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from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors," Art. II, § 4, and that the House of Representatives shall bring, and the Senate try, the impeachment, Art. 1, § 2, cl. 5; Art. I, § 3, cl. 6. The appointments clause of the Constitution, which it is universally agreed has some bearing upon removal powers, reads as follows:

... [The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

Art. II, § 2, CL 2.

Since the early days of the Republic it has not been doubted that the Constitution implicitly confers upon the President power to remove civil officers whom he appoints, at least those who exercise executive powers. In what has come to be known in the legal literature as the "Decision of 1789," the First Congress, after heated debate, deleted from a proposed bill creating the Department of Foreign Affairs language which provided that the Secretary of Foreign Affairs was "to be removable from office by the President." The reason urged by the proponents of the deletion was that the original text implied the absence of a constitutionally conferred power of the President to effect the removal. See Myers, 272 U.S. at 111-36.

The extent to which the implicit presidential removal power extends beyond officers exercising executive powers, however, the extent to which it can be restricted by legislation, and the extent to which it can be conferred by legislation upon the Congress itself, have been the subject of Supreme Court pronouncements that are conflicting in their reasoning, if not in their results. See generally Burkoff, Appointment and Removal under the Federal Constitution: The Impact of Buckley v. Valeo, 22 Wayne L. Rev. 1335 (1976); Donovan & Irvine, The President's Power to Remove Members of Administrative Agencies, 21 Cornell L.Q. 215 (1936). The cases are few enough that

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their holdings and their principal rationales may be readily summarized.

In In re Hennen, 38 U.S. (13 Pet.) 230 (1839), the Court held that a district court clerk, who had been appointed by a district court judge pursuant to that provision of the Constitution authorizing Congress to vest the appointment of "inferior Officers . . . in the Courts of Law," could also be removed by a district court judge. The Court said that "[in the absence of all constitutional provision or statutory regulation, it would seem to be a sound and necessary rule, to consider the power of removal as incident to the power of appointment." Id. at 259.

In United States v. Perkins, 116 U.S. 483 (1886), the Court upheld an award of back pay to a cadet-engineer in the Navy, who had been appointed by the Secretary of the Navy and was dismissed by him in disregard of a statutory provision prohibiting dismissal of any naval officer in peacetime except by court martial. The Court quoted and approved the opinion of the Court of Claims stating that, regardless of what the situation might be with regard to officers appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate under the self-operative provision of the Constitution,

Id. at 485.

'when Congress, by law, vests the appointment of inferior officers in the heads of Departments it may limit and restrict the power of removal as it deems best for the public interest. The constitutional authority in Congress to thus vest the appointment implies authority to limit, restrict, and regulate the removal by such laws as Congress may enact in relation to the officers so appointed.'

In Shurtleff v. United States, 189 U.S. 311 (1903), the Court held that a statute which provided that a particular Customs Department official "may be removed from office at any time by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office" did not prevent presidential removal for other reasons, since such a limitation would have to be stated in "very clear and explicit language," id. at 315. The Court did not confront, therefore, the issue of whether such a limitation would be constitutional.

In Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926), the Court finally dealt with the constitutionality of a statutory provision giving Congress a role in the removal process.

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The plaintiff was a postmaster, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, for a four-year term; he was dismissed by the President despite a tenureof-office act requiring advice and consent of the Senate for his removal The Court found the limitation unconstitutional in a 71-page opinion by Chief Justice Taft exhaustively examining the historical record bearing upon the meaning of the applicable constitutional texts. The nub of the analysis is that, as the Decision of 1789 in the Court's view established, and as In re Hennen had held, "the power of removal [is] incident to the power of appointment," 38 U.S. (13 Pet.) at 259. The Constitution gives Congress no authority to limit that removal power, except, implicitly, in the provision authorizing Congress to provide for the appointment of inferior officers by means other than the constitutionally prescribed method of presidential appointment with Senate consent. At least where it exercises that authority in such fashion as to vest appointment in the head of a department, it "may prescribe incidental regulations controlling and restricting the lappointing officer] in the exercise of the power of removal" 272 U.S. at 161. Even in the latter situation, the Court added, for Congress to "draw to itself, or to either branch of it, the power to remove or the right to participate in the exercise of that power.... would be to infringe the constitutional principle

...

of the separation of governmental powers." Id. The opinion clearly regarded its holding as applicable to officers whose functions include "duties of a quasi-judicial character," id. at 135, including specifically the commissioners of the Interstate Commerce Commission, see id. at 171-72.

The next case, decided nine years later, warrants more extended attention, since it is the last major discussion by the Supreme Court of the constitutional authority of Congress over power of removal. Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), was a suit for back pay by a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission whom President Roosevelt had removed without cause. The Federal Trade Commission Act provided that commissioners "may be removed by the President for inefficiency,

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neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The Court's opinion, by Justice Sutherland, first found that this language, unlike the virtually identical language involved in Shurtleff, did bar removal for other causes, distinguishing the earlier case on the basis that the office there involved had no term of appointment, whereas Federal Trade Commissioners were limited to a term of seven years. Humphrey's Executor, 295 U.S. at 619-26. Then, in six pages addressing the constitutional issue - two of which were spent discussing why the facts of Myers were distinguishable the opinion swept away much of the reasoning of Myers (precisely how much is one of the issues before us) and simultaneously revolutionized separation-of-powers analysis. The Court said that the holding of Myers extended only to "purely executive officers," and that the constitutional prohibition it expressed did not apply to an officer like the Federal Trade Commissioner, who "occupies no place in the executive department and who exercises no part of the executive power vested by the Constitution in the President," but acts only "in the discharge and effectuation of... quasi-legislative [24] or quasi-judicial powers, or as an [officer of an agency of the legislative or judicial departments of the government." 295 U.S. at 628.25 As to the latter, it said, "illimitable power of removal is not possessed by

24 It is noteworthy, though generally not noted, that the "quasi-legislative" powers referred to in Humphrey's Executor were not substantive rulemaking powers, which the Federal Trade Commission itself did not assert it possessed until 1962, see National Petroleum Refiners Ass'n v. FTC, 482 F.2d 672, 693 (D.C. Cir. 1973), cert. denied, 415 U.S. 951 (1974), but rather the responsibility to conduct investigations for the purpose of recommending legislation to Congress. See 295 U.S. at 621, 628. Though the holding of Humphrey's Executor is necessarily limited to this sort of function, it is generally assumed (though without any Supreme Court holding to sustain the point) that rulemaking is a "quasi-legislative activity" for purposes of the rule of Humphrey's Executor. See, e.g., INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919, 953 n.16 (1983).

25 The Court did note that the President was authorized to direct the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and report alleged antitrust violations, but described that activity to be an "executive function as distinguished from executive power in the constitutional sense - [exercised] in the discharge and effectuation of [the Federal Trade Commission's] quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers, or as an agency of the legislative or judicial departments of the government." Humphrey's Executor, 295 U.S. at 628 & n.*. In this opinion, we are careful to direct our attention to the question whether the power that the Comptroller General exercises under the Act is "executive power in the constitutional sense."

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the President," and Congress may "fix the period during which [the officer] shall continue

in office, and ... forbid. removal except for cause in the meantime." Id. at 629.

...

This was said to be required by the doctrine of separation of powers, since "sound application of a principle that makes one master in his own house precludes him from imposing his control in the house of another who is master there," and since the "coercive influence (of unlimited presidential power of removal threatens the independence of a commission, which is not only wholly disconnected from the executive department, but which... was created by Congress as a means of carrying into operation legislative and judicial powers, and as an agency of the legislative and judicial departments." Id. at 630.

The last Supreme Court decision involving the removal power was handed down almost three decades ago. Wiener v. United States, 357 U.S. 349 (1958), was another back-pay suit, by a commissioner of the War Claims Commission who had been removed by President Eisenhower without cause. It was uncontested that the Commission exercised only "quasi-judicial" functions, and the point at issue was whether Congress had prohibited presidential removal without cause. Despite the absence of any explicit prohibition, the Court found that

[i]f, as one must take for granted, the War Claims Act precluded the President from influencing the Commission in passing on a particular claim, a fortiori must it be inferred that Congress did not wish to have hang over the Commission the Damocles' sword of removal by the President for no reason other than that he preferred to have on that Commission men of his own choosing.

Accordingly, Humphrey's Executor was held to render the removal

26 In other language, the Wiener Court suggested its view that, at least with respect to officers exercising "quasi-judicial" powers, the Constitution simply did not vest the President with a power of removal, even one that might be expressly or implicitly limited in appropriate circumstances by Congress. 357 U.S. at 352-53, 356. This language seems squarely at odds with a long line of authority, beginning with In re Hennen, 38 U.S. (13 Pet.) 230 (1839), and unchallenged even by Humphrey's Executor, which was careful to limit its decision to the question whether the Constitution vested in the President an "illimitable" power of removal Humphrey's Executor, 295 U.S. at 629. We are unwilling to suppose that that line of authority has been overruled by the language in Wiener.