Myers v. United States (1926)

An 1876 law provided that first-class postmasters could be removed by the President only with the advice and consent of the Senate. In 1920 President Woodrow Wilson removed Frank Myers, the postmaster of Portland, Oregon, before his four-year term ended, without seeking Senate approval. Myers sued for his lost salary, and after his death his estate pressed the claim. The question of whether Congress could limit the President's removal power had been debated since the First Congress in 1789 and had led to Andrew Johnson's impeachment under the Tenure of Office Act in 1868.

On October 25, 1926, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 against Myers in an opinion by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former President. Taft reasoned that the executive power vested in the President by Article II, and the duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, include the power to remove officers who help carry out those duties, and that requiring Senate consent unconstitutionally restricted that power. He also stated that the Tenure of Office Act had been invalid. Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., James McReynolds, and Louis Brandeis dissented.

Nine years later, in Humphrey's Executor v. United States in 1935, the Court limited Myers to purely executive officers and upheld removal protections for members of independent commissions. Supporters of the unitary executive theory regard Myers as correctly decided and have urged the Court to return to its broad reasoning, and the Court relied on it in Seila Law v. CFPB in 2020 and in 2025 orders allowing the President to remove members of independent agencies while litigation proceeded. Critics say Taft's opinion overstated the historical evidence and the President's inherent powers.