der the direction
of the President. But it would be an alarming doctrine, that Congress
cannot impose upon any executive officer any duty they may think proper,
which is not repugnant to any rights secured and protected by the
Constitution; and in such cases the duty and responsibility grow out of
and are subject to the control of the law, and not to the direction of
the President. And this is emphatically the case, where the duty
enjoined is of a mere ministerial character."[392] In short, the Court
recognized the underlying question of the case to be whether the
President's duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed"
made it constitutionally impossible for Congress ever to entrust the
construction of its statutes to anybody but the President; and it
answered this in the negative.

MYERS CASE VERSUS HUMPHREY CASE

How does this issue stand today? The answer to this question, so far as
there is one, is to be sought in a comparison of the Court's decisions
in the Myers and Humphrey cases respectively.[393] The former decision
is still valid to support the President's right to remove, and hence to
control the decisions of, all officials through whom he exercises the
great political powers which he derives from the Constitution; also all
officials--usually heads of departments--through whom he exercises
powers conferred upon him by statute. The Humphrey decision assures to
Congress the right to protect the tenure, and hence the freedom of
decision of all officials upon whom, in the exercise of its delegated
powers, it confers duties of a "quasi-legislative" or a "quasi-judicial"
nature. The former may be described as duties for the satisfactory
discharge of which Congress justifiably feels that a specialized and
informed judgment is requisite. The latter are duties the discharge of
which closely touches private rights and which ought therefore be
accompanied or preceded by a "quasi-judicial" inquiry capable of
affording the claimants of such rights the opportunity to be heard. In
neither case is the President entitled to force his reading of the law
upon the officer, but only to take care that the latter exercise his
powers according to his own best lights.

POWER OF THE PRESIDENT TO GUIDE ENFORCEMENT OF THE PENAL LAW

This matter also came to a head in "the reign of Andrew Jackson,"
preceding, and indeed foreshadowing, the Duane episode by some months.
"At that epoch," Wyman relates in his Principles