Editing Tenure of Office Act (1867) (section)

==Later use==
The act was amended on April 5, 1869, one month and one day after Republican president [[Ulysses S. Grant]] [[First inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant|assumed the presidency]]. The revisions grew out of an attempt to completely repeal the 1867 Act. The measure to repeal passed the House of Representatives with only 16 negative votes but failed in the Senate. The new provisions were significantly less onerous, allowing the president to suspend office holders "in his discretion" and designate replacements while the Senate was in recess, subject only to confirmation of the replacements at the next session. The president no longer had to report his reasons for suspension to the Senate, and the Senate could no longer force reinstatement of suspended office holders.<ref name=Cleveland>Grover Cleveland. "[https://books.google.com/books?id=VFkiAQAAMAAJ&q=1869&pg=PR4 The Independence of the Executive]", lecture delivered at [[Princeton University]], April 1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1913), pp. 30 et seq.</ref> 

Although Grant, in his first message to Congress, in December 1869, urged the repeal of even the revised act, it did not cause further problems until the election of [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrat]] [[Grover Cleveland]] in 1884. Under the [[spoils system]] it had long been accepted practice for the administration of a new party to replace current office holders with party faithful. Cleveland, a supporter of a [[civil service]] system, had promised, however, to avoid wholesale replacements, vowing to replace incumbents only for cause. When he suspended several hundred office holders for cause, Senate committees requested information from cabinet members regarding the reasons for the suspensions, which Cleveland refused to provide. If he had simply said that the incumbents were being replaced for political reasons, the Senate would have complied, but Cleveland would not do so. When, in early 1886, the Senate as a whole demanded information regarding the conduct of the suspended [[United States Attorney|U.S. Attorney]] for southern Alabama, Cleveland sent a message to Congress explaining his position opposing impingement of independence of the executive. Cleveland's replacement nominee was eventually confirmed when it was discovered that the suspended incumbent's term had expired in the meantime anyway.<ref name=Cleveland/> The Tenure of Office Act was formally repealed in 1887.