Myers v. United States: Taft Court Reads Presidential Removal Power Into Article II, Predicate for Later Unitary-Executive Claims
Opening
On October 25, 1926, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Myers v. United States that the President possesses the exclusive, unilateral power to remove executive-branch officers he has appointed with Senate advice and consent, and that Congress cannot condition such removal on Senate approval. The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice William Howard Taft — the only former President ever to sit as Chief Justice — and struck down a provision of an 1876 postmaster-tenure statute that required Senate concurrence in the removal of first-class postmasters. Although the immediate stakes were modest (a $8,838.71 salary claim by the widow of postmaster Frank Myers, whom Wilson had fired in 1920), Taft’s opinion laid down a sweeping constitutional theory of presidential control that would be invoked by every subsequent expansion of executive removal authority, including the unitary-executive theory advanced by the Reagan, Bush II, and Trump II administrations.
What Happened / Key Facts
In July 1917 President Woodrow Wilson appointed Frank Myers first-class postmaster in Portland, Oregon, for a statutorily fixed four-year term. In January 1920, Wilson demanded Myers’s resignation; when Myers refused, Wilson ordered the postmaster general to fire him. The 1876 statute required that postmasters of the first three classes “shall be appointed and may be removed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” Myers’s estate sued for the salary owed through the remainder of the term.
Taft’s opinion held that the Decision of 1789 (the First Congress’s debate over the removal power of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs) had settled the question: the Constitution vests in the President sole authority to remove executive officers. Taft reasoned that the Take Care Clause — “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed” — requires the President to command subordinates who can be discharged at will, and that any statutory requirement of Senate concurrence in removal is an unconstitutional encroachment.
Justices Holmes, Brandeis, and McReynolds dissented. Brandeis’s dissent warned that concentrating removal authority in the presidency would enable patronage abuse and political coercion of the civil service. Holmes’s short dissent noted simply that the office of postmaster was a congressional creation and that what Congress created it could condition.
Why This Event Matters
Myers is the origin-point for the modern constitutional theory that all executive power is ultimately the President’s — a doctrine that nine decades later becomes the core of the unitary-executive arguments in Morrison v. Olson dissent (Scalia, 1988), the OLC torture memos (Yoo/Bybee, 2002), and the Roberts-era removal cases (Seila Law, 2020; Collins v. Yellen, 2021). Every time a subsequent administration removes an official whose tenure was statutorily protected — Reagan’s firing of air-traffic controllers, Trump’s firing of inspectors general, Trump II’s 2025 purge of independent-agency commissioners — Myers supplies the base authority being claimed.
Critically, Myers stands in structural tension with Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) 1935-05-27–humphreys-executor-fdr-independent-agencies-removal-limit — which limited Myers to “purely executive” officers and preserved the independent-agency model. The long-running struggle between these two precedents frames the entire 20th-century debate over administrative state structure.
Broader Context
Taft wrote Myers as a former president vindicating the executive prerogatives he had himself exercised. The opinion is unusually long (71 pages) and reads as a historical treatise rather than a standard judicial opinion. Louis Fisher (Library of Congress) and Charles Black (Yale) have both characterized it as more political-theoretical than judicial. The decision was preceded by decades of civil-service reform (Pendleton Act, 1883) that had deliberately insulated federal employees from presidential patronage; Myers reopened the constitutional question by carving out politically appointed officers from that protection.
Research Gaps
- Full briefing history and whether Wilson administration filed an amicus
- Extent to which Taft’s pre-presidential and presidential-era views on executive authority shaped the opinion
Related Entries
Sources & Citations
The Cascade Ledger. “Myers v. United States: Taft Court Reads Presidential Removal Power Into Article II, Predicate for Later Unitary-Executive Claims.” The Capture Cascade Timeline, October 25, 1926. https://capturecascade.org/event/1926-10-25--myers-v-united-states-taft-presidential-removal-power/