Roger B. Taney

“ In the mean time, about the year 1833, and subsequently to that time, several cases came before the Supreme Court, in which officers who were not named in the act of 1822, but who received a fixed salary as a clerk in a department, or a fixed compensation as an officer in the army, or in some other office, claimed the right to set off against the United States compensation for extra services undertaken by the direction of the Secretary, and for which there was no fixed compensation by law. ”

“ And as the department appointed him to perform a duty required by law, for which the compensation was fixed by law, and the money appropriated to pay it, he is entitled to the compensation given by law, if he has performed the duty; for the Secretary has no more discretionary power to withhold what the law gives, than he has to give what the law does not authorize. ”

“ He was not forbidden to employ a revenue officer for this purpose; and, so far as his services were performed for other districts, he stood in the same relation to the Government as any other agent. The law forbidding compensation, or reducing it to a small amount, did not apply to this service. The agency was entirely foreign to his official duties, and far beyond the limits of the district to which the law confined his official duties and power. ”

“ Yet this law, like the preceding appropriation laws, appropriates a sum equal to two and a half per cent. commission upon the whole amount appropriated for light-house service, and the Secretary might therefore employ any agent he pleased; and if he was not the collector, he would be entitled to full commissions. ”

“ The language is clear, precise, and appropriate, and no multiplication of words could more plainly indicate its object. The words 'any other office' were evidently used with reference to the contingencies in which one of these officers might be required to perform the duties imposed by law on one of the others. ”

“ And as the collectors would by law be entitled in some cases to nothing, and in others to the small sum above mentioned, if the service was performed by them in their respective districts, it is very clear, from the commissions allowed, and the appropriation to pay them, that he was at liberty to employ a different agency, and pay the commissions given by the law whenever he supposed the public would be better served by this arrangement. ”