05/28/2024 11:06:25 AM PDT
· 6 of 20 Publius
to Regulator
Actually Congress has the power to abolish the entire federal judiciary, except for the Supreme Court, which is defined within the Constitution itself. This means that every federal judge not on the Supreme Court loses his job. Congress can then create a whole new federal judiciary with the president filling all the slots with the consent of the Senate.
05/23/2024 2:04:20 PM PDT
· 58 of 67 Publius
to Reily; Jacquerie
Dirksen's effort to get an Article V Convention of the States to convene to reverse Reynolds v. Sims managed to get 32 states on board by 1967. At that point, all hell broke loose in the Senate.
Sen. Millard Tydings (D-MD) stated that the legislatures that had applied for this convention were themselves malapportioned, and thus Congress could safely ignore the applications and refuse to call the convention. (Tydings later went to prison.) Sen. Charles Percy's (R-IL) argument was a bit more tightly argued but also aimed at Congress refusing to call the convention. Dirksen quoted the clear language of Article V and Hamilton's statement in Federalist #85 that Congress had no discretion in the matter, and Congress needed to establish some ground rules for how the convention was to function.
In 1969, Dirksen died of emphysema due to his 4-pack-a-day habit, the habit that gave him his distinctive voice. The wind then went out of the sails of the movement. I think most states that applied for this convention have since rescinded their applications.
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
Deep in the bowels of the FBI's Hoover Building there is a room with servers monitored by FBI special agents. It calls itself Free Republic.
On one side of the room is a steel-reinforced door guarded with a keycode lock and retinal scanner. Once you get on the other side of that door, you enter --