More Hate With Some Jefferson Thrown In

OK, I'M GOING TO SAY IT so you'll understand it.    

The ONLY honest telling of American history under the Constitution is the struggle of those left out of the Constitution to pry from an unwilling privileged few what the Declaration of Independence promised them as their God-given rights, the rights which any legitimate government delivers equally to "All Men" - that is All PEOPLE - or it is an illegitimate government legitimately overturned by The People for one which does. 

I mentioned the original success in that history of struggle against the Constitutional order set up in 1787, the very partial, very incomplete "Revolution of 1800" that overthrew the original Federalist establishment which had governed the country before then. That is especially on my mind because Jefferson's letter to Spencer Roane, September 1819, in which he talks about his election as a "revolution" is also highly germaine to my series about the usurpation of the Supreme Court that sets it over the elected government. In that letter he said:

DEAR SIR,—I had read in the Enquirer, and with great approbation, the pieces signed Hampden, and have read them again with redoubled approbation, in the copies you have been so kind as to send me. I subscribe to every title of them. They contain the true principles of the revolution of 1800, for that was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected indeed by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people. The nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle, and electing those of another, in the two branches, executive and legislative,

But that revolution was made by white men on behalf of white men, led by slave holders, "planters," whose planting was done by Black People held in slavery.  That they held a broader view of those who should vote and hold the government on behalf of the many rural farmers, what Jefferson called "yoemen" didn't do much for anyone else who had to live under the government they didn't elect but which dominated the country and made its laws.  

The real revolution that Jefferson boasted about took the abolitionist struggle, the Civil War and the passage of the Civil War amendments and passage of laws such as were included among those the Supreme Court had nullified, the law protecting the rights of Black men to vote and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.  

But, as I noted in quoting that passage from Simeon Baldwin's 1905 book about the judiciary,  those laws and much of the changes made as a result of the slave-power losing the war, handed victory to white supremacy through Supreme Court nullification of those laws.

It took almost ninety years to win back what was previously won through the most terrible domestic war in our history and the defeat of THE LAWS that permitted slavery as exended in the Dred Scott decision where the law said it could not go.  And that Civil War era progress was then nullified by the "justices" on the Court - the same Court that had declared less than a quarter of a century before those laws were overturned ruled that Black People were not citizens and could not bring a suit in a federal court, it took until the mid 1960s for a new Voting Rights and Civil Rights act to be made laws during an all too brief period when the Supreme Court was not on the side of white supremacy, a rarity in the history of the Supreme Court and as the Roberts Court has shown, not a permanent situation. 

How long it will take for the next Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts to be made law, is anyone's guess. I will note that, especially, in overturning Voting Rights, the  Roberts Court hasn't just overturned the original 1960s Congress and President Johnson who pushed it through to be enacted as law, they were overturning the Congress that, by a larger, bi-partisan majority reauthorized it and the Supreme Courts that had held it to be valid and binding federal law.  I will predict that when a Congress and president who hold with equal rights passes a new one, the greatest danger to it will, again, be the Supreme Court acting under the Marbury power it invented for itself. 

That role of the Roberts Court played was hardly new even in 1883 when the Court nullified the first Civil Rights Act, in the same letter that Jefferson wrote bragging about the revolution brought about through his election continued, referring to the Court starting c. eight decades earlier:

Over the judiciary department, the constitution had deprived them of their control. That, therefore, has continued the reprobated system, and although new matter has been occasionally incorporated into the old, yet the leaven of the old mass seems to assimilate to itself the new, and after twenty years’ confirmation of the federal system by the voice of the nation, declared through the medium of elections, we find the judiciary on every occasion, still driving us into consolidation.

Among the reforms that Jefferson, Madison et al attempted in the "revolution of 1800 was the break up of consolidation of power to the federal government at the cost of the state governments, which is what I believe Jefferson meant by complaining about "the judiciary on every occasion, still driving us into consolidation."  

He is more explicit as to the Court's role in nullifying progress towards equality (and in many other ways) in the next paragraph.  (Note, I'm giving you his words verbatim but changing the format for ease of reading and emphasis. 

In denying the right they usurp of exclusively explaining the constitution, I go further than you do, if I understand rightly your quotation from the Federalist, of an opinion that “the judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the government, but not in relation to the rights of the parties to the compact under which the judiciary is derived.” If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our constitution a complete felo de se. 

"Felo de se" means suicide. In case you think I'm guilty of jazzing up my descriptions in this matter.  His entire letter is interesting as an example of the problem with the Marbury power grab (he mentions it by name*) and, in fact, with the scheme of "balanced powers" and the meaning of the Constitution as written. 

For intending to establish three departments, co-ordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone [the Supreme Court], the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one too, which is unelected by, and independent of the nation. 

For experience has already shown that the impeachment it has provided is not even a scare-crow; that such opinions as the one you combat, sent cautiously out, as you observe also, by detachment, not belonging to the case often, but sought for out of it, as if to rally the public opinion beforehand to their views, and to indicate the line they are to walk in, have been so quietly passed over as never to have excited animadversion, even in a speech of any one of the body entrusted with impeachment. 

The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please. 

It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes.

It is certainly worth noting here that the Congress that passed those original, post-Civil War voting and civil rights acts were full of those who had fought that war instigated by those who wanted to maintain slavery against whom those who fought for the Union had that as, certainly, their strongest motivation. 

And it is certainly worth completing the thought by noting the Congress that passed the 1960s Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and the president who pushed for their passage and signed them into law, had fought WWII against the Nazis, the Italian Fascists and the Japanese Imperial regime.  They were witness to the consequences of inequality in ways that the generation that followed them were not.    It turns out my generation and, perhaps in ever decreasing form till now, did not have the same "spirit up" but  in regard to the ideal of equality, without witness to that same consequence of its absence, felt free to "relax."  Though I will note that propaganda in the form of "news" and, far more effectively, entertainment which more people consumed, had a lot to do with that relaxation into the habits of white supremacy which are never far from the surface.  That it is the slave-holder Jefferson who has given me this motivation to point that out is certainly a huge irony but that doesn't make it any less valid. 

Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law. [though, as can be seen over and over again, when propagandized they have every inclination to ignore moral law.  Look at the Old Testament for deailed examples]. 

My construction of the constitution is very different from that you quote. It is that each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially, where it is to act ultimately and without appeal. I will explain myself by examples, which, having occurred while I was in office, are better known to me, and the principles which governed them.

I'm not giving Jefferson's conception of the Constitution as one we should adopt going forward, or any other except to say that any one which doesn't have EQUALITY as its first principle is bound to devolve into unequally held, allowed and exercised freedom.  Equality is the true bedrock of legitimate government, one in which the "just consent of the governed" is what determines the government to be and what gives its laws their real character.  To say that something in the Constitution does that is absurd.  Scripture talks about moral Law being written on the Peoples' hearts making written laws unnecessary.  Without that, no human institution, including the U.S. Constitution is anything put a pause before it all goes to hell and there is nothing like lawyering to speed that process. 

And what can be said about the constant nullification of progress towards justice for Black People and other People of Color can be said about Women, workers, about other groups who have been subject to inequality and injustice for our entire or part of our history.   The Supreme Court is not a reliable champion of equal rights and are frequently the enemies of justice.  They are far, far more often the implacable and domineering enemies of them.  

*  He gives several examples from when he was president, which are extremely interesting, here is where he mentions the Marbury power grab by the Court. 

A legislature had passed the sedition law[ John Marshall was Secretary of State then]. The federal courts had subjected certain individuals to its penalties of fine and imprisonment. On coming into office, I released these individuals by the power of pardon committed to executive discretion, which could never be more properly exercised than where citizens were suffering without the authority of law, or, which was equivalent, under a law unauthorized by the constitution, and therefore null. In the case of Marbury and Madison, the federal judges declared that commissions, signed and sealed by the President, were valid, although not delivered. I deemed delivery essential to complete a deed, which, as long as it remains in the hands of the party, is as yet no deed, it is in posse only, but not in esse, and I withheld delivery of the commissions. They cannot issue a mandamus to the President or legislature, or to any of their officers.

Such was the mole hill on which the Supreme Court built its invention that, as Jefferson predicted, has dominated the entire history of the country, most often for privilege against justice, for privilege against equality.   Now giving us a king. 

Hate Mail

AS SOON AS I READ about the decision in the Buckley v. Valeo case which overturned the bi-partisan clean elections laws passed to prevent another crime spree such as Nixon and his campaign and his Department of "justice" had engaged in through his Attorney General who, I'll remind you, went to jail because of his crimes,  as soon as I heard the Court had overturned it ON THE BASIS OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT, INVENTING THE HUGE WHOPPER OF A LIE THAT MONEY EQUALS SPEECH, I became a complete and dedicated opponent of the Supreme Court usurpation in which they gave themselves the "right" to nullify duly adopted federal laws.  That was fifty years ago last winter.  

And, once I started researching the issue, you can bet I got into arguments about it. 

"But what about Brown v. Board of Education," was one of the early retorts. 

Brown v Board was not overturning a federal law, was the immediate answer.  Though as I learned more about the actual effect of Brown in the erection of private white-flight academies in which the affluent put their children so they would not go to school with Black Children, something that state governments and Republican dominated Supreme Courts have supported with voucher laws and other means of getting private schools funded with money that should go only to public schools which have to accept anyone have become a thing.   

I have not studied the issue of where the members of the Supreme Court, their children, grandchildren etc. have gone to school but I would not be surprised if such a study didn't show that the large majority of them didn't send them to public schools or that they'd not attended public schools, themselves.  The majority on today's Court have not.  I would go into that but it would get me on a tirade against the moral atrocity of elite Catholic preps and the Ivys who have turned out so many of the worst of them. 

There were other "what abouts" none of which answered the problem of what Boudin called "government by a few conservative men" on the Supreme Court - as I noted even one of those conservative men, Nathan Clifford predicted the atrocity of the Court dominating the People and even the Congress - it does so whenever it overturns a duly enacted federal law.   

As the history of the 14th Amendment under Court "interpretation" proves,  even the Constitution, itself, is not safe from the de facto power the Court gives itself to nullify parts of it.   If they had not done so within the last three years,  Trump would not be president we would almost certainly not have gone from being a respected world power to being one of the most hated countries in the world and we would not have gone from the most successful measures to revive the welfare of the People from the Covid-19 mini-depression of all developed countries to being the country which is driving large parts if not the entire global economy into a depression that may make the Great one look not so great by comparison.   We would certainly not be at war with Iran with a president who is Putin's bitch boy. 

As can be seen in the posts this week, even the "justice" who favored the power before the Constitution, Iredell, had reservations about the kind of use of it that has become routine. 

And then there are those state Supreme Court justices and their legal erudition.

I mentioned the status of Women and their ownership of their own bodies in the wake of the Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, which it had whittled down in previous rulings before they did what several of them claimed they wouldn't do during their confirmation - all of them lied through their teeth during their confirmations and every single person in the room and almost all of those listening to the festival of mendacity that Senate confirmation hearings have become knew it too - lying like Todd Blanche did and the Republican-fascists will confirm him, anyway, as they did Kavanaugh. 

In that case the Roberts court fascists overturned a Supreme Court decision that overturned state laws in favor of the fact that either you own your own body or every goddamned right mentioned in the goddamned "Bill of Rights" means not a damned thing - EXACTLY THE SAME THING AT STAKE IN THE CONSTITUTION AND THE COURT PERMITTING SLAVERY.

In fact they didn't just overturn the ruling made by the Court by 7-2 in 1973, they overturned every court that upheld the Roe decision.   While my argument here doesn't deal directly with the matter of the Court overturning the rulings of previous courts - even those that acknowledge the right of half of the population to the ownership of their own bodies A TINY LITTLE MATTER LEFT OUT OF THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION BY THE SLAVE-HOLDERS, SLAVE TRADERS AND PROFITEERS FROM SLAVERY WHO WERE, IN FACT THE FRAMERS,  for obvious reasons.  It would have cost them their enormous wealth - and America's slavers were some of the wealthiest in the world - and they might have had to earn an honest living from their own labor.  

But the matter of a Supreme Court overruling a previous Court's decision, especially those claimed to have been made on the basis of the Courts interpretation of the Constitution - and in the large majority of cases on either a clearly ideological basis or in the Courts and their patrons' political and financial interests, though neither Roe nor Brown v Board would have, in context fit into those categories, all of that brings up the issue of the validity of the Court being able to accurately discern the actual meaning of the Constitution in any reliable way.

I might consider that the thinking of Ketanji Brown Jackson or Sonia Sotomayor to be up to the standards of the majority on the court in 1973,  I hear Harry Litman say that he has great regard for the writing ability of Elena Kagan though I often don't think her thinking matches that, there isn't anyone else on this Court who is a first-rate thinker, they certainly aren't masters of rationation or logic.  As the Republican-fascists, the Federalist fascist Society, the billionaires and millionaires who have funded the effort have, as Sheldon Whitehouse said, "captured the court" the level of intelligence on the Court has certainly gone down, considerably.   John Roberts is about as banal a thinker as has been on the court and he's certainly not as bad as Alito, Thomas or Kavanaugh. 

What pretense is there that they were able to read the Constitution any nor insightfully or, FAR MORE IMPORTANTLY, HONSTELY than the majority in Roe?   You will remember that Alito and those who concurred with him had to resort to late medieval English judges who sentenced Women to burning as witches in coming up with his Constitutional fiction to overturn the case.   I would really love to know what the framers, who no doubt had a deep sense of disdain and shame for the Salem witch trials and the execution of and imprisonment that resulted from it, what those men of the "enlightenment" would make of Alito's (or, more likely his Ivy League law clerks') citation of such a judge in such a case.  Abortion was legal in the states at the time of the framing of the Constitution, by the way. 

If the Constitutional reading of the 7 "justices" who decided Roe, if the many more "justices" who confirmed and maintained it read the Constitution wrong, only to have the decidedly inferior minds of the Roberts Court find the "right" reading of it,  doesn't that, in itself, prove that there is something extremely dangerous in allowing them to maintain that THAT is their proper role?   And what is dangerous in them overturning a Court decision - and those overturnings have in some somewhat rarer instances expanded equality and freedom and the public good, just not very often - then it's far more dangerous to allow them to take the extra-Constitutional steps of nullifying duly passed laws made by the Congress and president. 

I absolutely and entirely reject that the members of the Supreme Court have a single "right" to do anything that the most humble and wretched person on Earth, American or not, has.   Holding public office isn't a right, it doesn't create rights, it imposes responsibilities freely taken on with the responsibility to The People that they do what the agreed to do.   The faster we get over the stupider uses of the word "rights" which have led to all kinds of evils, the better.   It is an outrage that any Supreme Court "justice" or president or Senator or member of the House believes that they have some enhanced status in terms of "rights" than the most common of common People any where on Earth.   Any respect that an office holder is considered to be "due" is misplaced.   It is a violation of the actual foundation of democracy to do so,  that foundation is equality not some notion of "liberty."  Freedom only comes through equality and knowing the truth.  And with freedom comes responsibilities, as well. 

Courts cannot nullify an act of the state legislature on the vague ground that they think it opposed to a general latent spirit supposed to pervade or underlie the Constitution, where neither the terms nor the implications of the instrument disclose any such restriction. Such a power is denied to the courts, because to concede it would be to make the courts sovereign over both the constitution and the people, and convert the government into a judicial despotism.

READING THROUGH WHAT he wrote you have to always remember that the already awful result of the Supreme Court nullifying federal laws that led Louis Boudin to devoting his considerable scholarly abilities to researching the power the court had given itself to do that in the Marbury decision has only become more extreme in the more than a century since then.  

In his great two volume work of the same title, he updated his case to the early 1930s before Roosevelt became president, when the country was facing the Great Depression and a Court which was hell bent on preventing those measures by the federal government which were essential to not only ending it  but to even giving effective relief to the misery of the large majority of Americans.  Franklin Roosevelt faced down the court for several crucial years before he was able to swing the court to one that faced reality,  something which, as usual, happens only only death or the rare retirement while a "justice"still has most of their marbles - and a lot of them never had many to start with - made possible.   Life terms for judges and "justices" is an idiotic 18th century holdover from back when lives were shorter and they stupidly depended on nature to take care of things like that.  It should be changed when the inevitable and drastic reform of the courts and especially the Supreme Court can no longer be put off. 

The quote that I took as the title for this post from Boudin's text is from the associate "justice" of the Supreme Court Nathan Clifford who was a Maine man who had the most varied career in public service of any Supreme Court "justice" in its history, serving in many state as well as federal positions, having a private practice, etc.  

It has to be noted that Clifford was certainly not anything like a progressive, he was more of a paleo-conservative, certainly not a champion of the rights of slaves or of the supposedly newly freed slaves (he was a Buchanan appointee).  He held to a rigid interpretation of the Constitution as written, which is a problem in itself even if he did correctly identify one of the problems with the power that Marshall invented but was not ether explicitly or implicitly a part of the written Constitution.  

His feared "judicial despotism" is the the reality that Black Americans live under after the Roberts Court nullified the Voting Rights Act,  it is certainly one, effectively, for Women* whose bodies are left by the Court to the whims of Republican-fascist state legislators, state courts, lower courts and the Supreme Court, itself.   That the "justices" on the Roberts Court have, in fact, made us a country of one right-wing president and their corrupt fellow Republicans is indisputable. 

it is increasingly a reality for white males.

He is also a "justice" who, for political reasons, refused to retire from the bench even after his advancing senility and a severe stroke rendered him, in the words of his fellow "justice, Samuel Miller " a babbling idiot."   Miller opined at the time, commenting on the mental unfitness of the lone Democrat on the Court that anyone over the age of 70 was unfit to undertake the workload of a United States supreme court "justice, "  at that time he advocated an age of retirement from the Court.  Though, as you might have guessed, when it came to "justice" Miller, he didn't voluntarily retire at that age, himself,  he stayed on till death took him at 74.  

In part four of his argument about the dangers and invalid status of the Marbury power, Louis Boudin talked about how that power had expanded as the Supreme Court and the "public men," no doubt many of them lawyers who had a decided interest in not rocking the boat over it, became accustomed to its use once Taney et al had broken the previous embargo on its significant use. 

IV

A change no less striking has taken place, since the power of courts to annul legislation has been more freely exercised and has come to be generally recognized, in the attitude of our judges and in the opinions or our public men in regard to the question:  How far shall this power extend?  

Even after the decision in the Dred Scott case the existence of this power was not admitted by our leading statesmen except in a very limited sense.  Lincoln denied its binding force in our modern sense, that is, as a rule of political conduct. 

And even those who admitted it as a rule of political conduct did not by any means, until very recent times, give it the broad scope which it now possesses.

The older and more conservative point of view is clearly stated in the opinions of the very judges who asserted and used this power in its earlier stages of development. 

Judge Iredell was one of the first members of the United States Supreme Court to claim this power.  He advocated it even before the adoption of the federal Constitution; for he was leading counsel in the case of Bayard v. Singleton, noticed above, on the side which urged the right of the North Carolina state court to declare unconstitutional the state law at that time under review.

As an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court he asserted this power before the decision in Marbury v. Madison, as we have seen in our examination of the case of Calder v. Bull.  We have also seen that he regarded this power as of an "awful nature," never to be resorted to except in a clear and urgent case.  

A further examination of his opinion will show that he considered the power to be limited to those cases in which the legislative enactment violated the very letter of an express prohibition of the Constitution.

He emphatically repudiated, as we have seen, the theory that an act passed by Congress or by a state legislature, within the general scope of its constitutional power, could be pronounced to be void merely because it was deemed by the court to be contrary to the principles of natural justice. 

He based this conclusion on the assumption that each and every legislature was "possessed of an equal right of opinion" with any court as to what the principles of natural justice were.  

The hundred-odd years which have passed since Justice Iredell wrote this opinion have certainly wrought havoc with his antiquated ideas regarding the competence of legislatures and the functions of courts. 

More than half a century later, at a time when the judicial power had firmly established itself and on the eve of its great coup in the Dred Scott case, the utterances of the courts regarding the limitations upon their authority remained the same.  

In 1853 the judges of the Pennsylvania supreme court wrote a series of notable opinions on this subject, in the case of Sharpless v. The Mayor.  The leading opinion was written by Chief Justice Jeremiah S. Black, one of the greatest constitutional lawyers of his generation, and soon afterwards successively attorney-general and secretary of state of the United States. The decision rendered in this case and the opinions upon which it is based are very interesting reading.  They give much food for thought to the constitutional lawyer of to-day and to the student of our existing political institutions.  Among the points decided in the case are the following: 

"In determining whether an act of the legislature is constitutional or not, we must look to the body of the constitution itself for reasons.  The general principles of justice, liberty and right, not contained or expressed in that instrument, are no proper elements of a judicial decision upon it. 

If such an act within the general grant of legislative power, that is, if it be in its character and essence a law, and if it be not forbidden, expressly or impliedly, either by the state or federal constitution, it is valid. 

To make it void, it must be clearly not an exercise of legislative authority, or else be forbidden so plainly, as to leave the case free from all doubt." 

When I raised this issue a number of years ago, one of my online friends, a lawyer, responded that it might be a good idea to restrict the Supreme Court to only having that power when ALL of the "justices" agreed as to its unconstitutionality might be a good idea short of nullifying Marbury.  I would wonder how often there has been such unanimity - without the various explanations in concurrences, some of which deny parts of the majority decision - on the Supreme Court and what could any such cases of unanimity tell us in terms of what dangers they potentially hold.  It is the business of lawyers to find loopholes and openings and permissions for them or their clients to do whatever they want - as I pointed out in an earlier post in this series.  I'm not sure that even with that very reasonable seeming provision wouldn't, in time and under lawyer, judge and "justice" usage expand to where we are now as, in fact, Boudin said was already happening with the Marbury-Dred Scott power in his time. 

In their opinions the judges specifically state that by "forbidden expressly or impliedly" they mean just what they say; that there must be something in the Constitution, state or federal, which shows plainly, so as to leave no room for any doubt, that the Constitution intends to forbid just such a law as that under consideration, and that such general prohibitions as that "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law" do not furnish a sufficient basis for declaring a legislative act unconstitutional, unless, indeed the act be such as cannot be properly called a law or an act of legislation at all.  

Chief Justice Black said in his opinion: 

"We are urged to hold that a law, though not prohibitied, is void if it violates the spirit of our institutions, or impairs any of those rights which it is the object of a free government to protect, and to declare unconstitutional if it be wrong and unjust.

But we cannot do this 

. . . I am thoroughly convinced that the words of the constitution furnish the only test to determine the validity of a statute, and that all arguments based on general principles outside of the constitution must be addressed to the people, and not to us.  

A proposition which results so plainly as this does, from the reason of the thing, can scarcely need the aid of authority . . . . But, if the doctrine I am denying could be allowed to prevail, it would decide this case in favor of the plaintiffs without looking into the constitution at all;  for it must be admitted that such measures cannot be sustained on principles of moral justice or propriety. . . There  is another rule which must govern us in cases like this; namely that we can declare an act of Assembly void only when it violates the constitution, clearly, palpably, plainly and in such manner as to leave no doubt or hesitation in our minds."

And Mr. Justice Knox, in a concurring opinion said:

"The presumption is that the legislature has judged correctly of its own constitutional power, and the contrary must be clearly demonstrated before a coordinate branch of the government can be called upon to interfere between the people and their immediate representatives.

In ascertaining whether there has been this clear usurpation by the law-making power, I agree with the Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Woodward, that the tests to be applied are:

1. Is the act in the nature of a legislative power?

2. Does the constitution expressly, or by necessary implication, forbid the exercise of such a power?. . . 

I am aware that under this rule may be passed which will, in the minds of may persons, be contrary to natural justice, and subversive to the just rights of the people.  The remedy is to be found in further constitutional restrictions upon legislation, not in restraints imposed by the judiciary.  The limit of the power of the people's representatives should be written upon the pages of the constitution, rather than remain in the breasts of our judges.

There is a great danger in recognizing the existence of a power in the judiciary to annul legislative action, without some fixed rule by with such a power is measured.  Our opinions are so diversified and varied, that what to one mind may seem clearly right and proper, to another will appear to be fraught with imminent danger.  If we have not a certain standard by which to test the constitutionality of legislative enactments, if each judge is to be governed by his own convictions of what is right or otherwise, I fear that restraints upon judicial, rather than on legislative action, will be demanded by the people, ever jealous of the accumulation of power in the hands of he few." 

I almost took this last sentence as the title of this post because it is my fervent hope that "retraints upon judicial . . . action, will be demanded by the people," UNDER THE SUPREME COURT'S ACCUMULATION OF POWER AND USING IT TO ALLOW OLIGARCHS TO AMASS POWER INTO THEIR FEW HANDS AND SO DESTROY EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY AND EVEN A DE FACTO REPUBLICAN FORM OF GOVERNMENT.  

And only a generation ago Justice Clifford of the United States Supreme Court said:

"Courts cannot nullify an act of the state legislature on the vague ground that they think it opposed to a general latent spirit supposed to pervade or underlie the Constitution, where neither the terms nor the implications of the instrument disclose any such restriction.  Such a power is denied to the courts, because to concede it would be to make the courts sovereign over both the constitution and the people, and convert the government into a judicial despotism." 

Having commented on Clifford's statement above, I'll break here because this post is getting longer than a blog post can be and have any realistic expectation that it will be read. 

I just barely remember the Edsel While It Was Happening Because It Was Born A Joke

WORD ON THE WEB IS ELON'S "TRUCK" is a bigger flop than Edsel Ford's  posthumous namesake.  And the stories are coming out as Musk's insanely overhyped and Trump-regime permitted con job in "AI" is crashing and ruining those who bought into it. Only the rare surviving Edsels are favored by a niche in the classic car collecting and restoring hobby,  I doubt Elon's Edsel is going to be keeping one running will probably be a harder thing to do.

Edsel Ford is remembered as a joke, largely because of a car produced about a decade after his death but, from what I read this morning, he was something of a real innovator and business success, having pushed things like the very successful Model A and innovations in the engineering of cars which his total A-hole of a father opposed.  It's for completeness instead of fairness to Henry that Edsel was a bit of a Nazi collaborator until the US entered the war - Edsel, though, had had the insight to push starting an airplane division that made Ford part of the war effort.   Henry hadn't been able to imagine a commercial application for flying so he'd opposed that. 

That is certainly something I doubt anyone will say about Elon Musk whose greatest skill is in shaking down governments to give him business and money.  Every time there is something about Elon Musk, his image . . . . Nazi salute, I can't believe he ever had and still has the same kind of cult of worshipers that so many other anti-saints of capitalism have had.   The guy, on top of being a total sex creep in his white-supremacist white, drug-habit weight fluctuating body, on top of being a white supremacist Nazi who, thanks to Trump and the Roberts Court may well top Hitler's body count in those he will end up as having killed, and a Nazi saluting douche-bag.   He is an idiot savant at being a grifter.   

I was a huge skeptic of the idol of affluent cyber enthusiasts,  Steve Jobs, who was a total asshole in so many ways but he was nothing like the plague on the world that Musk is.  

That other conman, P.T. Barnum got his estimate wrong, there aren't enough minutes to account for the number of suckers in the world,  not by a long shot.  And so many of them are affluent capitalists in the developed countries, enough for them to be a danger to the world.   As it is, dangerous enough as ignorant white-supremacists are,  those who have been to college are a lot more dangerous. 

I think it's unfortunate that Elon's "truck" won't have a two-syllable name to turn it into a joke that slips off the lips as easily as "Edsel".  I've thought of Elsel, Lonsel, etc.  I read in Wiki that Marianne Moore was asked by the Edsel team for suggestions in naming - what she is said to have come up with would make me think less of her poetry though that's pretty uneven already.   If Musk was known as a wino instead of a ketamine addict I'd float "Muskatel" because I think a late stage wino could have drawn up a better truck - I've heard that Musk was the one who drew it though that might just be internet myth.    

Just for something a little different.  I've got lots of typing to do before the next part of the Marbury bashing series comes out.  

Posted Without Apology No Explanation Needed

 

A Perfect Illustration Of Faulkner's Quote Provided By The Court

WILLIAM FAULKNER FAMOUSLY wrote, "The past is never dead.  It isn't even past, " in one of his decidedly lesser works,  Requiem For A Nun.  While the novella and, later, play didn't take, the line did, certainly because it so perfectly matches human experience in life.   

As I said last week in this series going over the use by conservative to reactionary to genteel racist-fascist use of the power the Supreme Court invented for itself to nullify duly adopted laws of the U.S. Congress, the entire history of the United States under the Constitution could very accurately,  and I hold far more importantly be told in terms of the struggle against the Constitution of 1787. 

From the Jeffersonian "revolution of 1800 through the abolitionist and Women's Suffrage and workers-rights movements, other movements to demand and all too temporarily win some measure of equality - what the great Reese Waters calls "freeish" only to have the Supreme Court mow down the decades and scores of years and centuries of struggle and progress, in almost every case for exactly those whose privilege to enslave, cheat, rob and oppress was either embedded in the Constitution from the start or it was read into it by courts and at times presidents and congresses - it would be interesting to study what the "textualist-originalist-BS flinging "justices" have done when those presidential and legislative inventions favor the wealthy, white supremacist, etc. as opposed to when those oppose the interests of the elites but my time is short.

In the footnotes included in my last post in the continuing series going through Louis Boudin's 1911 analysis of the history and legal arguments against the Marbury power grab by the Supreme Court was one for the 1905 book, The American Judiciary by Simeon E. Baldwin.  In it he gives a partial list of the federal laws which up to that date had been overthrown under the Marbury power the Court gave itself.  It's a good illustration of the use to which the Court has put that power once the Taney Court burst the dam holding it back in the Dred Scott decision.  I have reproduced what he said, verbatim, though I have changed his format for ease of reading.  

 The number of statutes which have been judicially pronounced in whole or part invalid in the United States is very large. Among the Acts of Congress which have fallen in this manner and have been made the subject of elaborate opinions may be mentioned the provision in the original Judiciary Act giving the Supreme Court of the United States greater original jurisdiction than the Constitution provided (the Marbury case); 

-  the Act of 1865, excluding from practice in the United States courts attorneys who could not take the  "iron-clad oath" that they had not supported the South in the Civil War;
 

- the Legal Tender Act of 1866;
 

-the Act of 1870, to protect the colored voter;
 

- the Civil Rights Act of 1875 ;  

 

- the Trade Mark Act of 1876;
 

- and the Income Tax Act of 1894.
 

Fifteen others of less importance have fallen by the same sword. 

The Supreme Court of the United States has also set aside in the same manner, as inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States, over two hundred statutes passed by States. 

Of the twenty-one acts of Congress thus declared unconstitutional, the decisions as to all but two were rendered after 1830; of the State statutes all but twenty-six. The fourteenth amendment has added largely to the list of the latter since its adoption in 1868.  

 

Maybe you can see that even someone like Baldwin who, on balance, defends the Marbury power grab has noted the fate of probably the most important of Constitutional Amendments in the history of the country when the "interpreting" Court gets hold of them.  

Since it's a perfect illustration of the implications of Faulkner's quote in regard to how the Supreme Court has been the reliable nullification of hard fought for progress towards equality - including in the Civil War and the great and extremely long post-bellum civil rights struggle -  I will present an official view of one of those cases,  the Civil Rights Act of 1875

 Here, from the US Senate website, until the Republican-fascists - never to be confused with the Radical Republicans of Charles Sumner's generation - take it down for, you know "DEI."  

Civil Rights Act of 1875

Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act in 1870 as an amendment to a general amnesty bill for former Confederates. The bill guaranteed all citizens, regardless of color, access to accommodations, theatres, public schools, churches, and cemeteries. The bill further forbid the barring of any person from jury service on account of race, and provided that all lawsuits brought under the new law would be tried in federal, not state, courts.

Sumner predicted that the Civil Rights Act would be the greatest achievement of Reconstruction. “Very few measures of equal importance have ever been presented,” he proclaimed. Unfortunately, Sumner did not live to see the fate of his bill. He died of a heart attack in 1874—just 63 years old. “Don’t let the bill fail,” the dying Sumner pleaded to Frederick Douglass and others at his bedside. “You must take care of [my] civil rights bill.”

In the months following Sumner’s death, Congress debated the bill. As another Republican senator from Massachusetts, George Boutwell, explained, the Reconstruction amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution) “did limit the power of the States; they did extend the power of the General Government,” but lawmakers in Washington failed to agree on how far the power of the federal government should be extended. After long and at times heated discussions on the Senate floor, the bill’s supporters agreed to drop one of the more contentious components of the bill, which would prohibit segregation in public schools. Another contentious debate in the Senate centered on the question of whether or not Congress had the constitutional right to define the composition of juries selected for state courts.

The Senate brought the bill to the floor for a vote in late February 1875. Perhaps as a last gesture of respect for the departed Charles Sumner, for whom securing civil rights had been a lifelong pursuit, the Senate passed the bill with a vote of 38 to 26 on February 27, 1875. The bill became law on March 1, 1875. The new law required: “That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” The second section provided that any person denied access to these facilities on account of race would be entitled to monetary restitution under a federal court of law.

The Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1883. In a consolidated case, known as the Civil Rights Cases, the court found that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted Congress the right to regulate the behavior of states, not individuals. The decision foreshadowed the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision in which the Court found that separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional.

Not only has the Roberts Court replicated what the Court did in the infamous Plessey case, it is replicating what an even earlier court did to enforce American apartheid, which existed well before South Africa's infamous system gave it that name.   The Roberts Court has gone far past those 19th century Courts, however, in so many other areas.  They're overturning everything they can in an obvious attempt to destroy equality, democracy and, as I pointed out, even a republican form of government, in as baldly partisan a manner as could possibly be undertaken by a corrupt Congress or President.  In fact, they have done exactly what the most corrupt President and Congress in our history have asked it to do, especially in the Trump v. USA case in which they agreed with the outrageous claims of John Sauer which the lower court deliniated in the most revealing way possible.  They are no more a guarantee against the kind of tyranny that the Marbury power was allegedly invented to prevent, THEY ARE DOING EXACTLY WHAT THAT POWER WAS ALLEGEDLY THERE TO STOP WHEN IT WAS IMAGINED THE CONGRESS MIGHT DO IT.  

I don't think I've ever posted a Lincoln Project video before.

Maybe they're coming up in my Youtube sidebar because I've been reading a lot of what Lincoln said against the Dred Scott decision, condemning the Supreme Court's dishonest ruling based on lies, the Court majority, including slave-holders,  in favor of extending slavery throughout the country.   Here's Rick Wilson about his experience talking to People in Britain about the common corruption that is trying to establish fascism there as it is succeeding in doing here - not dissimilarly to what the Taney Court tried to establish in favoring the slave-power over equality and even the federalism that is embedded in the Constitution. 

 

And here's my comment on it.  

No one, especially no one in the media will admit that the foundation of all of this fascism is originally media, then social media carried and magnified LIES.   LIES.   And ironically, it started in a Supreme Court ruling that the biggest liars among the fascists want to repeal,  the Sullivan Decision that gave the media, first the New York Times but all of it the Supreme Court invented "right to lie."    The fact is that without that and other rulings of the Courts from Warren to Roberts, especially those knocking down clean elections laws from Buckley v. Valeo to Citizens United and beyond on the basis of their always malignant interpretation of the poorly written First Amendment.  THAT IS WHERE THIS ALL BEGINS, SO IT'S NO WONDER THAT THE TWO COUNTRIES WITH THE BIGGEST MEDIA LIE OPERATIONS WOULD BE VULNERABLE.   

On top of that are many other rulings of the ever more out of control Supreme Court, those lying about and altering the meaning of the 14th and other Amendments to the Constitution (ironically enough, right-wing Supreme Court legislating from the bench, such as conservatives howled against when the Warren Court made a few modest rulings in the direction of doing that in favor of equality, etc.). 

NONE of this will go away until that artificial, supreme court invented "right to lie" is abolished,  none of it will go away unless the Marbury power the Court invented with which they do things like strike down things like the truly bi-partisan clean elections laws passed after Watergate is decisively and permanently ripped away from the nine "justices" or any simple or minority of them have used to corrupt the country. 

In view of these conflicts, and of the disastrous results attending the first important use of the federal judicial power to annul an act of Congress in the Dred Scott case, it sounds like bitter irony when Judge Lurton says that this power has made us "for more than a century the most law-abiding people of the earth."

III concluded

The conclusion of the  third part of Louis Boudine's argument dealing with the actual issuance of the Marbury v. Madison decision and its immediate consequences in the years before its first significant use in the putrid Dred Scott decision, still infamous as likely the worst Supreme Court decision in the history of that court — which deserves to have its many, many atrocious rulings exposed instead of concealed by concentrating on merely the worst of those many rulings — ends by briefly mentioning the uses of it made by the state Supreme and other courts.  I have not researched those very much, apart from he dissent of Judge Gibson in Eakin v. Robb mentioned below.   

I will include at least one post about that, the lengthy document which is an extremely important piece of legal reasoning is as timely now as it was in the two hundred one years since it was issued.  It is far more insightful than any defense of the Court's power grab I've ever seen which depends mostly on lore, myths, habits, lies and outright fiction.   In fact, I've seen pro-Marbury scribblings that would seem to misrepresent Gibson's incisive reasoning against it as supporting the Supreme Court's original usurpation.  Lying is the mother tongue of lawyers and, especially, those who write about it academically and polemically.  

In the meantime the conflict over this power was raging in other fields.  The state courts in several instances attempted to follow up the logic of Marbury v. Madison.  The state courts were in this respect in a much better situation than the federal courts.  

The acts of the state legislatures were admittedly subject to review by the judiciary,  both federal and state, on the score of repugancy to the federal Constitution, treaties and statutes, in matters of federal character.  

From this it was but one step — and a step which a layman could not always see — to the power of review on the score of repugancy to the respective state constitutions.  And yet this step was not taken unopposed, even after Marbury v. Madison. 

The ensuing conflicts form one of he most interesting chapters in our history — a chapter unfortunately now entirely neglected, the common lot of all struggles which end in defeat.  

It may be said in general,  that the actual exercise of this power by the judiciary of the several states during the first fifty years after the adoption of the Constituion was very rare;  and it was used only under extraordinary circumstances;  and that its use almost always provoked great public excitement and sometimes entailed results of a more serious sort.  

In Kentucky it at one time led to the creation of two rival courts, each defying the other, and it almost led to the creation of two state governments. 

There are two footnotes with citations worth mentioning here:

1  In reference to these struggles, cf.  American State Papers Misc., vol ii pp 2, 6;  Sketch of Hon. Calvin Pease, Western Law Monthly, June, 1863, quoted in Cooley, Constitutional Limitations (7th ed.), pp 229, 230;  Niles Register, vol xxiii supplement, p. 155;  Collins History of Kentucky, vol i pp. 218 et weq.  

2  Baldwin,  The American Judiciary, pp 113-115.]

I hope to research this fascinating sounding topic in American history. 

In view of these conflicts, and of the disastrous results attending the first important use of the federal judicial power to annul an act of Congress in the Dred Scott case, it sounds like bitter irony when Judge Lurton says that this power has made us "for more than a century the most law-abiding people of the earth."

I have mentioned that Horace Harmon Lurton had been a Confederate who waged insurrection against the United States and the Constitution, such was his notion of abidance to the law.   If it hadn't been for the actions of two of the worst presidents of the 19th century, Andrew Johnson and Rutherford Hayes, he may have remained ineligible to hold public office for the rest of his life.   

It would be interesting to go over whether the relevant provisions of the Supreme Court sliced, diced, minced, rinsed, denatured, etc. 14th Amendment was relevant to him being on the Court as an abstract question.  He certainly gave aid and comfort to those who waged war against the Constitution of the United States, which is an explicit bar for someone holding federal office contained in its text and, I'd bet, in the legislative record of its drafting and approval by Congress.  

Though, as it was always the case when it was a matter of the slave-power, which persisted in slightly changed form through until the mid-1960s and has been revived by the Roberts Court, almost everything that favors the wealthy and the powerful against the powerless,  the Constitution doesn't seem to apply, even when it so obviously does.   

And among the infamous things the Roberts Court did was to green-light the most culpable and extreme insurrectionist since the end of the Civil War, Trump's, again taking the presidency from which he waged an insurrection against the Constitution.   Even the bloodiest and worst of the Confederates' insurrection against the Constitution and, far more importantly, the country cannot be said to match Trumps' which was waged as president to overturn an election and remain in power.   If the law was not an ass before the Roberts Court,  it's a whole team of them now. 

In most of the states, however the power in question, although generally asserted, was not used at all during the first half of Judge Lurton's "more than a century."  

This was the case, for example, in Pennsylvania, then the leading state of the Union.  During the half-century following the adoption of the United States Constitution the Pennsylvania courts did not declare a single law unconstitutional, although the judges, with one notable exception, asserted that right.  

There may have been other exceptions, for it is probable that the doctrine was not quite so universally accepted even by the judiciary,  either in Pennsylvania or elsewhere, as it is now imagined; but the one exception known to us is that of Judge John B. Gibson, for  any years judge of the Pennsylvania supreme court, part of the time its chief justice, and one of the ablest men who ever sat on that renowned bench.  

His opinion, officially stated in 1825, is a most convincing (and in my judgment quite unanswerable) argument against the existence as well as against the expediency of the power of the judiciary to review legislation under any circumstances.  

Its historical importance, however, lies in the fact that, nearly a quarter of a century after Marbury v. Madison, one of the three judges who then composed the highest court of the great state of Pennsylvania, in an official judicial opinion, denied the existence of the power asserted by Marshall.  And it is not without historical interest, as an evidence of the spirit of his time and commentary upon the changed spirit of ours, that Judge Gibson's views did not impede his promotion to the chief-justiceship of his state. 

Maybe We Should Start Talking About "Paulism"

 "Dr. Rand Paul" is jealous because DR. Anthony Fauci is a real doctor,  one of the most respected doctors in his field in the world for more than a half a century,  not one that is licensed by his own pseudo-medical agency.

The Republican-fascists are outdoing the late Senator Joe McCarthy and HUAC by miles and miles.   Will George Clooney do a movie about it?    Not unless they go after Hollywood figures would be my guess.  

I wouldn't answer their questions,  not with them having stated their intentions to prosecute without having any evidence of any crime.   I wouldn't have been as polite in opening as Dr. Fauci was, but, then, he's a lot nicer than I am.   

I wonder if Susan Collins and the other "moderate" fascists will vote to hold him in contempt of the Senate.   These days I don't know how anyone with a sense of moral awareness could be in any other state in regard to that bunch of windbags. 

Remembering Thirty Six Years Ago

I HAVE BEEN looking for a quote I remember reading from the very late and,  it would seem, largely forgotten giant of my youth and middle age,  John Kenneth Galbraith which said, in substance, that it was a mistake for liberals to depend on the Supreme Court as much as they had become in the habit of doing instead of depending on winning elections.   How much of that habit was the result of the non-stop PR from the ACLU asking for us to fund their brave fight for the rights of Nazis, gun-lovers, pornographers and on behalf of the wealthy to put as much money as they wanted into elections, I wonder.   I will have more to say about that as I have from the first post I ever posted online.  

I haven't found it though I found a reference to him saying it in the first issue of The American Prospect magazine,  though I've searched their site I haven't tracked down the quote yet.  But I did find this worth reading article, How to Win Elections: Integrity as a Political Ploy, which might be useful to not only those who want to win campaigns but to we the liberal to leftish, . . . . to Christian socialist Voter.  

This passage is one I'm sure I'll remember the next time James Carville opens his mouth though I could name dozens of those I recall it applying to equally,  maybe I'll look for my post in which I condemned Democratic campaign operatives who touted the benefits of strategic losing of elections during the years when Galbraith was alive to hear that bullshit 

Speaking out of personal experience and acquaintance going back to James Aloysius Farley, I am persuaded that the self-styled political expert is, in most respects and in most instances, a compulsively articulate idiot. His reputation, when separated from his unlimited and intellectually unsupported self-confidence, depends on his having been accidentally on the winning side in the last election and thus being qualified now to help lose the next.

The advice that this self-admitted wizard gives his candidate and his coworkers is always the same. It is based on the one thing in which he is unquestionably accomplished, namely simple arithmetic. Subtract votes from the other side, add them to your totals and, mirabile dictum, you have a majority. 

From this, accordingly, the strategy. You abandon your own supporters and their aspirations and desires — they are deemed to be yours anyway — and put on as impressive as possible an imitation of the opposing candidate and his program. There is always thought to be something clever, even deviously brilliant, about thus setting aside one’s own beliefs and principles along with those of the candidate. The press responds wonderfully: “That fellow is certainly politically adept.” The name of Machiavelli is invoked by the many who have never read him. Such praise then reinforces the political magician in his error and, needless to say, in his self-esteem, and, sadly, it also impresses the candidate.

Speaking of ACLU BS, the idea that the press is the friend of the left and those who the left either serves or it is no left at all, the underclass,  is in almost all cases complete bullshit.   They're corporate whores who know one thing above all, which side their own bread is buttered on.   The "right to lie" which the "civil libertarians" won for them is one of those backfiring Warren Court rulings I mention below  

Also, I try to remember to capitalize "Voter" and the noun "Vote" because it is always forgotten that those are the very trunk of legitimate government.  Without the real consent of the majority, those three branches including the goddamned Supreme Court are only a muslin tree under a climate change burning sky.

but the second is usurpation

I apologize for the length of this post, which is probably a mistake because some of you will see this and decide not to read it.  But I think it's at the heart of the problem and I give what I think will have to be done if the recent decrees from the Roberts Court turn out to be as disastrous as I fully believe they will be.   They are certainly headed in that direction,  though MS-Now lawyers and liberal and even liberalish journalists are holding on to any of the impotent and always calculating hedgings and dodges that the Roberts Court is taking in light of the disasters it has already created as if those are life preservers for the democracy they are as intent on destroying as the most anti-democratic of the Federalists were in the last years of the 18th century.   

I AM GOING to start off with the footnote on the beginning of the third section of Louis Boudin's argument, in which he lays out the terrible and momentous though rather banal case Marshall used to invent the Marbury power, claiming the right of the Supreme Court to act in a legislative role and nullify a duly adopted law of the Congress and president.  Note that Marshall as John Adams' the last Federalist Party president's Secretary of State had a direct role in the court-packing in the last hours of his Federalist Party's in control of the presidency - it never again had that control of the elected government, such was the potency of the Jeffersonian revolution in its democratic expansion of the heretofore elite favoring meaning of the Constitution.  

But the Federalists lived on in the Supreme Court under Marshall. That influence lasted there, several decades in living action and ever since in Supreme Court influence on the course of the country.  Which is one of the worst things about Supreme Court made law and the nullification of legislative law, Congresses get voted out of office and the evil they do has a good chance of getting overturned by something like the will of the majority.  Courts and the conservative to reactionary inclinations and habits of lawyers, judges and, worst of all, "justices" aren't even reliably overturned by even Constitutional Amendments as the history of the 14th Amendment in the hands of an aristocratic Court proves.

I have every confidence that that is relevant to Marshall inventing a power for the use of his political side especially as it turned out it could never, again, win the control of the elected branches it had had.  It's certainly relevant to both the use of such powers - and those which the court erected on top of this first power-grab - in both the Rehnquist and Roberts Court when the scope of its danger have become indisputable to anyone honest enough to admit that and the clearly partisan nature of Republican controlled Courts in the last half century.   

Though, as you might know from my criticism of a lot of the atypical supposed civil liberties rulings of the Warren and Berger Courts, I don't put much stock in the wisdom of "liberal" Courts, either. 

1.  The facts of this celebrated case, in so far as they are material to understanding of the decision, were as follows.

After the great victory of the Republicans in the election of 1800 — "the Revolution of 1800" as Jefferson called it — the Federalists [the losers of that election] utilized the brief term of power which was left to them to remodel the federal judicial system and to fill the federal courts with their partisans.  [Among the reforms desperately needed is the shortening of the length between someone losing the presidency in an election and their end of term.] As part of that work they created, by an act passed February 21, 1801, certain justiceships for the District of Columbia;  and one William Marbury, the plaintiff in the case, was appointed to one of these justiceships.  His nomination was confirmed by the Senate March 3, the last day of the Adams administration, and his commission was signed that night by the president and sealed by Marshall, the secretary of state.  On that night Marshall himself was commissioned as chief justice of the United States.  Marbury's commission, however, was left undelivered for lack of time;  and when Jefferson took office he forbade its issuance, on the ground that the appoitnment did not take effect until the delivery of the commission, and he was therefor free to revoke it. 

Marbury then applied to the Supreme Court, now headed by Marshall for a mandamus compelling Madison, Jefferson's secretary of state, to issue to him his commission.  To the order made by the court, commanding the new secretary of state to show cause why the mandamus should not issue,  Madison paid no attention.  After long deliberation, the court gave its decision in 1803, refusing to issue the mandamus.  In the opinion delivered by Marshall, the court based its decision, not on the contention put forward on behalf of the administration, that Marbury was not legally appointed and therefore not entitled to the commission, which contention it expressly overruled, but on the alleged lack of power in the Supreme Court to issue a mandamus.  In order to arrive at this latter conclusion, the court had to declare unconstitutional a statute passed by Congress giving the Supreme Court such power.  And it is this part of the opinion that has made it famous. 

III

In 1803 came Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Marbury v. Madison.  Since this is not an inquiry into the broad question whether or not the courts should have the power to declare legislation unconstitutional under any circumstances, but rather a historical sketch of he development of that power,  I shall not enter into a discussion of the merits of that decision.  Suffice it to say that historically it was, as Mr. Cotton calls it, "amazing;" and that as a matter of legal reasoning it has been pronounced by many eminent thinkers unsatisfactory.

Nearly twenty-five years later Chief Justice Gibson of he Pennsylvania supreme court, one of the ablest judges that ever sat on that great bench, called Marshall's argument "inconclusive."

Its "amazing" quality does not, however, exhaust its historical interest.  It was undoubtedly a turning point in the history of our political institutions. But it lacked much of being what it has since been often represented to be,  and what it is generally understood to be by students of and writers on the subject.  

The fact is, the Marbury power has, itself, become, under the Supreme Court's habits developed under its power to define the Constitution, WHATEVER THE COURT SAYS IT IS AT ANY GIVEN TIME.  And, as the history of Supreme Court law making has proved, that whatever it says it is tends always to become ever more bold and broad, the worst of the actions of the Roberts Court in destroying first egalitarianism, then democracy and, as it has started and with such irony, if you are merely going by the words used to describe it, the republican nature of the American government, itself. 

It is therefor worth our while to examine a little more closely into its immediate significance at the time when it was rendered. [The footnote above is placed here in the text.]

Its positive historical importance lies in the fact that here, for the first time in our federal history, a court undertook to base a decision on is alleged power to declare a law null and void for its alleged repugnance to the written constitution. 

The right previously asserted by some judges as an abstract proposition was thereby turned into a concrete power, to be reckoned with as a part and parcel of our political system.  It created the politico-legal foundation upon which the imposing edifice of that power as it now exists was gradually erected.  

Boudin wasn't exaggerating the effect that this power has had because it decisively altered the relationship between the Congress and the Court, putting the Court OVER THE CONGRESS, THOUGH ONLY FOR AS LONG AS THE CONGRESS COULD BE DUPED INTO ACCEPTING THAT DOMINATION AND THE COURT'S USURPATION OF LEGISLATIVE POWER TO ITSELF.  

It is among those ironies mentioned above that in my youth, as the Warren Court made a very few, sometimes ineffective,  sometimes back-firing rulings that the white supremacists and their increasing allies and then partners, the affluent Republican establishment didn't like, they howled and moaned and carried on about Courts making law from the bench,  something which the very same had eagerly accepted as the "Constitutional order" for the rest of its history when those rulings, in the vast majority of cases, favored their interests and ideologies from the time of Marshall and after Warren had gone.   No doubt the very members of the Roberts Court majority had regarded that kind of "making law from the bench" with disdain in their law school years and, probably, hearing their parents and grandparents on the topic, in their infancy.  That law-making from the bench includes nullifying legislation of the Congress and state legislatures as well as Court invented requirements to be carried out by the executive and followed by the Congress.  It has come to mean even the Supreme Court majority appointing a president of its party and making one an impune monarch with greater powers of law defiance than George III had when the founders and later framers made a revolution and threw him off their backs. 

But the power which was actually exercised in this case [Mabury v. Madison] was a very limited power.  Two points should be carefully noted.  In the first place, the law which the decision annulled was one peculiarly relating to the judicial department and it powers, much like the law which was questioned in Hayburn's case.  In this instance, however, the law conferred upon one of the federal courts, namely, the Supreme Court, a distinctly judicial power.  In fact it increased the power of the Supreme Court.

What was really decided, in Marbury v. Madison, was that the Supreme Court had received certain powers from the Constitution itself, which Congress would not be permitted by that court either to increase or to diminish.   One might very well agree with that contention, without attributing to the Supreme court a general right of reviewing the acts of Congress in matters of general legislation.  

From the claim that the judicial department is a co-equal branch of the government, and that its purely judicial powers and jurisdiction, in so far as they are expressly given by the Constitution, cannot be encroached upon by Congress, which is all that the case actually decided, it is a far cry to the claim that the Supreme Court is the sole interpreter of the Constitution and that its interpretation is binding on the legislative department in all matters of legislation.  

I will remind you that one of the issues in the Hayburn Case, objected to by the "justices" and district court judges who wrote to Washington complaining about the role the Congress had given them in matters of pensions was that it made their decisions subject to revisions by, first, the secretary of war (the executive) and then the Congress (the legislative) when under the Constitution the branches were held to be independent of each other and to have distinct roles.  

The "justices" and judges before Marshall went so far as to assert that the congress had and were "possessed of an equal right of opinion" in matters of law and the Constitution.  Since there is no such power given to the Court that was asserted by Marshall and the mountain of dubious and evil Court legislation built on it after he died, any such "power"  for the Congress could certainly be claimed to be there on the basis of "implication" as much for either other branch.  There have certainly been formidable scholars of the law and the Constitution in the Congress and, to a lesser extent, in the presidency. [Note: I DO NOT mean William Howard Taft here.]  I think Lincoln on the subject makes more sense than almost any of the champions of the Marbury power.  And he was never claimed to be a profound scholar of the Constitution though he was certainly among the greatest of all who ever held public office in the United States. 

In the second place, there is a wide difference, particularly in political matters, between the refusal to exercise a power which one's opponents believes to exist — which is all that those who did not agree with Marshall could say — and the actual exercise of a power which that opponent believes not to exist.  To the opponent the first may be unnecessary modesty or weakness or, at the very worst, neglect of duty;  but the second is usurpation.

A further point deserves notice.  The practical result of the decision, and the only result that the ordinary man could see, was a victory by Marshall's political opponents, the Jeffersonians.  Marbury, a Federalist appointee of Adams, applied to a court controlled by Federalists for a writ of mandamus compelling Jefferson's secretary of state to give him the commission signed by the outgoing Federalist secretary of state.  He claimed the writ under a law passed by the Federalists.  The Supreme Court annulled the Federalist law [part of the Court Act, which was written by a framer and adopted by a Congress in which a number of them sat as members as well as signed by a President who stood as first among the framers, which Marshall was not one of.] and non-suited the Federalist claimant.  Jefferson won a practical and substantial victory.  

What did it matter what reasoning Marshall employed in giving Jefferson the victory?  The "man on the street" knew nothing of Marshall's reasons.  And if he did, he did not care.  He seldom does care for such niceties.  He is so intensely "practical."  He may have thought that Marshall used a great deal of technical language and acute reasoning in order to save the face of the court.  In short, there is noting in the decision to bring its importance, whatever that was, home to the "practical man" — a fact which is often of controlling importance in historical events. 

Of course there were not wanting at that time those who could read the future.  One of them was Jefferson.  They saw the legal significance of this decision and its possible implications, and they denounced it in unmeasured terms.  Jefferson bade it defiance;  and it is safe to say that, had there been any attempt to do anything under this decision while Jefferson was president it would have provoked a conflict in which the judiciary might easily have come out second-best. 

That is certainly among the reasons that Marshall and his fellows on the Court, Federalist and other, didn't dare to use it while those for whom its illegitimacy and danger were in their active memory.  I will note that the Marbury power grab was not the only radical revision of the written Constitution undertaken by the Court and, especially, by Marshall.  That he is the most cited of all the previous and ancient Supreme Court "justices" is exactly because so much of what he wrote in decisions has become the real constitution, the one which is not written in the document that allegedly rules us but the one which consists of Supreme Court "interpretation" of that document and the laws that it has both knocked down and those it, in fact, legislated into existence from the bench.   That is what government by judiciary is, the reality under which we really live. 

But in fact nothing was done under the power asserted by the court in Marbury v. Madison during the following thirty-odd years of Marshall's chief-justiceship.  Why this was so, it is not necessary here to inquire.  I will say, however, in passing, that Marshall's position as a constitutional lawyer and statesman has been much misapprehended, owing to later attempts to base the judicial power on his decision in Marbury v. Madison.  

In my opinion Marshall's great place in the history of our country is due, not to any doctrine of the limitations of the legislative power, which others deduced from that decision more than half a century later and with but doubtful warrant, but to the liberal spirit in which he interpreted, and thus helped to develop, the legislative powers of Congress.

I have to insert that for a Chief "justice" who was so appalled at the Congress expanding the power of the Supreme Court in authorizing it to issue writs,  he had remarkably little reluctance for the "judicial department" meddling in the powers of the Congress.  Whether that was, ultimately, to the good or bad in those cases he did that,  I don't know.   But it is a good example of the quality of legal "reasoning" and its uses in the hands of those who are allowed to set the boundaries, ever changing of its authority to do what it wants to. 

Nor was the power to annul federal legislation used by the federal judiciary for many years after Marshall's death, not indeed until the troublous times that immediately preceded the Civil War.  During Marshall's chief-justiceship and under his successors, a number of state enactments were declared void because in conflict with the federal Constitution, and particularly because of attempted encroachments upon powers attributed to Congress; but the first case in which an ordinary law of Congress was declared unconstitutional was that of Dred Scott.  And the only case besides Marbury v. Madison in which any law can be said to have been declared unconstitutional before the fateful Dred Scott decision was the negligible case of Fereira v. the United States, decided but a few year earlier.  It will thus be seen that for at least half a century no attempt was made by the federal judiciary to exercise the power asserted in Marbury v. Madison.  And when it did act in this sense, it acted under extraordinary circumstances, in a attempt to solve by judicial decree an extraordinary political problem; and the attempt had extraordinary and disastrous results. 

If the consequences of the Roberts Courts' radical law-making from the bench, especially its openly partisan and, I won't mince words, anti-Constitutional consummation of the fascist, conservative Ivy League Law profs' and Federalist Fascist society unitary executive wet dream belongs on that list of extraordinary and disastrous results of Supreme Court supremacy would seem to me to be entirely likely.  If that brings about an eventual reform of the Constitution as momentous as those adopted in the wake of the Civil War,  I hope and pray that among those things adopted will be to once and for all abolish government by judiciary, and getting rid of the Marbury usurpation will only be one of the things they'll have to yank from the "justices."  

I will break up this long passage into two posts for ease of reading and commenting on it. 

It Got Late Last Night

 I accidentally posted the next to last draft of this morning's post last night before my last revision of it.  Doing that this morning, a few passages I wrote needed to get cleared up and some of my typos and elisions corrected.   Sorry for those who have read it in draft, I'll try not to hit the wrong button next time. 

It is absurd to assume that the many avowed opponents of judicial control of legislation who sat in the Convention would have agreed to the article without a murmur had they suspected that it contained even a part of the enormous power which our judiciary now exercises

WITH THIS SECOND part of Louis Boudin's argument we come right to the heart of the matter, the absolute fact that there is no explicit or honestly claimed implicit power given to the Supreme Court to overturn duly adopted federal laws in the text of the original Constitution of the United States.   As can be seen below, even a major scholar of the decisions of John Marshall, the inventor of that power,  had to admit that not only was there no such power given to the court in the Constitution, its presence in the document would have astonished the large majority of those who framed the document and who ratified it in the states - the claim of its universal authority over the People of the United States almost two hundred and fifty years after its ratification.   THAT IS A FACT WHICH HAS ALMOST UNIVERSALLY BEEN BURIED OR COVERED OVER OR SUPPRESSED AND I DOUBT MANY PROFESSIONAL LAWYERS OR LAW PROFESSORS WOULD DARE TO ASSERT THAT TODAY BECAUSE IT WOULD BE PROFESSIONAL SUICIDE TO DO SO.   

I have said that its insertion into the real Constitution, not the document that was drafted in 1787 or ratified in the months after it was put out for consideration or even as amended in the prescribed manner, but the constitution that has real and powerful effects which is a creation of the Supreme Court,  that its imposition on the United States was first by stealth, the court waiting thirty-seven years before springing it on the country in its first significant use in the Dred Scott decision.  And after that in increasing use of it on behalf of slavery, white supremacy,  the wealthy, employers against employees, men wishing to dominate Women, for those prejudiced against minorities and in the present centuries by Republican "justices" to first appoint a president who lost an election of their own party, to reimpose Jim Crow (now John Crow in "honor" of the author of our new apartheid, Mr. Chief "justice" John Roberts) and in other ways ensure the dominance of the minority of voters and up to and including creating a monarchy in Trump v. USA so that the worst president in our history could run a reign of crime and terror such as we have certainly not known since the era of slavery.  

It is that financial, ideological and power interest that the wealthy and already powerful have in maintaining the Marbury power that leads to the case that it is illegitimate being forbidden, a taboo which, if broken by those with the ability to refuse to follow it must be suppressed.  

To an extent all Constitutional lawyers and scholars, whose stock and trade is in THE LORE of the law as that has grown up, have a financial and prestige stake in maintaining the many lies you have to tell to hold it up, one of the reasons I have said that I doubt any lawyers among those in Congress or in the presidency would even consider doing that.   Just as in the early years under the Constitution, when those who actually wrote and adopted it were alive to be in Congress and in the presidency was a new world, the overturning of Marbury would created a new world in the law, in government, in the culture of those institutions and would require a lot of the old junk built up in rulings and law theories be scrapped - something that science does regularly but with far more reluctance than is generally acknowledged.   

I'm sure many a lawyer would hate having to do the reading AND THINKING that would come with that.  Entire careers of academic scribbling would become moot. 

Though I will point out that with the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts overturning vast areas and even a centuries worth if not more of that lore and habit,  we are already in uncharted and far more dangerous waters than anyone would have guessed thirty years ago.  

We don't have much of a choice but to go in a different direction if we are not going to lose democracy, admit that we've rejected equality and even, ironically considering the claims of the likes of "justice" Lurton, a government of laws and not of corrupt men whether in black robes or the mad and stupid king they have imposed on us. 

I could say a lot more but I'll give you the next section without much breaking in. 

 II 

Turning now from pre-convention history to the Constitutional Convention itself, and to the document which that convention framed, the candid student must admit that there is absolutely no evidence whatever of any intention on the part of that body to invest the judiciary with any sort of control over federal legislation or over state legislation in matters admittedly within the competence of the states.  And even if it be assumed, as it is commonly assumed to-day, that in those matters in which state legislation was made subordinate to the federal Constitution and laws it was the judiciary, rather than any other federal governmental department, that was to act as guardian of federal power against state aggression, there is not the slightest evidence that the framers intended to confer upon the judiciary anything approaching the degree of control over state legislation which in later times and by slow expansion of "implied" authority the judges came to exercise. 

There undoubtedly were some men in the Convention who favored the investing of the federal judiciary with general revisory powers over legislation;  but all attempts to make the judiciary part of the legislative power of the federal government failed signally and had to be abandoned by their sponsors.

The provisions of the Constitution as they now stand contain no reference whatever to any such powers, either expressly or by obvious implication.  and there is ample historical proof that — whatever the hopes of some, from the complete silence of the document, as to possible future development — the great majority of the framers never suspected that a general power of the judiciary to control legislation could be interpreted into the new Constitution.  

They evidently assumed that such an extraordinary power could not be exercised unless expressly granted.

The judiciary article as finally formulated was adopted without a dissenting vote and almost without discussion.  It is absurd to assume that the many avowed opponents of judicial control of legislation who sat in the Convention would have agreed to the article without a murmur had they suspected that it contained even a part of the enormous power which our judiciary now exercises.  Richard Spraight for one, whose fiery denunciation of this power I have quoted above, would have made the halls in which the Convention met ring to the echo with his emphatic protest, had he suspected any such implications.  

And it is equally certain that had the Convention given to the courts that power, either expressly or by necessary implication, apparent to the ordinary mind, the Constitution would have been overwhelmingly rejected by the people.

A careful examination of all the evidence on the subject now extant leads to the conclusion that the Constitution was adopted by the Philadelphia Convention, and ratified by the people of the states, without any belief, without even a suspicion on the part of the great majority of those voting for it, whether in or out of the Constitutional Convention,  that it contained any such implications.  

Even Hamilton, who saw more clearly than did the others the possibilities arising from the silence of the document on this vital point, probably never dreamed of any development of the judicial power as has taken place since his day.  Mr. Joseph P. Cotton , Jr., puts the case rather mildly when he says, in his introductory essay to the latest edition of John Marshall's constitutional decisions, in speaking of Marbury v. Madison

"Common to this conception of the powers of our courts now is, it is hard to comprehend the amazing quality of it then.  No court in England had such a power;  there was no express warrant for it in the words of the Constitution;  the existence of it was denied by every branch of the government and by dominant majority of the country.  Moreover, no such power had been clearly anticipated by the framers of the Constitution, nor was it a necessary implication from the scheme of government that had been established." 

OK, I have to break in here to point out that if there was a hidden passage in the Constitution as it would have had to be to find the Marbury power in it,  then the Constitution has to be held to be a sham and a con job, something sold to the American People the way that a sleazy lawyer writes up a contract with language to confuse and dupe the signer into agreeing to things they have no idea they are agreeing to but which a sleazy judge would claim they clearly agreed to and held it to be legally binding.   You can't have it both ways, either that language is neither there nor implied or the framers were con men as I would hold that the Supreme Court has been in creating such junk as the Marbury power, corporate person-hood, . . . presidential immunity and a Constitutional right for office holders to accept bribes for their acts as long as the loot is delivered after the act is taken. 

I think the "amazement" in light of the clear judicial modesty (including as seen below) in the pre-Marshall judiciary as opposed to the arrogant boldness of the courts that came later is a direct product of that original judicial creation of that power for itself. 

Mr. Cotton may well call the decision in Marbury v. Madison "amazing,"  for prior to that decision the federal judiciary itself did not claim to have obtained the powers in question by the adoption of the Constitution.  

Hayburn's case, so-called gives a fair picture of the way in which the judges themselves regarded the relative positions of legislature and judiciary, under the government established by the Constitution, during the first years of its adoption.  

The consideration of that case should be prefaced by the remark that, upon the adoption of the Constitution, and because the powers now under consideration were not then believed to have been granted by the Constitution, the federal judiciary was considered of little importance, and so inferior and subordinate to the legislative and executive departments that our first presidents had great difficulty in getting men of high standing to accept position on the United States Supreme Court.  The judges themselves were evidently in fear of encroachments by the legislative department upon their dignity and prerogatives.  That was the atmosphere in which arose the following facts, which are usually referred to as "Hayburn's case."

The first United States Congress passed an at "to provide for the settlement of the claims of widows and orphans barred by the limitations theretofore established, and to regulate the claims to invalid pensions."  Under the provisions of this act the claims were to be passed upon by the federal circuit courts, whose decisions were to be subject to the consideration of the secretary of war, and, if the secretary saw fit, to suspension, and to the revision of Congress, itself.  

The question of unconstitutionality, in the modern sense of the word, was not involved. 

But the judges saw in this act of Congress an encroachment upon the dignity and independence of the judicial department.  For this view there was good reason; for if the duties assigned to the judges were regarded as non-judicial and ministerial,  it was not fit that such a burden should be imposed upon them;  and if, on the other hand, these new duties were regarded as judicial, the independence of the courts was endangered by assigning to the executive and legislative departments power to revise judicial decisions. 

What were the courts to do?  We can readily imagine what they would do now, in any similar emergency.  What they actually did then shows how far we have traveled from the points of view held by the men of Massachusetts and of Virginia and of Maryland, who formed this government of ours. 

The members of the circuit court for the district of New York (Mr. Jay, chief justice of the United Sates,  Mr. Cushing, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, and Mr. Duane, district judge) stated, in writing, their objections to the law.  They held that the duties which Congress had assigned to the court were "not judicial, nor directed to be performed judicially,"  and that the court as such could not perform them.  

But, they said, "as the judges desire to manifest, on all proper occasions, and in every proper manner, their high respect for the national legislature," they would execute this act in the capacity of commissioners.  And they proceeded to perform the duties imposed upon them. 

The members of the circuit court for the district of Pennsylvania (Messrs. Wilson and Blair, associate justices of the United States Supreme court, and Mr. Peers, district judge) and the members of the circuit for the district of North Carolina (Mr. Iredell, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, and Mr. Sitgreaves, district judge) declined to act;  and they sent "representation" to the president, explaining their apparently insubordinate conduct.*  These "representations are strange reading to the lawyers of to-day.  We are used to different language from members of the "most august judicial tribunal in the world."

The matter was afterwards brought up by the attorney-general before the United States Supreme Court, on the question whether the judges had a right to decline to act.  And the official report says, that, although the judges were all agreed as to the unconstitutionality of the law, "the Court observed, that they would hold the motion under advisement until the next term; but no decision was ever pronounced, as the legislature at an intermediate session, provided, in another way, for the relief of the pensioners." 

No decision pronouncing an act of legislation void because repugnant to the federal constitution was rendered prior to Marbury v. Madison.  

The case of Calger v. Bull decided in 1789, in which an act of the Connecticut legislature was upheld is interesting,  just as Otis's argument in the Paxton case is interesting, because in delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court Mr. Justice Chase went out of his way to give his views on the abstract proposition of the right of the courts to annul legislation, irrespective of constitutional limitations, on the ground that it is "contrary to the first principles of the social compact."  The case is interesting, further, because in asserting obiter the authority of the court to declare unconstitutional laws void,  Mr. Justice Iredell described the authority "of a delicate and awful nature' and said that "the court will never resort to that authority but in a clear and urgent case."  To the view propounded by Chief Justice Chase, Justice Iredell took exception, saying:

"If, on the other hand, the legislature of the union or the legislature of any member of the union shall pass a law within the general scope of their constitutional power, the court cannot pronounce it to be void, merely because it is in their judgment contrary to the principles of natural justice.  The ideas of natural justice are regulated by no fixed standard;  the ablest and purest men have differed upon the subject; and all that the court could properly say in such an event would be, that the legislature (possessed of an equal right of opinion) had passed an act, which, in the opinion of the judges, was inconsistent with the abstract principles of natural justice. 

* I will give you the long footnote on this paragraph because it demonstrates what Boudin said and because it shows how strictly the first members of the Supreme Court and district courts, some of them framers of the Constitution, saw a far sharper line of demarcation that the later members of the Court, not framers, breached in the Marbury case. 

1. The "representation" which the Pennsylvania circuit court sent t the president reads as follows:

"To you it officially belongs to 'take care of the laws of the United States be faithfully executed,' Before you, therefore, we think it is our duty to lay the sentiments, which on a late painful occasion governed us with regard to an at passed by the legislature of the union. 
The people of the United States have vested in Congress all legislative powers 'granted in the constitution.' They have vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress shall establish, 'the judicial power of the United States.'  It is worthy to remark, that in Congress the whole legislative power of the Unites States is not vested.  An important part of that power was exercised by the people themselves, when they 'ordained and established the Constitution.'  This Constitution is 'the Supreme Law of the Land.'  This supreme law 'all judicial offices of the United States are bound, by oath and affirmation, to support.' 

" It is a principle important to freedom that in government, the judicial should be distinct from, and independent of, the legislative department.  To this important principle, the people of the United States, informing their Constitution, have manifested the highest regard.  They have placed their judicial power, not in Congress, but in 'courts.' They have ordained that the 'Judges of those courts shall hold their offices during good behavior,' and that 'during their continuance in office, their salaries shall not be diminished."

"Congress have lately passed an act, to regulate, among other things, the claims to invalid pensions.' Upon due consideration, we have been unanimously of this opinion that, under this at, the Circuit court held for the Pennsylvania could not proceed. 

"1st.  Because the business directed by this act is not of a judicial nature.  It forms no part of the power vested by the Constitution in the courts of the United States;  the Circuit court must, consequently, have proceeded without constitutional authority.  2nd, Because, if upon that business, the court had proceeded, its judgments (for its opinions are its judgments) might under the same act, have been revised and controlled by the legislature, and by an officer of the executive department.  Such revision and control we deemed radically inconsistent with the independence of that judicial power which is vested in the courts; and consequently, with the important principle that is so strictly observed by the Constitution of the United States.

"These, Sir, are the reasons for our conduct.  Be assured that, though it became necessary, it was far from being pleasant.  To be obliged to act contrary either to the obvious directions of Congress, or to a constitutional principle, in our judgement equally obvious, excited feelings in us, which we hope never to experience again." 

You should notice that all they were doing in this was not to overturn legislation for the general welfare or affecting The People in general by judicial fiat, they were refusing to follow the law in a very restricted realm of judicial action.  No doubt the present court would refuse to follow any Congressionally passed and presidentially ratified code of ethics on the Court, they refuse to even adopt a real and binding one instead of the absurd assertion that we can trust them to act ethically due to the fictitious "honor" of "their Honors" when the need for one is due to the fact that they have no honor that can be relied on.   

We can be fairly confident they would refuse anything that would make them actually do a full years work for the exorbitant pay and benefits they get on top of the grift they get from billionaires and millionaires. 

P.S.  I am very much tempted to go over the far more ethical "justice" Kagan's claims about the ethical conduct and especially her claims about the "non-political"  conduct of the "justices" which I'll leave by saying, considering this past term alone,  it was a steaming pile of manure.   Even the best lawyers have lying as the mother tongue of their profession.