Constitution of New York

The Constitution of New York is a recurring point of comparison in the essays’ defense of the proposed federal Constitution. It appears not merely as a model to imitate, but as a test of consistency: the writers invoke its courts, executive arrangements, and omissions to show how familiar constitutional practices bear on disputed features of the national plan. At once precedent and counterexample, it helps make abstract arguments about separation of powers, accountability, and institutional design concrete.

Institutional Structure and Constitutional Comparison

The essays repeatedly place the proposed national arrangements beside those of New York. The comparison is not a claim that the two governments are identical. Rather, it asks whether a feature condemned in the proposed plan is already present in a constitution its critics profess to admire, and whether the practical safeguards surrounding a power matter more than a broad description of that power.

This method is especially clear in the dispute over impeachment. The proposed plan divides the process between the House of Representatives, which accuses, and the Senate, which judges; conviction requires the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate. The defense presents this division as a safeguard against making the same persons both accusers and judges, and against factional persecution. It then turns to New York, where the Senate, together with the chancellor and judges of the Supreme Court, forms the court of impeachments and also serves as the state’s highest tribunal in civil and criminal causes. Because the judges are few in relation to the senators, the essay argues that the state Senate effectively holds the judiciary’s final authority. The comparison reverses the force of the objection: if the federal arrangement violates the separation-of-powers maxim, the existing New York constitution would be still more exposed to the same charge.

New York also furnishes a precedent for a lieutenant governor who presides in the Senate and can serve as the governor’s constitutional substitute in specified contingencies. The essay uses this arrangement to answer the claim that the national vice presidency is superfluous or mischievous. A separate officer allows the Senate’s presiding officer to cast the deciding vote without depriving a state of its senator’s regular vote; the lieutenant governor provides a state-level analogue to the vice president’s succession function.

Executive Power and Its Limits

The Constitution of New York is central to the argument that the proposed president should not be equated with a British king. The essays compare the president not only with a hereditary monarch but also with New York’s elected governor, whose three-year term may be renewed without limitation or interruption. The president, by contrast, is elected for four years and may be reelected if the people continue to trust him. The comparison treats duration and scale together: the essay argues that a dangerous influence would be easier to establish within a single state than throughout the United States, so the national term is not thereby more alarming than the state term.

Personal accountability sharpens the distinction. A president may be impeached, tried, removed upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, and then prosecuted under ordinary law. The king of Great Britain, in the contrast presented, is constitutionally inviolable. The essay says the president’s position on personal responsibility is no better than that of New York’s governor, and less protected than the governors of Maryland and Delaware. New York thus helps show that an accountable executive is compatible with established state practice.

The comparison of veto powers likewise distinguishes a qualified check from an absolute royal negative. The president may return a bill for reconsideration, but it becomes law if two-thirds of both legislative houses approve it. New York’s governor participates with the chancellor and judges, or any two of them, in a council of revision. The president would exercise singly what the New York governor shares with other members of that council, but the essay says the federal arrangement corresponds exactly to the revisionary authority of the governor of Massachusetts. New York is therefore both a point of comparison and a limit on the comparison: it establishes that revisionary review is not alien to state government, while Massachusetts supplies the closer institutional model for vesting the power in one executive.

The state appointment system is used to challenge the claim that the president would possess excessive patronage. In New York, appointments are lodged in a council composed of the governor and four senators chosen by the Assembly. The governor claims, and has often exercised, the right to nominate; he also has a casting vote. If the council divides, he can therefore confirm his own nomination. The essay contrasts this arrangement with national appointments made publicly by the president together with the Senate: a large legislative body is harder to influence than a small council meeting privately, sometimes with only two members present besides the governor. On this account, New York’s chief magistrate may wield greater practical appointment power than the president, despite the national office’s prominent formal role.

Revision, Interbranch Checks, and Judicial Independence

The state council of revision also illustrates how an executive negative can restrain legislation without becoming an absolute veto. The essay describes the power as having been freely used on varied occasions and frequently with success. Experience, it adds, led people who had opposed the arrangement while compiling the state constitution to become its declared admirers. That reported change in opinion makes New York an example not only of institutional design but of constitutional judgment revised through practice.

Yet the essays do not treat every feature of the state model as suitable for the federal government. They explain that the proposed plan departs from New York by excluding judges from the revisionary body. Two reasons are offered: judges might be biased in later interpretation by opinions they had already given while reviewing legislation, and close association with the executive might draw them into that magistrate’s political projects. The warning is directed at the risk of an executive-judicial combination. New York’s arrangement can demonstrate the usefulness of revision while also clarifying why the proposed federal structure places the judges elsewhere.

Judicial tenure supplies another point of continuity. The plan provides that federal judges hold office during good behavior, a rule the essay identifies as conforming to the most approved state constitutions, including New York’s. Such tenure is presented as a safeguard in both monarchy and republic: it can resist a prince’s despotism and a representative body’s encroachments, while supporting steady, upright, impartial administration of law. The judiciary’s institutional weakness is central to the argument. It controls neither the sword nor the purse and depends on the other branches to carry its judgments into effect; therefore, security of tenure helps it withstand pressure from those stronger departments.

The argument for judicial independence extends beyond tenure. In a limited constitution, courts must be able to treat legislative acts contrary to the Constitution as void; otherwise, specified limits on legislative authority would have no practical effect. The essays describe that responsibility as arising from the relation between delegated authority and the people who grant it, not from a claim that judges are superior to legislators. New York belongs to this broader constitutional discussion as an example of a state constitution against which the proposed system’s protections and institutional boundaries can be assessed.

Constitutional Silences and Political Consistency

The Constitution of New York is also invoked in the controversy over the proposed plan’s lack of a formal bill of rights. The essay notes that New York is among the states whose constitutions have no bill of rights prefixed to them, even though opponents of the national plan in that state vigorously demand one. Their defense of the state constitution rests, in part, on protections for particular privileges embedded in its text and on the rights secured by the common and statute law of Great Britain. The immediate comparison is pointed: the proposed Constitution, the essay answers, also contains provisions protecting particular rights.

In a later review, the writers gather several alleged defects of the proposed plan and observe that they are also chargeable to New York’s constitution. These include executive reeligibility, the absence of a council, the omission of a formal bill of rights, and the omission of a provision respecting freedom of the press. The force of the comparison lies in the opponents’ professed admiration for their own state government. To attack the national plan for imperfections that they excuse in New York, the essay argues, is inconsistent; the disparity in their treatment is presented as evidence that some opposition is selective rather than principled.

This use of New York does not establish that every omission is harmless or that every state provision should be copied. Instead, it presses critics to apply a consistent standard and directs attention to what a constitution provides in substance as well as what it leaves unstated. Across disputes about courts, executive power, appointments, and rights, the Constitution of New York becomes a practical benchmark: familiar enough to expose double standards, yet varied enough to show that institutional arrangements must be judged in their particular structure and operation.