At Preludium, the Rev. Mark Harris offers an argument why the deposition is supposedly effective. I greatly admire Mark, but in this case he appears to be abandoning judgment in favor of wishful thinking. Mark writes:
To read “whole number” as meaning a reference back to all the possible bishops (300 or so) absent or present would provide the parliamentary boondoggle of making some votes based not on those present but on those possibly present. One might suppose it would be a virtue of any democratic system to insist that a majority vote ought to be on the basis of the whole body of voters on the rolls, but it would be a virtue that would either require compelling voters to be present or it would be increasingly unmanageable.
Nonsense. Requiring certain actions to be approved by a stated percentage of an entire body is a common procedural safeguard. For example, if the U.S.
Senate wishes to remove a president from office (after impeachment by the House), a full 2/3 of all sitting senators must vote to convict, not just 2/3 of those senators present. If the Congress wishes to override a presidential veto, a full 2/3 of the entire membership of each house must approve the override. These requirements are hardly parliamentary boondoggles.
Mark writes:
The whole number of persons eligible to be present at the meeting is the list of 300. The list of bishops eligible to vote at the meeting are (i) persons present and (ii) persons part of the whole list.
If this were true, then the definition of a quorum in Art I.2 would be incoherent: ”A majority of all Bishops entitled to vote, exclusive of Bishops who have resigned their jurisdiction or positions, shall be necessary to constitute a quorum for the transaction of business.”
Under Mark’s argument, testing whether a quorum was present would entail counting up those bishop-voters who happened to be present, and then determining whether a majority of them were present. That, however, implies that the remaining minority of bishop-voters were somehow both present and not present at the same time. (Insert here your favorite joke about boring meetings.)
I would like nothing better than to see +Schofield defrocked and, independently, stripped in civil court of every stick of diocesan property he controls. But we need to face the facts: The deposition motion failed for lack of the required number of votes.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that perhaps a surprising number of bishops would’ve refused to vote for Bishop Schofield’s “deposition” if a meeting of the entire House had been required? Or was this “deposition” supposed to have been guaranteed to be a shoo-in at this meeting……regardless of HOW many bishops actually attended?
#1, Cennydd. An absolute majority of all the bishops extant likely would still have voted to depose.
Credit goes to D.C. for straightforward reasoning. Canons should be followed for the benefit of all. How can the remaining bishops now feel secure that rules will not be misapplied or ignored in other proceedings?
Yes mousetaliker – but they would have had to have cared enough to show up. Apparenlty many did not feel the agenda items were worth their time.
#2, Mousestalker, but would an absolute majority have been as likely to depose Bp. Cox? I say they would not.
Mark Harris and others should remember that for most of ECUSA’s history the House of Bishops met only during General Conventions. The rules weren’t set up to make it easy to execute bishops at this sort of off-year meeting.
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DC: You deserve praise and admiration for choosing consistency of principle (and the rule of law) over a substantive outcome you might have preferred.
I hope reappraising commenters will remember to do the same. We can’t be having one standard for ourselves and our allies and another standard for those we disagree with.