And went nowhere. Davis never mentioned a supreme court in any more of his messages to congress, never mentioned it in any speech I've been able to find, never fought for it at all.
Cause the record of debates I am familiar with indicates that they actively debated it and manuevered to hold it up as a block on his powers.
That's a pretty good definition letting a matter 'die in the senate'. In the mean time Davis could act without fear of judicial interference.
Evidence please?
"...the true and only test is to enquire whether the law is intended to and calculated to carry out the object...If the answer be in the affirmative, the law is constitutional"
What if a court saw it differently?
Actually, it did more than that. Bills that "go nowhere" are referred to comittee and sat on, never to be heard from again. The judiciary bill made it to the floor for debate, where it was repeatedly held back and defeated by the states rights senators.
Davis never mentioned a supreme court in any more of his messages to congress
According to the Jefferson Davis papers website (http://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/) Davis gave only one subsequent state of the union address to Congress on 5/2/64. Thus your sample is hardly conclusive.
never mentioned it in any speech I've been able to find
Per the index of Davis' papers on the Rice website, Davis documents referring to the Confederate Supreme Court appear in the following locations:
Vol 8 (1862) pp. 61
Vol 9 (1863) pp. 3, 219
Vol 10 (1864) pp. 614
Vol 11, covering the second half of 1864 and 1865, has yet to be published.
And those are just the documents specifically indexed as supreme court. That's a pretty good definition letting a matter 'die in the senate'.
So what if President Bush were to put forth a new tax reform bill tommorrow, asked the congress to take it up and sent them messages on it over the course of the next three years? Thenn suppose that, after intense debate in the Senate and repeated efforts to pass it, the measure was voted down for good. Does that mean Bush "let it die" in the senate? I would think not. Rather, the senate actively moved to kill the legislation.