Introducing the subject of succession in the last stage of his effort, Senator Hoar remarked that one of the important alterations in the existing law, that of 1792, was the substitution of—
members of the Cabinet in the order of their official seniority—the order in which the various Departments were created, except that the head of the Department of Justice, which is the last Department created by law, is continued in his old place as Attorney-General, ranking the heads of the Departments created since the original establishment of the Cabinet. . . .[1]
Thus the attorney-general, considered as a cabinet-associate of the President from 1789, was once more acknowledged as a peer among his colleagues—a position that he had in reality held since 1853.
Henry Barrett Learned.
New Haven, Conn.
- ↑ The discussion of the bill may be followed in the Congressional Record, December 15, 1885–January 19, 1886. Senator Hoar prints the bill as enacted in his Autobiography of Seventy Years (1903), vol. ii, pp. 170-1. He there says: "I drew and introduced the existing law" (page 170). It is interesting to note that Senator Hoar got the substance of the bill from a speech made in the House of Representatives sometime between 1873–1875 by his brother, Ebenezer R. Hoar, first attorney-general under Grant (1869–1870). I have not been able to discover this speech. Congressional Record, December 16, 1885, p. 215.
