...The answers to those questions are not simple, and no doubt Canon Harris will not like them. But in a canonical nutshell, the situation is this: General Convention has no more authority over the several Dioceses than Congress did over the several States under the Articles of Confederation. If Congress in the time of the Articles passed a law which a particular State did not like, that State could simply pass its own contrary law to replace it, and there was absolutely nothing Congress could do about it.
That situation changed, of course, when the Constitutional Convention of 1789 proposed a new Constitution, which contained in Article VI a Supremacy Clause, making the Constitution and all laws of Congress enacted pursuant thereto "the supreme Law of the Land . . . any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." From that point forward, no State could pass a law which was contrary to a law passed by Congress (provided the latter was constitutional).
But the Episcopal Church, which also organized in 1789, has never had a Supremacy Clause in its Constitution -- and so in that respect, the authority of its General Convention to pass Canons is on a par with that of Congress under the former Articles. In 1895, as I described in this post, a Standing Commission on the Constitution proposed to General Convention that a Supremacy Clause be added to the Church Constitution. It would have read (with emphasis added)...
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