A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 7, part 2: Rutherford B. Hayes
History
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 7, part 2: Rutherford B. Hayes
Hayes, Rutherford Birchard, 1822-1893; Presidents -- United States; United States -- History -- Sources; United States -- Politics and government
The President is called upon to give his affirmative approval to
positive enactments which in effect deprive him of the ordinary and
necessary means of executing laws still left in the statute book
and embraced within his constitutional duty to see that the laws are
executed. If he approves the bill, and thus gives to such positive
enactments the authority of law, he participates in the curtailment
of his means of seeing that the law is faithfully executed, while
the obligation of the law and of his constitutional duty remains
unimpaired.
The appointment of special deputy marshals is not made by the statute
a spontaneous act of authority on the part of any executive or
judicial officer of the Government, but is accorded as a popular right
of the citizens to call into operation this agency for securing the
purity and freedom of elections in any city or town having 20,000
inhabitants or upward. Section 2021 of the Revised Statutes puts it in
the power of any two citizens of such city or town to require of
the marshal of the district the appointment of these special deputy
marshals. Thereupon the duty of the marshal becomes imperative, and
its nonperformance would expose him to judicial mandate or punishment
or to removal from office by the President, as the circumstances of
his conduct might require. The bill now before me neither revokes this
popular right of the citizens, nor relieves the marshal of the duty
imposed by law, nor the President of his duty to see that this law is
faithfully executed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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