ion is, whether
the powers given in a particular charter are appropriate for a bank. If
they are powers which are appropriate for a bank, powers which Congress
may fairly consider to be useful to the bank or the country, then
Congress may confer these powers; because the discretion to be exercised
in framing the constitution of the bank belongs to Congress. One man may
think the granted powers not indispensable to the particular bank;
another may suppose them injudicious, or injurious; a third may imagine
that other powers, if granted in their stead, would be more beneficial;
but all these are matters of expediency, about which men may differ; and
the power of deciding upon them belongs to Congress.

I again repeat, Sir, that if, for reasons of this kind, the President
sees fit to negative a bill, on the ground of its being inexpedient or
impolitic, he has a right to do so. But remember, Sir, that we are now
on the constitutional question; remember that the argument of the
President is, that, because powers were given to the bank by the charter
of 1816 which he thinks unnecessary, that charter is unconstitutional.
Now, Sir, it will hardly be denied, or rather it was not denied or
doubted before this message came to us, that, if there was to be a bank,
the powers and duties of that bank must be prescribed in the law
creating it. Nobody but Congress, it has been thought, could grant
these powers and privileges, or prescribe their limitations. It is true,
indeed, that the message pretty plainly intimates, that the President
should have been _first_ consulted, and that he should have had the
framing of the bill; but we are not yet accustomed to that order of
things in enacting laws, nor do I know a parallel to this claim, thus
now brought forward, except that, in some peculiar cases in England,
highly affecting the royal prerogative, the assent of the monarch is
necessary before either the House of Peers, or his Majesty's faithful
Commons, are permitted to act upon the subject, or to entertain its
consideration. But supposing, Sir, that our accustomed forms and our
republican principles are still to be followed, and that a law creating
a bank is, like all other laws, to originate with Congress, and that the
President has nothing to do with it till it is presented for his
approval, then it is clear that the powers and duties of a proposed
bank, and all the terms and conditions annexed to it, must, in the first
place, be sett