Replies

You are wrong. He acknowledged limits. Read Marbury.

I have read Marbury (repeatedly), and “you are wrong,” not I. As Thomas Jefferson noted, a government that can “judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself” is limited only by its own “discretion, and not the Constitution.”

;>)

…he never claimed 'the high court has final and exclusive power of constitutional review', or anything of the sort. Thus -- your pitiful straw man claim collapses…We discussed your out of context straw man use of "say what the law is" quite some time ago. You were proved wrong, and shown where he explicitly recognized limitations on the courts power to interpret law.

Actually, as one constitutional scholar has noted with regard to Mr. Justice Marshall's opinion:

…[T]he dictum explaining the duty of the court to rule a statute unconstitutional if it was in conflict with the constitution was sound, as far as it went. The problem was that it left the impression that this was the exercise of a power of the court that only the court had. The misleading statement was, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." It is misleading because it connotes that as the "province" it is exclusive of the other departments… When one of the laws in conflict is the constitution, then the duty is of ‘constitutional review,’ which is only ‘judicial review’ when it is judges that happen to do it. It is not an exclusive power of the courts…

Having claimed an "exclusive" power for the federal judiciary, the power must also be "final" if exercised by the high court. Furthermore, because Mr. Justice Marshall recognized no limits but (supposedly) the “Constitution” (even your “original right to establish” quote refers to the Constitution – NOT “the people” as you implied ;>) and simultaneously claimed a right to ‘say what the Constitution is,’ the lack of limits is necessarily implicit. In short, you have "proved" nothing.

And BTW, as I stated earlier, highlighting Marshall’s logical inconsistencies hardly qualifies as a ‘straw man’ argument. Perhaps you should purchase a dictionary…

;>)

Principles the people established cannot be "reviewed' away, -- obviously.

LOL! Quite obviously, my friend, you have no grasp of reality! What the heck do you think “loose constructionists” like Marshall have been doing for the last two centuries and more? The high court is in the business of ‘reviewing away’ our constitutional rights!

’Unfortunately, you seem unable to grasp that point’...

;>)

Fine, -- you can't understand Marshalls fundamental logic, -- and no one here can understand yours, poor thing.

(You do live in your own, private ‘dream land,’ don’t you? ;>)

Nothing in Jeffersons words you quoted conficts with anything Marshall wrote in Marbury:

"...The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers..."

Actually, the conflict is obvious. Unfortunately, ‘you can't understand Jefferson’s and Madison’s fundamental logic’ – or the written history of the early Republic, for that matter.

“Poor thing.”