Once Congress ordains and establishes a federal court can they then de-establish that court? Could Congress decide to scrap the federal court system except for the Supreme Court and start again?
Yes, and Congress has in fact rearranged the federal court system repeatedly in history. The Constitution only mandates the Supreme Court and whatever inferior courts it wishes “from time to time”. The only caveat is that they must continue to pay federal judges a salary once they are appointed to the bench unless they are impeached, so they’d pretty well better get as much use of the judges as they can, Rearrangement pretty much needs to involve rearrangement of the existing judges. Federal judges have even continued to draw salaries while incarcerated in federal penetentiaries.
I believe so, since the Constitution requires only a Supreme Court IIRC. I’m not sure what would become of the existing federal judges, since they are supposed to have life tenure.
Actually, I should rephrase that. Congress can reshape the court system, move the circuits around, add or take away a circuit, that sort of thing, but they can’t unseat a judge except by impeachment. If a judge can’t keep his seat on the bench because there’s a civil war in his state or he’s in the federal hoosegow, the judge will still draw a salary until impeached. Pretty much the only way to get rid of any one federal judge is to impeach them, outlive them, or catch them on the take.
There’s an argument to be made that if Congress decided to completely abolish the federal judiciary except for the Supreme Court, that this would be unconsitutional, as the Constitution anticipates a judiciary that operates on a par with Congress and the Executive and, as those two branches have grown and arrogated power to themselves over the last 200 years, the Constitution demands that the judicial branch be in a position to check them as needed. I don’t think this is a winner, but it’s an argument. But the force of this argument, if it has any, is lessened dramatically if the dismantling of the judicial system were not wholesale (or approaching it). As pravnik notes, the arrangement of the judicial branch in most all particulars except the existence of the Supreme Court (but not its structure) is in Congress’s hands.
–Cliffy