Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol II).djvu/17

 CH. VII.] impart to them a legislative force and operation. He also possesses the sole appointing power to the judicial department, though the judges, when once appointed, are not subject to his will, or power of removal. The house of lords also constitutes, not only a vital and independent branch of the legislature, but is also a great constitutional council of the executive magistrate, and is, in the last resort, the highest appellate judicial tribunal. Again; the other branch of the legislature, the commons, possess, in some sort, a portion of the executive and judicial power, in exercising the power, of accusation by impeachment; and in this case, as also in the trial of peers, the house of lords sits as a grand court of trials for public offences. The powers of the judiciary department are, indeed, more narrowly confined to their own proper sphere. Yet still the judges occasionally assist in the deliberations of the house of lords by giving their opinions upon matters of law referred to them for advice; and thus they may, in some sort, be deemed assessors to the lords in their legislative, as well as judicial capacity.

§ 525. Mr. Justice Blackstone has illustrated the advantages of an occasional mixture of the legislative and executive functions in the English constitution in a striking manner. "It is highly necessary," says he, for preserving the balance of the constitution, that the executive power should be a branch, though not the whole of the legislative. The total union of them, we have seen, would be productive of tyranny. The total disjunction of them, for the present, would, in the end, produce the same effects by causing that union, against which it seems to provide. The legislative would soon

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