Dear Editor,
Their are a number of powerful political people who would basically like to subvert and undermine the U.S. Constitution without actually amending it in a way that’s provided for in the constitution itself. There was an individual person who accomplished that by himself over 200 years ago. His name was John Marshall, who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court when the Marbury V. Madison case was decided in 1803 .
This decision stated that the U.S. Supreme Court has the power to decide whether a law passed by congress and signed by the president can remain in effect. In other words the court can erase this law by declaring it unconstitutional. Of course there’s nothing expressly stating or even impliedly stating in the constitution that the court has this power. It’s obvious by reading his decision that Marshal felt that the constitutional convention had failed to consider this issue. Marshal ruled that the court has this right even though it is not found in the constitution. This properly should be considered ultra constitutional as opposed to unconstitutional if one’s describing what Marshal actually did.
Thomas Jefferson was quick to realize that this decision of Marshals’ actually destroyed the balance of power in our tripartite constitutional system and gave the judiciary much more power than our founders had intended it to have. For example in a 5 to 4 decision the Supreme Court could declare a law unconstitutional . That means actually one unelected person can dictate what laws are valid or not valid. Jefferson spent the rest of his life writing and talking about how wrong this decision was. He even felt that John Marshall’s 6 week course in law that he had taken at William and Mary College had not equipped him to render a decision such as this.Jefferson predicted that because of this decision judges would become despots(I.e. Little dictators).
Interestingly in school law you will essentially learn that the legal profession has virtually canonized Marshall as one of the patron saints of the profession! Marshall’s also considered the the father of the federal court system. Maybe you can now figure out why some lawyers and certainly most judges have such big egos. It is in their law profession DNA!
Dr. W. David
Herbert ESQ
Billings, Montana
