Paradox of Self-Amendment by Peter Suber voice a diminution of their equal suffrage in the Senate. The states, as their white voters, have lost their equal voice in the Senate if their voice is diluted by the enfranchisement of blacks.[Note 54] Machen uses the one-person, one-vote principle, derived from the Fourteenth Amendment, before it was articulated by any court and which partisans of his camp were to oppose bitterly, to challenge the deprivation of equal suffrage, or equally weighted voices in the Senate, of a state considered as its white voters. He compares the sudden enfranchisement of blacks to the annexation of Puerto Rico to Rhode Island, depriving the Anglo Rhode Islanders of their equal voice in the Senate. This argument makes clever use of the Fourteenth Amendment to oppose the Fifteenth Amendment. In many places Machen reveals the tenacious racism that drives his legal arguments. The annexation to Rhode Island of Puerto Rico, when Vermont would have worked as well, is just one example. He claims that states are their people, but that "[t]he white people and they alone constituted the State of South Carolina,"[Note 55] because they alone could vote. The fact that blacks could vote after the Fifteenth Amendment did not make them part of their states; it violated the rights of whites. "The Fifteenth Amendment amounts to a compulsory annexation to each state that refused to ratify it of a black San Domingo within its borders."[Note 56] He finally falls back on an "abuse of power" argument, and asserts that the greatest abuse of power is "to take a state government out of the hands of its citizens and give it over to a mass of persons who by its laws were mere chattels."[Note 57] The Supreme Court has never ruled on the existence of Machen's implied limitations within the express limitation of the equal suffrage clause of Article V, nor has it ever directly ruled on the validity of the Fifteenth Amendment. Only once has the Supreme Court ruled on a theory that an implied limitation on the federal AC lay inside the equal suffrage clause. It held that the Senate is not barred by that clause from refusing to seat a newly elected member presenting proper credentials pending investigation of the legality of his election. Barry v. United States, 279 U.S. 597 (1929). The equal suffrage limitation on the AC is an entrenchment clause protecting the equal suffrage of the states in the Senate. It is incomplete entrenchment because it can be repealed by a difficult procedure —getting the consent of the states to be deprived of their equal suffrage. It is not self-entrenched, at least not expressly. Therefore, it might be repealed by an ordinary amendment, provided the losers by it voted with the majority. To prevent this one might want to find an implied limitation on the AC forbidding repeal of the equal suffrage limitation except by, say, unanimous consent of the states. The rationale is that the consent of each state is necessary because each state might be a victim if the clause were repealed (see Section 9.A). In general one might find in any AC an implied limitation self-entrenching any incomplete entrenchment clause at the same level of difficulty it requires for the amendment of the rule it protects. Such an implied limitation is certainly a reasonable reading of the intent of the framers: this can be said without reference to any particular clause or framers because an incomplete entrenchment clause that is not self-entrenched is virtually pointless. Such an implied limitation, however, would not interfere with the omnipotence of the AC, for at most a merely incomplete self-entrenchment is read into a clause, which could always be repealed by its own difficult procedure. If a complete entrenchment clause is impliedly self-entrenched, for the same reasons, then a limit on the omnipotence of the AC may be implied with it. If the AC can transmute immutable rules, its omnipotence will survive the implied limitation; otherwise not. Whether an AC can repeal a complete self-entrenchment of itself will be explored in Section 9. Alf Ross has argued in effect for another implied limitation on an AC, namely, that it never violate the logical rules of inference, such as modus ponens, in the derivation of a new amendment from the old AC. This is to say that no amendment can be adopted that is inconsistent with, or not deducible from, a set of premises that includes the existing AC. This position has, I think, been sufficiently dealt with. It is an application of a priori rules to an empirical subject; it requires outcomes that no court has recognized and forbids outcomes that are commonly, indeed, invariably upheld by courts. It purports to overrule law in the name of logic and thereby betrays its alegal character. The presumption that law must be logical is very strong in many other areas, for example in the rule of priority that prefers the more recent rule when two or more rules conflict irreconcilably (see Section 16). We have such rules because we would rather reconcile or eliminate inconsistent laws than live with them. But of course this is a policy decision that we can reverse or suspend. If there is a contradiction in self-amendment, no legal rule forbids it.[Note 58] (The variable value of consistency in law is further discussed in Section 21.B.) Because Ross believes that self-amendment is impossible, he allows the amendment of an AC only by means of a tacit rule transcending the constitution which authorizes just such changes. As noted in Section 6.B, Ross must and does regard this rule as immutable. If it were mutable, then the higher rule that authorized its amendment would be immutable, and so on. Such rules stand as limitations to the actual AC in the constitution; because they are tacit or implied, they are implied limitations. Their immutability protects them from the AC, as does as their hierarchical superiority to it. The permissibility of direct self-amendment eliminates the need to posit such rules, but they might nevertheless one day be posited or "discovered" and cited by a judge. If so, they would be judge-made limitations on the AC, which could always, when accepted, undo the omnipotence of the AC (see Section 15). That they would undo it revocably was argued above (Section 8.B, above; see also Sections 9 and 21.C). This leads to a more interesting problem. If the AC can be amended by rules of change other than itself, it is potentially limited to that extent. In Part Two I present six methods of amending the federal constitution other than direct amendment through the AC. All are "implied" in the sense that the "official" view is that the methods of the AC are exclusive and, for example, that judicial review does not amend but only interprets and applies the constitution. The availability of such methods may limit the omnipotence of the AC, but may also, by the same token, assure its mutability even if self-amendment is one day (revocably) ruled impermissible. 52