exception to these general rules are the two supreme executive organs that are justices, the president of the Constitutional Court and the president of the Supreme Administrative Court. Being justices, presidents of courts receive lifetime appointments in order to guarantee judicial independence. Even justices, however, can be removed in case of material misconduct: Judges can be dismissed if found guilty of serious crime or severe ethics violations. Disciplinary proceedings are essentially trials, usually before one of the higher regional courts or before the Supreme Court of Justice. Members of the Supreme Administrative Court are tried by the Supreme Administrative Court; they are otherwise subject to the same regulations as regular judges. Members of the Constitutional Court are exempt from conventional disciplinary action. Members that have proven themselves unworthy of their position can, however, be voted off the bench by a majority of two thirds of their peers. Article 19 Article 19 of the Federal Constitutional Law, the backbone of the constitution, empowers the National Council to enact incompatibility provisions that bar presidents, ministers, and members of provincial governments from holding positions in the private sector during their time in office. In its first sentence, Article 19 states that "the supreme executive organs are the president, the ministers and state secretaries, and the members of the provincial governments" (""). The language seems to imply that this list is meant to be an authoritative, taxative enumeration. Early scholarship has tended to accept it as such. Modern case law and the modern scholarly literature observe that Article 19 is problematic in several ways: The list is incomplete. The list includes organs that are not supreme, or in fact not even organs: State secretaries are assistants to ministers. A state secretary helps the minister manage the minister's bureaucratic apparatus and represents, if directed to do so, the minister in the National Council. The minister can delegate some of his or her responsibilities to the secretary; for instance, the secretary can be made head of one of the relevant ministry's sections. In all these capacities, the secretary takes orders () from the minister, meaning that the secretary is not "supreme" by any stretch of the imagination. The members of a provincial government are not necessarily organs; they usually only an organ. Written mainly by Hans Kelsen and following Kelsen's preferred ontology, the Federal Constitutional Law establishes Austria as a country with branches of government: the