Did ruthford b Hayes do any bad things while he was in congress?

Answer 1

Hayes voted for the Tenure of Office Act. The Act was probably unconstitutional, though no case in which it was an issue ever reached the US Sipreme Court before congress repealed the Act in 1887. The Act was an attempt to exert congressional control over the president. If that was a desirable thing, it would probably take an amendment to the Constitution to make it permissible for one branch to have power over another, separate branch of the Federal government (in this case, the Legislative over the Executive). Specifically, the Act said that the President could not remove executive appointees without the "advise and consent" of the legislature, meaning that a president could not fire his own cabinet secretaries unless Congress agreed. When Andrew Johnson, despite this new law, fired Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War, this Act provided the pretext for the impeachment of Johnson. Hayes also voted for the 14th Amendment, which was mostly a good thing, but was a poorly drafted piece of legislation, and provided "birthright citizenship", which was already a discredited 18th century concept at the time, to anyone born in the US. What the framers of this amendment were trying to do was to make it plain that the freed slaves were citizens of the US. Instead of just saying that, they gave us Constitutional authority that makes, say as an example, the child of a German woman changing planes in New York to travel on to Canada, who goes into labor and delivers her child in New York, a US citizen, even though the parents have never been to the US before and never return after. Or, a woman in labor who crosses the Rio Grande illegally and lies down and gives birth on the north bank has just produced an American citizen, though her presence in the country is illegal. One of the more bizarre episodes of Hayes' life was when he shot his own mother, allegedly by accident. She was wounded in the arm. In the 1876 election this was said by his opponents to have been done either while drunk, or in a fit of temporary insanity. As one newspaperman said "Missed his own fat mother from six feet away. That's no President!".