In addition to the establishment of this power of unlimited and causeless removal, another doctrine has been put forth, more vague, it is true, but altogether unconstitutional, and tending to like dangerous results.  In some loose, indefinite, and unknown sense, the President has been called the representative of the whole American people.  He has called himself so repeatedly, and been so denominated by his friends a thousand times.  Acts, for which no specific authority has been found either in the Constitution or the laws, have been justified on the ground that the President is the representative of the whole American people.  Certainly, this is not constitutional language.  Certainly, the Constitution nowhere calls the President the universal representative of the people.  The constitutional representatives of the people are in the House of Representatives, exercising powers of legislation.  The President is an executive officer, appointed in a particular manner, and clothed with prescribed and limited powers.  It may be thought to be of no great consequence, that the President should call himself, or that others should call him, the sole representative of all the people, although he has no such appellation or character in the Constitution.  But, in these matters, words are things.  If he is the people’s representative, and as such may exercise power, without any other grant, what is the limit to that power?  And what may not an unlimited representative of the people do?  When the Constitution expressly creates representatives, as members of Congress, it regulates, defines, and limits their authority.  But if the executive chief magistrate, merely because he is the executive chief magistrate, may assume to himself another character, and call himself the representative of the whole people, what is to limit or restrain this representative power in his hands?

I fear, Gentlemen, that if these pretensions should be continued and justified, we might have many instances of summary political logic, such as I once heard in the House of Representatives.  A gentleman, not now living, wished very much to vote for the establishment of a Bank of the United States, but he had always stoutly denied the constitutional power of Congress to create such a bank.  The country, however, was in a state of great financial distress, from which such an institution, it was hoped, might help to extricate it; and this consideration led the worthy member to review his opinions with care and deliberation.  Happily, on such careful and deliberate review, he altered his former judgment.  He came, satisfactorily, to the conclusion that Congress might incorporate a bank.  The argument which brought his mind to this result was short, and so plain and obvious, that he wondered how he should so long have overlooked it.  The power, he said, to create a bank, was either given to Congress, or it was not given.  Very well.  If it was given, Congress of course could exercise it; if it was not given, the people still retained it, and in that case, Congress, as the representatives of the people, might, upon an emergency, make free to use it.