The judges held their offices during good behavior; the instant a judge should behave ill his office became forfeited. To ascertain the fact “officially, or rather judicially,” impeachment was provided; the authority of the Senate was therefore coextensive with the complaint. Rodney stated this principle broadly, but did not rest upon it; on the contrary, he accepted the respondent’s challenge, and undertook to show that Chase had been guilty of crimes and misdemeanors in the technical sense of the term. Probably he was wise in choosing this alternative; for no one could doubt that his constitutional doctrine was one into which Chase’s counsel were sedulously trying to drive him. If Rodney was right, the Senate was not a court of justice, and should discard judicial forms. Giles had seen this consequence of the argument, and had acted upon it, until beaten by its inevitable inconsistencies; at least sixteen senators were willing to accept the principle, and to make of impeachment an “official, or rather judicial,” inquest of office. Judge Chase’s counsel knew also that some half-dozen Republican senators feared to allow a partisan majority in the Senate to decide, after the fact, that such or such a judicial opinion had forfeited the judge’s seat on the bench. This practice could end only in making the Senate, like the House of Lords, a court of last appeal. Giles threatened to impeach Marshall and the whole Supreme Court on Rodney’s theory; and such a threat was as alarming to Dr. Mitchill of New York, or Senator Bradley of Vermont, as it was to Pickering and Tracy. When Rodney finished, the theory of impeachment was more perplexed than ever, and but one chance remained to clear it. All the respondent’s counsel had spoken in their turn; all the managers had expounded their theories: John Randolph was to close. Randolph was an invalid, overwhelmed by work and excitement, nervous, irritable, and not to be controlled. When he appeared in the box, Feb. 27, 1805, he was unprepared; and as he spoke, he not only made his usual long pauses for recollection, but continually complained of having lost his notes, of his weakness, want of ability, and physical as well as moral incompetence. Such expressions in the mouths of other men might have passed for rhetoric; but Randolph’s speech showed that he meant all he said. He too undertook to answer the argument of Luther Martin, Harper, and Hopkinson on the nature of impeachment; but he answered without understanding it,--calling it “almost too absurd for argument,” “a monstrous pretension,” “a miserable quibble,” but advancing no theory of his own, and supporting neither Campbell’s, Nicholson’s, nor Rodney’s opinion. After a number of arguments which were in no sense answers, he said he would no longer worry the good sense of the Court by combating such a claim,--a claim which the best lawyers in America affirmed to be sound, and the two ablest of the managers had exhausted themselves in refuting.