Tenure of Office Act

The next major dispute takes place in the aftermath of the Civil War when Andrew Johnson, President Andrew Johnson, tries to fire one of Lincoln's cabinet members, now his cabinet members.

And radical Republicans in Congress, this is the final straw, they pass the Tenure of Office Act in 1867, Johnson vetoes it.

They pass it again, overriding his veto.

And that's on the books for decades and decades.

The Tenure of Office Act prohibits the president from unilaterally removing executive officers.

And that's on the books until the Supreme Court takes up the issue in 1926 in a case called Myers v.

United States.

And he says later on that this was probably his most important case.

So after this disastrous and inflammatory speaking tour, radicals in Congress make an example out of Johnson.

I mentioned they impeach him, they impeach him, basically for opposing their agenda in the South, technically for his violation of the Tenure of Office Act.

But the 10th article of impeachment is about the swing around the circle.

It's about the fact that the president's rhetoric was inflammatory and dangerous and undermined the authority of Congress.

It's always a problem when you're trying to frame an impeachment case.

Do you go broad? Do you go narrow? You know, one of the criticisms of the Andrew Johnson impeachment back after the Civil War was that the Republicans who then controlled Congress tried to impeach him for violation of a particular statute, the Tenure of Office Act, for firing the Secretary of War when the Tenure of Office Act said he shouldn't.

And they probably made a mistake in that case by making the case too narrow when, in fact, he was really being impeached for his whole effort to defy the consensus of the legislature about the way in which the republic ought to reorganize itself after the Civil War.

But one understood their problem.

Congress disagreed loudly.

In 1868, the House of Representatives impeached him, largely over his violation of the Tenure of Office Act, though everyone knew that was a pretext.

The real crime was political.

The trial went to the Senate, where Johnson escaped removal by a single vote.

While President Johnson was retained in office, he was practically shorn of the greater part of the power and patronage that attaches to the office.

This was done through the passage of a bill over the President's veto known as the Tenure of Office Act.

The constitutionality of this act, which greatly curtailed the power of the President to make removals from office, was seriously questioned at the time, but it was passed as a political necessity to meet an unusual and unexpected emergency that seemed to threaten the peace and tranquility of the country and practically to nullify the fruits of the victory which had been won on the field of battle.

The law was repealed or materially modified as soon as President Johnson retired from office.

In eighteen sixty-eight, Johnson became the first president impeached by the House of Representatives.

The charges centered on his violation of the Tenure of Office Act.

He’d removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without Senate approval, a deliberate challenge to congressional authority.

The Senate trial lasted eleven weeks.