Faster Cars and Smellier Air

Tom the Dancing Bug is my favorite comic in current production.

Check out the typeface on the roundtable studio’s wallpaper of this week’s installment.

Even presidents who received a decisive mandate have traditionally cooperated with the Senate to find consensus appointments.

Our current president, whose victory was secured by the electoral votes of a single state, has so far chosen to ignore this convention. This seems to me to run afoul of the spirit, if not the letter, of Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution:

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court

It is interesting to note that no where does the Constitution mandate how many justices the court must have. This is set by statute. The current law of the land was established by the Judiciary Act of 1869

the Supreme Court of the United States shall hereafter consist of the Chief Justice of the United States and eight associate justices, any six of whom shall constitute a quorum

So the high court can lawfully function with as few as six sitting justices.

I am not affirmatively recommending that the Senate stop approving the president’s Supreme Court nominees. What I am saying is that they are not obliged to do so. The Senate Judiciary committee could be folded up tomorrow without explanation, and without causing any fundamental problem for the judiciary.

The president should consider this as he works to further limit the Senate’s input by keeping mum and running out what he thinks is the clock.

The Supreme Court makes decisions that affect our lives. We are absolutely entitled to try and influence its composition by acting through our representatives.

I’m pleased to report that my custom blogging software appears to have successfully handled the month transition from June to July.

To celebrate, I added some validation, sorting, and capping functions to the stylesheet. I also threw in an optional Apache Ant script for easier builds and deployment.

My brother Michael and my friend Matt have both expressed interest in the code behind this, so I threw together a preliminary archive.

To use this yourself, you’ll need

• An XSLT 2.0 Processor like Saxon-B 8.4 and most likely a Java virtual machine to support it.

You may want but could get by without

• The afformentioned Apache Ant. This will also require Java.
• An HTML authoring tool like Nvu or Dreamweaver for creating content.

I like Blogfountain because it’s easy too customize and I can keep my blog as static HTML files on my own webserver. But if you prefer to go the simpler route and don’t care where your actual content resides, you might be happier with existing blog software.

Matt tells me he written a database-ready PHP-based comments engine for his blog. I may look at grafting this onto Blogfountain. [Note: this blog has since been moved to WordPress]