usurpation. In usurping this
power, Mr. Johnson must have known that his act belonged, in the opinion
of Congress, to the class of "high crimes and misdemeanors," for the
commission of which the Constitution expressly provides that Presidents
may be impeached; and he must also have known that Congress, in judging
of his infractions of the Constitution, would be bound neither by his
individual opinion of his constitutional powers nor by the opinion of
the Supreme Court, but was at perfect liberty to act on its own
interpretation of his constitutional duty. It is not therefore to be
supposed that he intended to limit his defiance of Congress to the mere
issuing of the Amnesty Proclamation, especially as the principle on
which that Proclamation was issued would cover his refusal to carry out
the whole Congressional plan of reconstruction. His conviction or
assertion that Congress has no right to withhold from him the power to
pardon defeated rebels and public enemies by the wholesale, is certainly
not greater or more emphatic than his conviction or assertion that, in
its plan of reconstruction, Congress has granted to subordinates powers
which constitutionally belong to him. If he can exalt his will over
Congress in the one case, there is no reason why he should not do it in
the other.

Indeed, in the Proclamation of Amnesty, Mr. Johnson practically claims
that his power to grant pardons extends to a dispensing power over the
laws. But it is evident that the Constitution, in giving the President
the power to pardon criminals, does not give him the power to dispense
with the laws against crime. At one period, Mr. Johnson seems to have
done this in respect to the crime of counterfeiting, by his repeated
pardons extended to convicted counterfeiters.--Still there is a broad
line of distinction between the abuse of this power to pardon criminals
after conviction, and the assumption of power to restore to whole
classes of traitors and public enemies their forfeited rights of
citizenship. By the pardon of murderers and counterfeiters, the
President cannot much increase the number of his political supporters;
by the pardon of traitors and public enemies, he may build up a party to
support him in his struggle against the legislative department of the
government. The reasons which have induced Mr. Johnson to dispense with
the laws against treason are political reasons, and bear no relation to
his prerogative of mercy. Nobody preten