be borrowed. What,
then, if this transaction shall be justified, is to hinder the executive
from borrowing money to maintain fleets and armies, or for any other
purpose, at his pleasure, without any authority of law? Yet even this,
according to the doctrine of the Protest, we have no right to complain
of. We have no right to declare that an executive department has
violated the Constitution and broken the law, by borrowing money on the
credit of the United States. Nor could we make a similar declaration, if
we were to see the executive, by means of this borrowed money, enlisting
armies and equipping fleets. And yet, Sir, the President has found no
difficulty, heretofore, in expressing his opinions, _in a paper not
called for by the exercise of any official duty_, upon the conduct and
proceedings of the two houses of Congress. At the commencement of this
session, he sent us a message, commenting on the land bill which the two
houses passed at the end of the last session. That bill he had not
approved, nor had he returned it with objections. Congress was
dissolved; and the bill, therefore, was completely dead, and could not
be revived. No communication from him could have the least possible
effect as an official act. Yet he saw fit to send a message on the
subject, and in that message he very freely declares his opinion that
the bill which had passed both houses _began with an entire subversion
of every one of the compacts by which the United States became possessed
of their Western domain_; that one of its provisions _was in direct and
undisguised violation of the pledge given by Congress to the States_;
that the Constitution provides that these compacts shall be untouched by
the legislative power, which can only make needful rules and
regulations; and that all beyond that is _an assumption of undelegated
power_.

These are the terms in which the President speaks of an act of the two
houses; not in an official paper, not in a communication which it was
necessary for him to make to them; but in a message, adopted only as a
mode through which to make public these opinions. After this, it would
seem too late to enjoin on the houses of Congress a total forbearance
from all comment on the measures of the executive.

Not only is it the right of both houses, or of either, to resist, by
vote, declaration, or resolution, whatever it may deem an encroachment
of executive power, but it is also undoubtedly the right of either house