Sublime

AND FOR MANY YEARS the Senate made use of its great powers. It created much of the federal Judiciary—the Constitution established only the Supreme Court; it was left to Congress to “constitute tribunals inferior,” and it was a three-man Senate committee that wrote the Judiciary Act of 1789, an Act that has been called “almost an appendage to the Co

After his landslide, Jefferson, in control of two branches of government, had turned his attention to the lone branch still dominated by the other party—the judiciary—moving, in the impeachment of Samuel Chase, to curb its independence. Now Roosevelt, too, moved against the judiciary’s independence. The Supreme Court had declared crucial New Deal m

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was to write: The Founding Fathers appear to have envisaged the treaty-making process as a genuine exercise in concurrent authority, in which the President and Senate would collaborate at all stages.… One third plus one of the senators … retained the power of life and death over the treaties.

it was not until 1913 that one of the caucus chairmen, Democrat John Worth Kern of Indiana, was generally referred to as a “Majority Leader,” although, as Floyd M. Riddick, the longtime Senate Parliamentarian, puts it, Kern still lacked “any official party designation other than caucus chairman.”

To build his case against the king, Coke dusted off a copy of an ancient and almost entirely forgotten legal document, known as Magna Carta (literally, the “great charter”), in which, in the year 1215, King John had pledged to his barons that he would obey the “law of the land.”

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg

AND LYNDON JOHNSON, looking for power over the Senate, had found another instrument with which power could be created. It wasn’t a new instrument. First employed in 1845, it had been formally embodied in the Senate Rules (Rule 12, Paragraph 3) since 1914, and previous Senate Leaders had used it in a number of different ways. Never, however, had it