he may be
allowed to consider himself as the SOLE REPRESENTATIVE OF ALL THE
AMERICAN PEOPLE, and is to act under no other responsibility than such
as I have already described, then I say, Sir, that the government (I
will not say the people) has already a master. I deny the sentiment,
therefore, and I protest against the language; neither the sentiment nor
the language is to be found in the Constitution of the country; and
whoever is not satisfied to describe the powers of the President in the
language of the Constitution may be justly suspected of being as little
satisfied with the powers themselves. The President is President. His
office and his name of office are known, and both are fixed and
described by law. Being commander of the army and navy, holding the
power of nominating to office and removing from office, and being by
these powers the fountain of all patronage and all favor, what does he
not become if he be allowed to superadd to all this the character of
single representative of the American people? Sir, he becomes what
America has not been accustomed to see, what this Constitution has never
created, and what I cannot contemplate but with profound alarm. He who
may call himself the single representative of a nation may speak in the
name of the nation, may undertake to wield the power of the nation; and
who shall gainsay him in whatsoever he chooses to pronounce to be the
nation's will?

I will now, Sir, ask leave to recapitulate the general doctrines of this
Protest, and to present them together. They are,--

That neither branch of the legislature can take up, or consider, for the
purpose of censure, any official act of the President, without some view
to legislation or impeachment;

That not only the passage, but the discussion, of the resolution of the
Senate of the 28th of March, was unauthorized by the Constitution, and
repugnant to its provisions;

That the custody of the public treasury always must be intrusted to the
executive; that Congress cannot take it out of his hands, nor place it
anywhere under such superintendents and keepers as are appointed by him,
responsible to him, and removable at his will;

That the whole executive power is in the President, and that therefore
the duty of defending the integrity of the Constitution _results to him
from the very nature of his office_; and that the founders of our
republic have attested their sense of the importance of this duty, and,
by expressing