If, then, ... the constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature," the Judiciary must prefer it to a mere statute.
Albert Beveridge
The Public Record
Albert Jeremiah Beveridge was an American historian and United States senator from Indiana. He was an intellectual leader of the Progressive Era and a biographer of Chief Justice John Marshall and President Abraham Lincoln.
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Which must the court obey--the Constitution or the act altering that instrument?
The independence of the judges is now directly assailed....
I am not willing to be sacrificed by such popular tyrants....
Holding that secession was impracticable, he declared: "I am not satisfied that the thing itself is to be desired.
Politics are more improper and dangerous in a Court of Justice, if possible, than in the pulpit.
Political charges, prosecutions, and similar modes of official influence, ought never to have been resorted to by any party.
The fountains of justice should be unpolluted by party passions and prejudices.
The Court must be defeated and retreat from the attack; or march on, till they incur an impeachment and removal from office.
But our Republican frame of Government is so firm and solid, that there is reason to hope it will remain unshaken by the assaults of opposition, & the conflicts of interfering departments.
The late alteration of the federal judiciary ... and the recent change in our state constitution, by the establishing of universal suffrage, ... will ... take away all security for property and personal liberty ... and our republican…
Will justice be impartially administered by judges dependent on the legislature for their ... suport?
Marshall thus suggested the most radical method for correcting judicial decisions ever advanced, before or since, by any man of the first class.
This is indeed employing an elephant to remove an atom too minute for the grasp of an insect.
All governments require, in order to give them firmness, stability, and character, some permanent principle, some settled establishment.
The want of this is the great deficiency in republican institutions." In the American Government an independent, permanent Judiciary supplied this vital need.
All history proved that republics could be as tyrannical as despotisms; not systematically, it was true, but as the result of "sudden gust of passion or prejudice....
If we have read of the death of a Seneca under the ferocity of a Nero, we have read too of the murder of a Socrates under the delusion of a Republic.
But how can it be such, unless the laws, while they exist, are sacredly and impartially, without regard to popularity, carried into execution?" Only independent judges can do this.
Our property, our liberty, our lives, can only be protected and secured by such judges.
If men cannot be protected by the courts against "base calumniators, they will become their own avengers.
Every Senator knew how patronage and all forms of Executive inducement and coercion had been used by the Administration in the passage of most important measures--the Judiciary repeal, the Pickering impeachment, the Yazoo compromise, the…
He closed by pointing out the inducements to a National judge to act as a tyrannical tool of a partisan administration--the offices with which he could be bribed, the promotions by which he could be rewarded.
The demon of destruction has entered their courts of justice, and spread desolation over the land.
Our children see this and learn to imitate it....
Politicians like Albert Beveridge
