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Thank you, neverdem, for posting this.
Liberals were saying the same thing regarding Bush v Gore.
Taney "reached out" to declare the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional-- almost 40 years later.
right.
When has anyone refused to give themselves more power, besides the founding fathers and all those who served others.... okay I mean what POLITICIAN or JUDGE in the modern era is going to limit their own powers.
These legal and economic elites were also believers in an ideology called Social Darwinism. They saw economic life in much the same way that Charles Darwin and his followers saw biological life — as an intense struggle for survival in which only the “fittest” deserve to survive and reproduce. Since economic regulation was usually in the interest of protecting those who could not protect themselves in this struggle, Social Darwinists believed that such laws were counterproductive in retarding economic progress, restricting the freedom of the “more fit,” and advancing the interests of those “less fit” people who constituted a “drag” on society.
Hmmm. Sounds like some FReepers.
It is really a misconception to say that a court can invalidate a law at all. All the Supreme Court can say is that the judicial branch will not be a party to enforcing it.
Marshall did recognize that, at the time, he could not force the President to do anything and so invented some mumbo jumbo about invalidating acts of Congress. This changed later when, as in the Nixon tapes case, courts do assume their orders carry a force of law which Presidents ignore at peril of impeachment.
But the realpolitique of that is that Presidents can be impeached or sustained by Congress for any reason at any time and the President backed by 34 Senators trumps that threat should he choose to do so. If Marshall had enjoyed a Senate hostile to Jefferson as Nixon would, he might also have reached an entirely different conclusion and dressed that up in different mumbo jumbo.