Petitioner was a member of the War Claims Commission created by
Congress "to receive and adjudicate according to law" claims for
compensating internees, prisoners of war and religious
organizations who suffered personal injury or property damage at
the hands of the enemy in connection with World War II. The
Commission's determinations were to be "final," and "not subject to
review by any other official of the United States or by any court."
The Commissioners' terms were to expire with the life of the
Commission, and there was no provision for removal of a
Commissioner. Appointed by President Truman and confirmed by the
Senate, petitioner was removed by President Eisenhower before the
expiration of the life of the Commission, on the ground that the
Act should be administered "with personnel of my own selection."
Petitioner sued in the Court of Claims to recover his salary as a
Commissioner from the date of his removal to the last day of the
Commission's existence.
Held: The President had no power under the Constitution
or the Act to remove a member of this adjudicatory Commission, and
the Court of Claims erred in dismissing petitioner's suit. Pp.
357 U. S.
349-356.
135 Ct.Cl. 827, 142 F. Supp. 910, reversed.
MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER delivered the opinion of the Court.
This is a suit for back pay, based on petitioner's alleged
illegal removal as a member of the War Claims Commission. The facts
are not in dispute. By the War Claims
Page 357 U. S. 350
Act of 1948, 62 Stat. 1240, Congress established that Commission
with "jurisdiction to receive and adjudicate according to law," §
3, claims for compensating internees, prisoners of war, and
religious organizations, §§ 5, 6 and 7, who suffered personal
injury or property damage at the hands of the enemy in connection
with World War II. The Commission was to be composed of three
persons, at least two of whom were to be members of the bar, to be
appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of
the Senate. The Commission was to wind up its affairs not later
than three years after the expiration of the time for filing
claims, originally limited to two years but extended by successive
legislation first to March 1, 1951, 63 Stat. 112, and later to
March 31, 1952, 65 Stat. 28. This limit on the Commission's life
was the mode by which the tenure of the Commissioners was defined,
and Congress made no provision for removal of a Commissioner.
Having been duly nominated by President Truman, the petitioner
was confirmed on June 2, 1950, and took office on June 8 following.
On his refusal to heed a request for his resignation, he was, on
December 10, 1953, removed by President Eisenhower in the following
terms:
"I regard it as in the national interest to complete the
administration of the War Claims Act of 1948, as amended, with
personnel of my own selection."
The following day, the President made recess appointments to the
Commission, including petitioner's post. After Congress assembled,
the President, on February 15, 1954, sent the names of the new
appointees to the Senate. The Senate had not confirmed these
nominations when the Commission was abolished, July 1, 1954, by
Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1954, 68 Stat. 1279, issued pursuant
to the Reorganization Act of 1949, 63 Stat. 203. Thereupon,
petitioner brought this proceeding in the Court of Claims for
recovery of his salary as a War Claims Commissioner
Page 357 U. S. 351
from December 10, 1953, the day of his removal by the President,
to June 30, 1954, the last day of the Commission's existence. A
divided Court of Claim dismissed the petition, 135 Ct.Cl. 827, 142
F. Supp. 910. We brought the case here, 352 U.S. 980, because it
presents a variant of the constitutional issue decided in
Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.
S. 602.
*
Controversy pertaining to the scope and limits of the
President's power of removal fills a thick chapter of our political
and judicial history. The long stretches of its history, beginning
with the very first Congress, with early echoes in the Reports of
this Court, were laboriously traversed in
Myers v. United
States, 272 U. S. 52, and
need not be retraced. President Roosevelt's reliance upon the
pronouncements of the Court in that case in removing a member of
the Federal Trade Commission on the ground that
"the aims and purposes of the Administration with respect to the
work of the Commission can be carried out most effectively with
personnel of my own selection"
reflected contemporaneous professional opinion regarding the
significance of the
Myers decision. Speaking through a
Chief Justice who himself had been President, the Court did not
restrict itself to the immediate issue before it, the President's
inherent power to remove a postmaster, obviously an executive
official. As of set purpose and not by way of parenthetic
casualness, the
Page 357 U. S. 352
Court announced that the President had inherent constitutional
power of removal also of officials who have
"duties of a
quasi-judicial character . . . whose
decisions after hearing affect interests of individuals, the
discharge of which the President cannot in a particular case
properly influence or control."
Myers v. United States, supra, at
272 U. S. 135.
This view of presidential power was deemed to flow from his
"constitutional duty of seeing that the laws be faithfully
executed."
Ibid.
The assumption was short-lived that the
Myers case
recognized the President's inherent constitutional power to remove
officials, no matter what the relation of the executive to the
discharge of their duties and no matter what restrictions Congress
may have imposed regarding the nature of their tenure. The
versatility of circumstances often mocks a natural desire for
definitiveness. Within less than ten years, a unanimous Court, in
Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.
S. 602, narrowly confined the scope of the
Myers decision to include only "all purely executive
officers." 295 U.S. at
295 U. S. 628.
The Court explicitly "disapproved" the expressions in
Myers supporting the President's inherent constitutional
power to remove members of
quasi-judicial bodies. 295 U.S.
at
295 U. S.
626-627. Congress had given members of the Federal Trade
Commission a seven-year term, and also provided for the removal of
a Commissioner by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty
or malfeasance in office. In the present case, Congress provided
for a tenure defined by the relatively short period of time during
which the War Claims Commission was to operate -- that is, it was
to wind up not later than three years after the expiration of the
time for filing of claims. But nothing was said in the Act about
removal.
This is another instance in which the most appropriate legal
significance must be drawn from congressional failure of
explicitness. Necessarily, this is a problem in probabilities.
Page 357 U. S. 353
We start with one certainty. The problem of the President's
power to remove members of agencies entrusted with duties of the
kind with which the War Claims Commission was charged was within
the lively knowledge of Congress. Few contests between Congress and
the President have so recurringly had the attention of Congress as
that pertaining to the power of removal. Not the least significant
aspect of the
Myers case is that, on the Court's special
invitation, Senator George Wharton Pepper, of Pennsylvania,
presented the position of Congress at the bar of this Court.
Humphrey's case was a
cause celebre -- and not least in
the halls of Congress. And what is the essence of the decision in
Humphrey's case? It drew a sharp line of cleavage between officials
who were part of the Executive establishment, and were thus
removable by virtue of the President's constitutional powers, and
those who are members of a body "to exercise its judgment without
the leave or hindrance of any other official or any department of
the government," 295 U.S. at
295 U. S.
625-626, as to whom a power of removal exists only if
Congress may fairly be said to have conferred it. This sharp
differentiation derives from the difference in functions between
those who are part of the Executive establishment and those whose
tasks require absolute freedom from Executive interference. "For it
is quite evident," again to quote
Humphrey's Executor,
"that one who holds his office only during the pleasure of
another cannot be depended upon to maintain an attitude of
independence against the latter's will."
295 U.S. at
295 U. S.
629.
Thus, the most reliable factor for drawing an inference
regarding the President's power of removal in our case is the
nature of the function that Congress vested in the War Claims
Commission. What were the duties that Congress confided to this
Commission? And can the inference fairly be drawn from the failure
of Congress to
Page 357 U. S. 354
provide for removal that these Commissioners were to remain in
office at the will of the President? For such is the assertion of
power on which petitioner's removal must rest. The ground of
President Eisenhower's removal of petitioner was precisely the same
as President Roosevelt's removal of Humphrey. Both Presidents
desired to have Commissioners, one on the Federal Trade Commission,
the other on the War Claims Commission, "of my own selection." They
wanted these Commissioners to be their men. The terms of removal in
the two cases are identic, and express the assumption that the
agencies of which the two Commissioners were members were subject
in the discharge of their duties to the control of the Executive.
An analysis of the Federal Trade Commission Act left this Court in
no doubt that such was not the conception of Congress in creating
the Federal Trade Commission. The terms of the War Claims Act of
1948 leave no doubt that such was not the conception of Congress
regarding the War Claims Commission.
The history of this legislation emphatically underlines this
fact. The short of it is that the origin of the Act was a bill,
H.R. 4044, 80th Cong., 1st Sess., passed by the House that placed
the administration of a very limited class of claims by Americans
against Japan in the hands of the Federal Security Administrator,
and provided for a Commission to inquire into and report upon other
types of claims.
See H.R.Rep. No. 976, 80th Cong., 1st
Sess. The Federal Security Administrator was indubitably an arm of
the President. When the House bill reached the Senate, it struck
out all but the enacting clause, rewrote the bill, and established
a Commission with "jurisdiction to receive and adjudicate according
to law" three classes of claims, as defined by §§ 5, 6 and 7. The
Commission was established as an adjudicating body with all the
paraphernalia by which legal claims are put to the test of proof,
with finality of determination "not subject to
Page 357 U. S. 355
review by any other official of the United States or by any
court by mandamus or otherwise," § 11. Awards were to be paid out
of a War Claims Fund in the hands of the Secretary of the Treasury,
whereby such claims were given even more assured collectability
than adheres to judgments rendered in the Court of Claims.
See S.Rep. No. 1742, 80th Cong., 2d Sess. With minor
amendment,
see H.R.Conf.Rep. No. 2439, 80th Cong., 2d
Sess. 10-11, this Senate bill became law.
When Congress has for distribution among American claimants
funds derived from foreign sources, it may proceed in different
ways. Congress may appropriate directly; it may utilize the
Executive; it may resort to the adjudicatory process.
See La
Abra Silver Mining Co. v. United States, 175 U.
S. 423. For Congress itself to have made appropriations
for the claims with which it dealt under the War Claims Act was not
practical in view of the large number of claimants and the
diversity in the specific circumstances giving rise to the claims.
The House bill, in effect, put the distribution of the narrow class
of claims that it acknowledged into Executive hands, by vesting the
procedure in the Federal Security Administrator. The final form of
the legislation, as we have seen, left the widened range of claims
to be determined by adjudication. Congress could, of course, have
given jurisdiction over these claims to the District Courts or to
the Court of Claims. The fact that it chose to establish a
Commission to "adjudicate according to law" the classes of claims
defined in the statute did not alter the intrinsic judicial
character of the task with which the Commission was charged. The
claims were to be "adjudicated according to law," that is, on the
merits of each claim, supported by evidence and governing legal
considerations, by a body that was "entirely free from the control
or coercive influence, direct or indirect,"
Humphrey's Executor
v. United States, supra, 295 U.S. at
295 U. S. 629,
of
Page 357 U. S. 356
either the Executive or the Congress. If, as one must take for
granted, the War Claims Act precluded the President from
influencing the Commission in passing on a particular claim,
a
fortiori must it be inferred that Congress did not wish to
have hang over the Commission the Damocles' sword of removal by the
President for no reason other than that he preferred to have on
that Commission men of his own choosing.
For such is this case. We have not a removal for cause involving
the rectitude of a member of an adjudicatory body, nor even a
suspensory removal until the Senate could act upon it by confirming
the appointment of a new Commissioner or otherwise dealing with the
matter. Judging the matter in all the nakedness in which it is
presented, namely, the claim that the President could remove a
member of an adjudicatory body like the War Claims Commission
merely because he wanted his own appointees on such a Commission,
we are compelled to conclude that no such power is given to the
President directly by the Constitution, and none is impliedly
conferred upon him by statute simply because Congress said nothing
about it. The philosophy of
Humphrey's Executor, in its
explicit language as well as its implications, precludes such a
claim.
The judgment is
Reversed.
* An earlier
quo warranto proceeding initiated by
petitioner was dismissed; an appeal from this judgment was
dismissed as moot by stipulation of the parties. The Government's
contention that that judgment estops petitioner from relitigating
certain issues in the present proceeding does not, in the special
circumstances presented on this record, call for consideration on
the merits. It was not urged, as in the particular situation it
should have been, as a "ground why the cause should not be reviewed
by this court." Rule 24(1) of the Revised Rules of the Supreme
Court of the United States. In thus disposing of the matter, we do
not mean to imply any support on the merits of the Government's
claim.