Trumbull, Edmunds, and Grimes of the Senate, and Messrs.
Benjamin F.Butler, C.C.Washburn, and John A.Bingham of the House.
The Bill reported by this committee to both Houses is the present law on the subject.( 2) Mr.Trumbull, in making the report, gave this assurance to the Senate: "As the Committee of Conference report the bill, the suspended officer would go back at the end of the session unless somebody else was confirmed in the place." On the same day in the House, in answer to a pressing question from Mr.Hoar of Massachusetts, Mr.Bingham expressed the opinion that "no authority without the consent of the President can get a suspended officer back into the same office again." General Butler, another of the House conferees, said: "I am free to say that I think this amendment upon the question of removal and re-instatement of officers leaves the Tenure-of-office Act as though it had never been passed, so far as the power of the President over the Executive officers is concerned." It was certainly an extraordinary spectacle, without precedent or parallel, that the report of the conference should have one meaning assigned to it in the Senate, and a diametrically opposite meaning assigned to it in the House, and that these antagonistic meanings should be made on the same day, and put forth by the conferees whose names were attached to the report.

Such a legislative proceeding cannot be too strongly characterized.
But the popular understanding among Democrats and Republicans alike was that the Tenure-of-office Act had been destroyed, and that Mr.
Trumbull's technical construction of the amendment was made merely to cover the retreat of the Senate.

By the new enactment, the provisions which had led to the dispute between President Johnson and Congress were practically extirpated; and thus a voluntary confession was recorded by both Senate and House that they had forced an issue with one Executive on an assumed question of right, which they would not attempt with his successor.

The members of the present House who in the preceding Congress had voted to impeach the President, and the great mass of the senators who voted to convict him, now voted to blot out the identical clause of the Act under which they held the President to be deserving of removal for even venturing to act upon his own fair construction of its meaning.

With all the plausible defenses that can be made for this contradictory course, the fact remains that the authors of the law precipitately fled from its enforcement the moment a President with whom they were in sympathy was installed in office.
They thereby admitted the partisan intent that had governed the enactment, just as they admitted the partisan intent that now led to the practical repeal.