Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 March 1886 — EDMUNDS IN WAR-PAINT. [ARTICLE]

EDMUNDS IN WAR-PAINT.

Importance of the Controversy Between the President and the Senate \ Plainly Stated. M Democrat|b Precedent Brought Forward Showing Beason for the Bepublican Attitude. [Washington epoeiat] Under the head of unfinished business, the Senate took up the resolutions reported by Mr. Edmuuds from the Judiciary -Committee. These resolutions, among other things, condemn the Attorney General for refusing to transmit to the Senate papers called for by the Senate, and declare that refusal to be a violation by the Attorney General of his official duty, and subversive of the fundamental principles of government and good administration. The resolutions also -condemn the discharge from the Government service of ex-Union soldiers. As the resolutions were read by the Chief Clerk, the most absolute silence prevailed on the floor and in the galleries. The galleries were crowded to apparent discomfort, many parsons being compelled to stand This was notably true of the reserved galleries, to which admission is only permitted by cards from Senators, many gentlemen and not a few ladies, though early in attendance, failing to find vacant seats. Senator Edmunds rose and prefaced his speech with the remark that the calm or order- ’ ly administration of constitutional government is a subject in which the people, the Presidefft, and representatives of the people were equally interested and equally responsible. It was in support of such prderly government that he *4 dressed the Senate. Entering upon the subject of the suspension of Mr. Duskm from the office of attorney for Southern Alabama and the appointment of Mr. Burnett to succeed him, Senator Edmunds contended that the act of the President did not remove Mr. Duskin, but simply withheld from him the duties and emoluments of the office pending a decision of the matter by the Senate. When the nomination of Mr, Burnett was sent to the Senate Mr. Duskm ' was the United States Attorney for Southern Alabama, and the proposition now made to the Senate was that he should be removed. In spite of sundry misstatements made in the case by the public press, the President, and the minority of the Judiciary Committee, he said, the case as it stood was that the President had asked Hie Senate to consent to the removal of Dustin and' the appointment of Burnett , " It was not for the President to determine what papers were releWntjTKatwas ary with the Senate. The papers called for in this case iy® re papers filed m the department, and the law made the Attorney General and the President the custodians of those papers, and required them to preserve them. Every paper addressed to the officer exercising the official function of suspension, upon that topic, must be an official paper, no matter how vile or false it might be. The papers were refused because they would enable the Senate to understand the reasons which prompted the suspension. Therefore the proposition was that the Senate, being called on in the exercise of its jurisdiction to judge of the official conduct of Duskin, could not have the papers, because if it did they would disclose the grounds on which the President acted. “If that,” said Mr. Edmunds, “is not a proposition which would, stagger the credulity and amaze the under ~ standing of any intelligent man in a government of law, or in a government of reason, I am unable to comprehend what would be.” The jurisdiction of Congress was infinitely broader than that of the President His was executive power." Congress made the laws, and when the Constitution commands him to give. Congress information ou.“the state of the Union” it says he “shall” do it There was no one thing, no one subject, that represented the “state of the Union.” It was the condition of the Government and every part of it, not only its legislative parts—about which the President could communicate no information without impertinence, for the Constitution had declared that the two houses were to regulate themselves—but he was to give to Congress, and was positively commanded to do so, from time to time, information on the state of the Union, and that was why Congress was entitled to have it every time 'it called for it And'lie violated a positive command of the Constitution when, on a constitutional call in the regular way, he omitted to do it It was because the President was under this constitutional obligation that Congress in its requests for information often left it to the dis- . cretion of the Executive to decide whether or not the information should be'sent when there might be a question as to the propriety of diselosing some confidential matters. Mr. Edmunds continued: •

I will state the extremes! case possible—that of either house calling on the President or the Secretary of State for information as to the disbursement of the contingent fund for the payment of the expenses of foreign idtjrcuui'se, which is ordinarily called a secret service fund. There the money of the people is appropriated under the law which say* that a voucher of the President of the United States shall be evidence to the accounting officers of the Treasury that the money has been appropriately expended, while in the State Department the real vouchers remain which snow for what the money has been expended. Now, then, suppose some President two or three years ago, when we appropriated SIOO,OOO or $200,000 for the contingent expensed of the department just preceding an election, should have turned into the Treasury a lump voucher for that whole amount Suppose that at the next meeting of the Senate and House of Representatives they should be of opinion that for tlie security of good government and as a guard against any corruption or improper use of-that money it was necessary that they should know what became of it Would it be within the power of the Secretary of State or the President of the United States to say no? If so, we had better be extremely careful hereafter as to how much money we put into the contingent fund for foreign intercourse. When this resolution was sent to the. Attorney General there was pending in another branch of Congress a bill providing for a deficiency of about $185,000 in the Department of Justice for foes of jurors and witnesses, and there was there, witheut doubt, a letter of the Attorney General stating that there must be added for this current fiscal year ending on the 30th of June next, a year covering twelve months of purely -Democratic control, a deficiency of $185,000. If the case of Duskin is fairly illustrative of the circumstances of all the District Attorneys and Marshals of the United States, then we have drawn in the question: What has become of the money that was appropriated at the regular session to carry on the administration of justice through the Department of Justice in the United States? Duskin was one of the persons who were to draw upon that fund. In that district he was the "very person whose agency, more than that of any other man, would go to an economical <» an’ extravagant—nay, jt&tor unjust—ex penditure or the public money. Can we u■. know anything about it? Take the other sixty or seventy districts in the United States. If it is denied to us as to Duskin. it must be denied as Dorsheimer, atuTas to Henry. "tEeTßarshaT of Vermont, and every other Marshal and every other District =Att3HSSy~~ _-r.—---What, then, are we to do? If we had passed this resolution while we were acting in a legislative way (as if there were any difference in the powers of the Senate.' whether sitting with open or with closed doors); if we had sent precisely this resolution and applied it to all the districts-m the United States; if the Attorney General and the President are right now tlny would be right then in saying: ‘No: we can give you no information, because if we do you may be able to know the reasons why so many of these Marshals and District Attorneys have been suspended, and that is purely within the province of the President of the’United states. That is the logic of our good f riends, Jhe minority o.f the committee, and their good friend and ally, the President of the United States, who, with a courage certainly unique, has interjected his supplementary report to the report of the minority committee before the Senate has even considered it Senator Edmunds quoted these words from a speech made by Senator Hayne of South Caror Ima fifty years ago in the discussion of a resolution demanding facts relating to a congress of South American and" Central American States and the United States, which resolution was opposed by the friends of f “However gentlemen may be enamored of this new doctrine of confidence in rulers, it is not the ground, I apprehend, on which the Senate

ought to act in fulfilling its (institutional duty of giving advice to the President, If we are to act by faith and not by knowledge we have no business to be here." ' Senator Edmunds thought with Senator Hayne that if the Senate was expected to act on 650 removals and appointments by faith and not by knowledge then the Senators had no business to be there. “Senator Edmunds cited the refusal of President Jackson in 1835 to send to the Senate information Concerning the removal of a Surveyor General named Wirtz, and the appointment in his place of a man named Williamson, saying that that Was one of the nutaerotts calls made on him by the Senate which he had hitherto complied With, but he was going to stop now-—that he had reliTovcd Mr. Wirtz as ho had a right to do, and the reason was none of the Senate’s business. Senator Edmunds continued: The Senate next day, without a division, rejected Mr. Williamson, although in the very message in which the President said he would not tell anything about what Wirtz hail been doing ho took particular pains to say that Williamson was one of the best qualified and most valuable personages ho had ever known. That was the end of the affair between President Jackson and the Senate on the subject of papers about appointnieuta. * * * The President, in his supplementary minority report to tne deliberations of the Senate, has stated, with a fullness of rhetoric which was as charming as it was unique, that these statutes of the United States and the practice under them had now for many years fallen into a state of “innocuous desuetude.” If that is true it ought to bo one of the missions of the President, in discharging the duty that the Constitution imputes to him, to talio that statute out of disuse, if I may use a shorter and humbler phrase, and, as he was sworn to do, put it into faithful execution. ' But is the statute in disuse? Let us see. On the 4th of March, 1879, the Democrats had a majority of this body. Their Cominittee on the Judiciary was Mr. Thurman (Chairman), Mr. McDonald of Indiana, and Mr. Bayard! of Delaware (the present Secretary of State), Mr. Garland, of Arkansas (the present Attorney General), Mr. Lamar of Mississippi (the present Secretary of the Interior), Judge Davis of Illinois, and Edmunds, Conkling; and Carpenter. [Senator Edmunds here read a copy of a letter from ex-Senator Thurman, as Chairman of the committee, to the Attorney General, dated March 24, 1879, calling for “such information as may be in the possession of your department concerning the following nomination, together with any suggestion you may be pleased to note.”] On the 7th of April there came a horse of a .different color—the same kind of an animal that we have here now. [Laughter.] Accordingly on that day this letter was written to the Attorney General: 8m: Under the direction of the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, I have the honor to request that you will communicate to the committee any papers nr information i n your -pes—session touching the question of the propriety of the removal [emnhasis by Mr. Edmundsjof Michael Shaffer, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Utah, and tne appointment of David T. Corbin to the office. Very respectfully yqur obedient servant, Aij-en’G. Thubman, Chairman. Alas for the Democracy of those days! [Laughter.] Think, Mr. President, of the infinite idiocy, the unpatriotism, the usurpation of that number of live Senators of the United States of the Democratic party assailing a Itepublican Attorney General and a liepublican President with the., insulting and impertinent inquiry as io papers and information touching a suspended officer whose successor was nominated to accomplish his removal And yet those men were, in their day—in those times—among the headlights of the Democratic locomotive. [Laughter.] There was Thurman—his light was out [renewed laughter]—the greatest Democrat in the United States [applause in the galleries], and the best one and the noblest one’, and the bravest one—for he had the courage not long ago in your State, sir, to denounce the Democratic frauds at the ballot. There was Thurman arid there was “Joe” McDonald—a name familiar in the West as m the East, the embodiment of upright Democratic pluck an d constitutional law * and there was Garland, whom we all know here, the leader on the Democratic side of the Senate, full and running over with constitutional ana statute and reported law—knowing his rights as a Senator and as a member of the committee and knowing his duties; and Lamar; and—and then all the rest of us on this side, joining in what the present President of the United States calls an impertinent innovation of his rights in asking for papers. Mr. President, if I were going to be rhetorical I should say just there: “Oh, shame, where is thy blush?” But that was not the only instance, Senator Edmunds said. The same Chairman on many occasions had called for that same class of information and got it It did not seem to the speaker that the Senate could fail to get the papers on the ground that the statute on the subject had become obsolete—or gone into a state of “innocuous desuetude. ’’