“The 2nd Court would be inferior to the SCOTUS, but superior to the federal district courts.”
I gave you the short version, but there is a method to the madness.
Each year, the district courts forward around 8,000 appeals to the SCOTUS, which can only consider a few dozen. This huge bottleneck means that if rejected, cases revert to the decision of the district courts, for better or worse. This results in a huge amount of bad law, in effect, legislated from the bench.
The next point is how would the 2nd Court reach its decisions? At first, the 8,000 cases would be heard as they are typically heard at first by the district courts, by 3 judge panels. So just 3 state judges out of a hundred would decide its jurisdiction, based on the lower federal courts decisions about its constitutionality.
This might settle many of the cases, but if appealed, the case would be heard by the 100 judges of the 2nd Court, with an interesting twist. If a simple majority (51) of the state judges affirmed or overturned the 3 judge panel decision, the 2nd Courts decision could still be appealed to the SCOTUS, but,
the SCOTUS would be required to assert actual constitutional language to overturn this decision, in its decision, *not* extrapolations, interpolations, or judicial precedent or interpretations of the constitution.
And then, if 2/3rds of the 2nd Court decided one way, the decision could not be appealed to the SCOTUS at all.
(As an aside, there is a movement in congress right now for another constitutional amendment, that if just 2/3rds of the states resolve against a federal law or regulation, it would be overturned. In effect, a constitutional convention without the risk of calling one. But the flaw in this is that even if 2/3rds of the states resolved, it would overturn just a single onerous federal law. A huge effort for a tiny return.)
In effect, with the 2/3rds finality from the 2nd Court, plus its original jurisdiction over lawsuits between the federal government and the states, the 2nd Court would effectively be a standing constitutional convention, but not to create new laws, but as a permanent pruning mechanism against the growth of government.
And as a standing body, the 2nd Court could take on the decisions of whimsical federal judges, overreaching bureaucrats, unfunded mandates on the states, presidential fiat, and every other variety of excessive federal growth.
Unfunded mandates should be simply regarded as unconstitutional and ignored by the States on the ground that the Federal goverment has no right to tell us how to govern our own States.
This should be particularity clear cut when it comes to spending. If a State like a man, has not control over his own wallet it has no fair chance of keeping a balanced budget. The Feds should be prohibited from giving money to the State on any conditional grounds, to carry out their responsibility of helping to maintain the militia They should buy the weapons and equipment themselves and then give the product to the States.
Much like you would give food directly to a beggar to keep them from using it on drugs or something.
problem solved.
I don’t beleive residing the direct Constitutional representatives of the States to 2nd tier status after the Federal Employees can at all be justice. After all it was our States that originally ratified and empowered the Federal Constitution and thus “in theory” created the monster that has sense overthrown the same Constitution.
By all rights our States know better what powers they agreed to cede then the out of control monster of their creation.
Frankenstein’s monster may have gotten out of control but that’s no reason civilized people should relegate Frankenstein to 2nd place behind the out of control monster.
The idea is to bring that monster back under control not to accept that it is out of control and negotiate a Constitutional monarchy with it...
You may be right that by assuming the 2nd their status this convention could wield power over the 8000 cases the Federal employees decide to ignore.
But there are 2 problems with that hypothesis:
1: The Federal Employees only choose to ignore a case if its insignificant to them. They will therefore NOT choose to ignore cases that are significant, specifically cases that decide how much power they have.
2: To decide 8000 case requires a great many courts. If SCOTUS only does about 12 of them a year then we can assume we would need about 665 more courts to pick up the remaining case load.
That is a big problem, particularly sense our State legislators have historically proven to be even slower as selecting nominates then the Congress. But lets say they all selected 2 judges assuming groups of 9 they would have to basically do the same work as ~60 federal judges and that’s just right now.
As our combined population grows invariably there will be more and more cases requiring more and more courts most all of which will be appealing to higher and higher courts of which their will still be fewer and fewer.
The case load of the SCOTUS AND this 2nd tier “Constitutional court” will only go up. We already are limited in how many judges we can appoint structurally because our legislators(including congress) only have so much time.
I realize my proposal doesn’t make the problem much easier, but it does mitigate it by resolving only major jurisdictional disputes not cases.
So instead of spending time & resources trying to figure out whether Johnny Killed Susan, they simply decide whether Texas, Arkansas, or Federal court would resolve the matter if and only if their was a dispute, by the Governments involved.
In either case the Supreme courts of Texas, Arkansas, and the United States would have the final appeals for the case according to their respective laws.
Its a rather simple case load limited by 51 potential parties(as apposed to 310 million), therefore a constitutional court could take its time.
Then just the state courts would expand and adjust with population, not everyone’s courts.