  The House of Commons had spoken, on some occasion, “of its own undoubted rights and privileges.”  The king thereupon sent them a letter, declaring that he would not allow that they had any undoubted rights; but that what they enjoyed they might still hold by his own royal grace and permission.  Sir Edward Coke and Mr. Granville were not satisfied with this title to their privileges; and, under their lead, the house entered on its journals a resolution asserting its privileges, as its own undoubted right, and manifesting a determination to maintain them as