Although Johnson, as President, controlled the patronage, Congress possessed the power, if not the moral right, to limit him in its use. No appointment could be made without the consent of the Senate, which was Republican. In 1867 Congress enacted that no removal should be made without the same consent, in a Tenure-of-Office Bill that brought the dispute to a climax. More important than this power of concurrence was the exclusive right of each house to judge of "the elections, returns, and qualifications" of its own members. So long as the Southern Senators and Representatives were out of Congress no power could get them in without the consent of either house. Violent advisers of the President argued that a Congress excluding the members of eleven States by prearrangement was a "rump," and without authority, but they failed to influence either the conduct of the majority or the acts of Johnson. In the Thirty-ninth Congress, which sat in 1865 and 1866, it was the problem of the leaders, Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House, to hold the party together and to block the designs of the President. In the House, the heavy Republican majority made this easy. In the Senate the majority was slighter, and could be kept at two thirds only by unseating a Democratic Senator from New Jersey, after which event both houses were able to defy Johnson and to pass measures over his veto. The vetoes began when Johnson refused his consent to the Freedmen's Bureau and the Civil Rights Bills. These and all other important acts of reconstruction were forced upon the President by the two-thirds vote. The split, so far as founded upon honest divergence in legal theory, was embarrassing. It was made disgraceful by the violence of the radical Republicans and the intemperate retorts of Johnson. In 1866 Congress sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the States for ratification. In 1867 it passed its bills for actual reconstruction under the control of the army of the United States, and defied Johnson to interfere by refusing to allow him to remove officials from office. Johnson carried himself through the partisan struggle with ability and success. His language was often extreme, but he enforced the acts which Congress passed as vigorously as if they had been his own. So far as any theory of the Constitution met the facts of reconstruction, his has the advantage, but in a situation not foreseen by the Constitution force outranked logic, and the radical Republicans with two-thirds in each house possessed the force. There was no lapse in the President's diligence and no flaw in his official character which his enemies could use. They began to talk of impeachment in 1866, but could find no basis for it.