Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (59 page)
Read Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy Online
Authors: David O. Stewart
Tags: #Government, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Executive Branch, #General, #United States, #Political Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #19th Century, #History
For the next two decades:
Robert V. Remini,
The House: The History of the House of Representatives
, New York: Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins (2006), p. 206.
In this vein:
Irving Brant,
Impeachment: Trials and Errors
, New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1972), p. 4.
Richard Nixon resigned:
Kyvig, pp. 29–33.
In response to President Grant’s demands:
Smith, p. 479.
The dissenters were not fazed:
272 U.S. 52 (1926). Few judges have ever shrugged their shoulders as eloquently as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who joined Brandeis and McReynolds in dissent, writing: “I have no more trouble in believing that Congress has power to prescribe a term of life for [a federal office] free from any interference than I have in accepting the undoubted power of Congress to decree its end. I have equally little trouble in accepting its power to prolong the tenure of an incumbent until Congress or the Senate shall have assented to his removal. The duty of the President to see that the laws be executed is a duty that does not go beyond the laws or require him to achieve more than Congress sees fit to leave within his power.”
The Supreme Court ruled: Humphrey’s Executor (Rathbun) v. United States
, 295 U.S. 602 (1935).
Indeed, in many ways:
Kyvig, pp. 392–94.
DAVID O. STEWART
is the author of
The Summer of 1787
, a
Washington Post
bestseller and winner of the Washington Writing Prize for Best Book of 2007. He was principal defense counsel in a 1989 Senate impeachment trial of a Mississippi judge. He has practiced law in Washington, D.C., for more than a quarter-century. He has argued appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and was law clerk to Justice Lewis Powell of that Court. He lives in Garrett Park, Maryland.