xt session, than it
can restrain any succeeding Congress from doing what it may choose. Any
Congress may repeal the act or law of its predecessor, if in its nature
it be repealable, just as it may repeal its own act; and if a law or an
act be irrepealable in its nature, it can no more be repealed by a
subsequent Congress than by that which passed it. All this is familiar
to everybody. And Congress, like every other legislature, often passes
acts which, being in the nature of grants or contracts, are irrepealable
ever afterwards. The message, in a strain of argument which it is
difficult to treat with ordinary respect, declares that this restriction
on the power of Congress, as to the establishment of other banks, is a
palpable attempt to amend the Constitution by an act of legislation. The
reason on which this observation purports to be founded is, that
Congress, by the Constitution, is to have exclusive legislation over the
District of Columbia; and when the bank charter declares that Congress
will create no new bank within the District, it annuls this power of
exclusive legislation! I must say, that this reasoning hardly rises high
enough to entitle it to a passing notice. It would be doing it too much
credit to call it plausible. No one needs to be informed that exclusive
power of legislation is not unlimited power of legislation; and if it
were, how can that legislative power be unlimited that cannot restrain
itself, that cannot bind itself by contract? Whether as a government or
as an individual, that being is fettered and restrained which is not
capable of binding itself by ordinary obligation. Every legislature
binds itself, whenever it makes a grant, enters into a contract, bestows
an office, or does any other act or thing which is in its nature
irrepealable. And this, instead of detracting from its legislative
power, is one of the modes of exercising that power. The legislative
power of Congress over the District of Columbia would not be full and
complete, if it might not make just such a stipulation as the bank
charter contains.

As to the taxing power of the States, about which the message says so
much, the proper answer to all it says is, that the States possess no
power to tax any instrument of the government of the United States. It
was no part of their power before the Constitution, and they derive no
such power from any of its provisions. It is nowhere given to them.
Could a State tax the _coin_ of the U