judiciary department by giving it an additional opportunity of defending itself against legislative encroachments. It would be useful to the executive, by inspiring additional confidence and firmness in exerting the revisionary power. It would be useful to the legislature, by the valuable assistance it would give in preserving a consistency, conciseness, perspicuity, and technical propriety in the laws—qualities peculiarly necessary, and yet shamefully wanting in our republican codes. It would, moreover, be useful to the community at large, as an additional check against a pursuit of those unwise and unjust measures which constituted so great a portion of our calamities. If any solid objection could be urged against the motion, it must be on the supposition that it tended to give too much strength, either to the executive, or judiciary. He did not think there was the least ground for this apprehension. It was much more to be apprehended, that, notwithstanding this cooperation of the two departments, the legislature would still be an overmatch for them. Experience in all the states had evinced a powerful tendency in the legislature to absorb all power into its vortex. This was the real source of danger to the American constitutions, and suggested the necessity of giving every defensive authority to the other departments that was consistent with republican principles.
Mr. MASON said, he had always been a friend to this provision. It would give a confidence to the executive which he would not otherwise have, and without which the revisionary power would be of little avail.
Mr. GERRY did not expect to see this point, which had undergone full discussion, again revived. The object, he conceived, of the revisionary power was merely to secure the executive department against legislative encroachment. The executive, therefore, who will best know and be ready to defend his rights, ought alone to have the defence of them. The motion was liable to strong objections. It was combining and mixing together the legislative and the other departments. It was establishing an improper coalition between the executive and judiciary departments. It was making statesmen of the judges, and setting them up as the guardians of the rights of the people. He relied, for his part, on the representatives of the people, as the guardians of their rights and interests. It was making the expositors of the laws the legislators, which ought never to be done. A better expedient for correcting the laws would be to appoint, as had been done in Pennsylvania, a person or persons of proper skill, to draw bills for the legislature.
Mr. STRONG thought, with Mr. Gerry, that the power of making ought to be kept distinct from that of expounding the laws. No maxim was better established. The judges, in exercising the function of expositors, might be influenced by the part they had taken in passing the laws.
Mr. GOUVERNEUR MORRIS. Some check being necessary on the legislature, the question is, in what hands it should be lodged.
vol. v.44
