articles of
impeachment are brought before it. It is then to proceed, by accusation
and answer, hearing, trial, and judgment. But there has been no
impeachment, no answer, no hearing, no judgment. All that the Senate did
was to pass a resolution, in legislative form, declaring its opinion of
certain acts of the executive. This resolution imputed no crime; it
charged no corrupt motive; it proposed no punishment. It was directed,
not against the President personally, but against the act; and that act
it declared to be, in its judgment, an assumption of authority not
warranted by the Constitution.

It is in vain that the Protest attempts to shift the resolution to the
judicial character of the Senate. The case is too plain for such an
argument to be plausible. But, in order to lay some foundation for it,
the Protest, as I have already said, contends that neither the Senate
nor the House of Representatives can express its opinions on the conduct
of the President, except in some form connected with impeachment; so
that if the power of impeachment did not exist, these two houses, though
they be representative bodies, though one of them be filled by the
immediate representatives of the people, though they be constituted like
other popular and representative bodies, could not utter a syllable,
although they saw the executive either trampling on their own rights and
privileges, or grasping at absolute authority and dominion over the
liberties of the country! Sir, I hardly know how to speak of such claims
of impunity for executive encroachment. I am amazed that any American
citizen should draw up a paper containing such lofty pretensions;
pretensions which would have been met with scorn in England, at any time
since the Revolution of 1688. A man who should stand up, in either house
of the British Parliament, to maintain that the house could not, by vote
or resolution, maintain its own rights and privileges, would make even
the Tory benches hang their heads for very shame.

There was, indeed, a time when such proceedings were not allowed. Some
of the kings of the Stuart race would not tolerate them. A signal
instance of royal displeasure with the proceedings of Parliament
occurred in the latter part of the reign of James the First. The House
of Commons had spoken, on some occasion, "of its own undoubted rights
and privileges." The king thereupon sent them a letter, declaring that
_he would not allow that they had any undoubted ri