Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/254

1805. 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 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