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.
Right now, many federal cases are impressively petty as well as being redundant.
My own personal bugaboos are the utterly inane “public school cases” that are brought before hundreds of federal benches every year. Off the top of my head these involve just a handful of issues: school dress codes, what student newspapers publish, student clubs, prayer, and school discipline. For some perverse reason these titillate federal judges so much that they insist there are federal issues involved, and “It is a good way to teach children.”
No. Spending $100k of taxpayer money to argue “the constitutional issues” of how many inches student dresses can be above the knee is not a “good way to teach children” for anything but unconscionable waste of money.
With its extremely restricted docket, the SCOTUS has *twice* agreed to hear arguments in the infamous and ridiculous “Bong Hits For Jesus” case, though I believe the high school student involved in the incident is now in his 30’s.
And conversely, America has denied justice to vicious murderers who a jury of their peers had sentenced to death on the “whimsy” of federal judges who openly say they “don’t like” the death penalty, so they are not going to let it be enforced. Their endless pursuit of minutiae they can use as an excuse is just pathetic.
Federal judges now regularly *order* state legislatures to appropriate moneys they do not want to, and if they refuse, these judges appoint “special masters”, that effective rule that part of the state until it meets the judges satisfaction that they are obedient to his will.
In our current system of government, there are no effective constraints on the federal judiciary. Congress could decide to prohibit them from hearing certain cases, but the list of prohibitions would run into the thousands.
Yet another good reason to restore some authority to the states in a body that will restrain a runaway federal government.