Wages may be diminished but won't affect those presently sitting.
I assume that Congress has the power to get rid of everybody save the SCOTUS. And quite possibly has the authority to limit that court to one judge.
:^)
Wages may be diminished but won't affect those presently sitting.
True, but it's those presently sitting who I presume are the problem. You could drop the pay to $20 a week for new justices, but all you'd be doing is insuring that you'd never find anyone competent to sit on the federal bench, liberal or conservative. Which may be okay, if that's the desired goal in the first place.
I assume that Congress has the power to get rid of everybody save the SCOTUS. And quite possibly has the authority to limit that court to one judge.
You do have a gift for thought-provoking posts, my friend - I had a long paragraph written out, explaining why you probably couldn't do such a thing. And then as I was proofing it, it occurred to me that you probably could do something very much like what you describe.
Here's how it works. The organization and jurisdiction of the federal court system was originally created by Congress, in the Judiciary Act of 1793, although that act has subsequently been modified fairly heavily. Now, the only way to remove a federal judge from the bench is to impeach him - you can't simply repeal the Judiciary Act and throw them all out on the street. But if you did repeal the Judiciary Act, the effect would be to eliminate the organizational structure and jurisdiction of the federal courts. Essentially, you'd still have all these federal judges wandering around, but they would have no jurisdiction over anything, no courthouses to sit in, and no dockets to administer. Basically, you'd be paying nearly 900 people $140,000 a year or so to play golf and sit by the pool, unless you formally impeached them in order to end their employment. Even so, that would have the practical effect of achieving the goal that is apparently at issue here - eliminating the federal judiciary as an institution. On paper, the judiciary would still exist, but they would have no power or authority to actually do anything.
Or, alternately, I haven't read the Judiciary Act in quite some time, but I don't believe anything in that act or in the Constitution mandates Congress to fill vacancies on the bench. If the Executive and Legislative branches were so inclined, they could simply let the federal bench empty itself out through attrition over the next few decades or so - when a judge retires, resigns, or dies, he or she would simply not be replaced. It would be rather slow, but it could be done.
Not that this will ever amount to much - in theory, these things might be possible, but nobody in the other branches of government has the political will to do anything remotely like going nuclear in this manner. I highly doubt W. wants to be remembered as the man who destroyed the courts ;)