This mode strikes, as we apprehend, at the vital privileges of the
House. For, with the single exception of the first question put to the
Judges in 1788, the case being stated, the questions are raised
directly, specifically, and by name, on those privileges: that is, _What
evidence is it competent for the Managers of the House of Commons to
produce?_ We conceive that it was not proper, _nor justified by a single
precedent_, to refer to the Judges of the inferior courts any question,
and still less for them to decide in their answer, of what is or is not
competent for the House of Commons, or for any committee acting under
their authority, to do or not to do, in any instance or respect
whatsoever. This new and unheard-of course can have no other effect than
to subject to the discretion of the Judges the Law of Parliament and the
privileges of the House of Commons, and in a great measure the judicial
privileges of the Peers themselves: any intermeddling in which on their
part we conceive to be a dangerous and unwarrantable assumption of
power. It is contrary to what has been declared by Lord Coke himself,
in a passage before quoted, to be the duty of the Judges,--and to what
the Judges of former times have confessed to be their duty, on occasions
to which he refers in the time of Henry VI.
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