I am a big fan of the Congressional Research Service Reports because they are concise and chock full of nitty-gritty types of information. They also tend to be reliable because they are non-partisan (unless you are Louis Fisher, where his defense of the Congress was taken as a partisan swipe at the President, leading to his removal from CRS) and usually very accurate. They also are hard to come by because Members of Congress will not allow them to be placed on a public server to be downloaded for free despite the fact that we, as taxpayers, pay for them.
Fortunately the Federation of American Scientists obtain the CRS Reports and provide them for free to anyone who comes looking for them. If you subscribe to the Project on Government Secrecy listserv, FAS will even email you updates to the most recent Reports it obtains.
Today, among the numerous CRS Reports was one that looked at the meaning of congressional votes of censure or loss of confidence. This is likely driven by the recent attempt by the Senate to hold a "vote of no confidence" against AG Alberto Gonzales.
The Report provides an overview (along with several pages in Appendices with tables) of attempts by the Congress to hold censure or no confidence votes against the President or his underlings. While the Report makes a nice acquisition to your library, it is incomplete and in parts, wrong.
It correctly notes that "no confidence" or even "censure" are tools more appropriate for parliamentary systems, where the functions of government are mixed. Here, outside of impeachment, there is little by way of punishment that the Congress can mete against the President or his staff. That is--and where the Report does not go--there is little constitutional backing for censure or no confidence. Rhetorically however, there is a lot of force behind them. No President wishes to have a legacy where the Congress held no confidence in him or the people he hired to work for him. In fact, the mere threat by the Congress to hold censure or no confidence votes on the floor of either chamber is often enough to buckle the knees of the President (see, for instance, the episodes in the early 1980s involving the EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch or Secretary of Interior James Watt.) If the Congress can successfully pull off this kind of a vote, it means that, in all likelihood, the President himself has lost, or is about to lose, the support of the people. So while the constitutional separation of powers means that there is little behind an effort to vote censure or no confidence, unofficially there is a lot to the devices. If not, there would not have been so much pressure by the administration on weakened Senators to get them to vote against a vote of no-confidence.
So the CRS is not being complete in the Report to the Congress, or to whichever member requested it.
Second, the CRS Report is incomplete on why there doesn't seem to be as much activity in the 19th century to vote no confidence or censure against a sitting President and/or his inferior officers. They assume that the lack of electronic documents makes it difficult to conduct the kind of search that today allows them to identify all these actions. Maybe. However, I would believe that it had more to do with the political power of the Congress in the 19th century that made such an action unnecessary. The contemporary presidency is nothing like its 19th century counterpart. That person had little to no staff. His inferior officers were picked by the Congress. And not only did he have to seek the advice and consent of the Senate in order to appoint his officers, but he also was required to seek the advice and consent of the Senate to fire inferior officers, or face impeachment as Andrew Johnson had when he refused to listen to the Congress when he moved against a Cabinet officer. Thus it is more likely that the Congress had the political resources to deal with a President or Cabinet officers that were not doing what the Congress wanted them to do.
This line of thought leads me to an important omission in the Report. On Page 6, it discusses earlier examples of censure or no-confidence, starting with "a series of resolutions proposing the censure and disapproval of Secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1793," which seemed to be initiated by Thomas Jefferson, working through a Member of the House of Representatives. The Report then jumps to 1860s, and a censure resolution against President Buchanan and his Secretary of Navy.
This represents the glaring omission. It doesn't say a thing about the successful censure of President Andrew Jackson in 1834 as a result of the "Battle over the Bank" that defined much of Jackson's Presidency. When Jackson declared War on the Bank of the United States, he moved money out of the Bank, fired the Secretary of the Treasury, and dared the Congress to impeach him, which it could not do largely due to the popularity of Jackson. Instead, it voted to censure the President in what the Senate Historian refers to as "an unprecedented and never-repeated tactic." Jackson wrote a lengthy letter in protest, and demanded that the letter be printed in the Senate Journal, which the Senate refused to do. Jackson fought against that censure, successfully in 1837 when he got a sympathetic Senate to expunge the record and remove what he considered to be a blackmark on his presidency.
Thus it illustrates that the censure is a political, and not a constitutional device; that may have no effect on the presidency constitutionally, but certainly has great political impact; and that is a device with deep lineage in American history.
CRS would have known that if they would have had a copy of Louis Fisher's Constitutional Conflicts between Congress and the President, or if they would not have gotten rid of Fisher himself.
