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Originally Posted by Aulirophile  You realize the 14th amendment inherently implies Federal authority over what states can do, and would thus also be nullified if the amendment was passed, yes? It also applies to any Federal court decision as influences state's rights, so anything that went to the U.S. Supreme Court is no longer applicable, because it is retroactive. Or predominantly active, I guess you could say. |
Read the Act. It's only retroactive with respect to the issues covered in Section 3, which enumerates three specific issues over which no federal courts can exercise jurisdiction. The appellate jurisdiction stripping is not retroactive, so the decisions covering integration, and the state court decisions incorporating those federal decisions, will be unaffected.
Your reductive understanding of the Act ignores its actual text. The Act does not apply to "any Federal court decision as influences state's rights," either. It just strips appellate jurisdiction preventing federal courts from issuing "any order, final judgment, or other ruling that appropriates or expends money, imposes taxes, or otherwise interferes with the legislative functions or administrative discretion of the several States and their subdivisions." The limits of the legislative functions and administrative discretion of the States are defined in part by the Fourteenth Amendment, and if a State is acting ultra vires and doing something that violates the Fourteenth Amendment the federal courts could still step in to an extent, and would retain at least the ability to enjoin state action. They couldn't step in and do something like take over a school system, but they could still tell a State it couldn't do a particular thing (like mandate segregated schools).
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Bizarre I know, but you're thinking in the current framework of how things are and not how the amendment would make things. Which is to say, it'd make them the way the original Constitution intended.
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I've got a pretty good idea how federal courts work and a pretty good idea of how federal judges think. They're not going to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment if there's a reasonable interpretation of the Act that will let them legitimately do it (and even if there wasn't, I suspect many judges would be more inclined to do violence to the Act than to the Amendment - that's when things get hairy). Such an interpretation is available, so you can be sure the equal protection clause will remain in effect to at least some extent.
It's a little simplistic to view the act as making things go back to "the way the original Constitution intended." It shifts the federal/state balance back toward the states, and it does so to a pretty significant extent, but the original Constitution has been amended several times. The structural changes wrought by those amendments ensure that so long as they remain in effect, the power balance will never be as strong to the state side as it was at the Founding.
There's a lot to be said for democratic action and judicial minimalism, and while I think Paul's proposal goes too far, I don't think it's inherently kooky to limit the power of the federal judiciary to undermine the democratically-accountable branches.
