Since I’m not a lawyer, I always defer to actual lawyers on points of law. I’m sure your summary of cases is accurate. However, they seem intended to refute statements that I never made, as I was explicit is limiting my statements to the Supreme Court itself.
Mostly, though, my point has always been not on the technical basis of the law, but on the political climate that brought forth such a decision and the resulting standing of the judiciary. The decision itself was oddly meaningless: no cases finding laws unconstitutional would occur for a full half century. Politically, however, it upended everything.
I found an excellent exposition of the political history in the classic Bulwark of the Republic: A Biography of the Constitution, published in 1937 for the Constitution’s sesquicentennial, written by Burton J. Hendrick, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, one in History and two more in Biography. The book is biographical, in that it studies the people who made the laws more than an examination of the law itself, perfect for my purpose.
Adams, as mentioned above, pushed through a last-minute expansion of the federal courts, horrifying the states-rights worshipping Jeffersonians and putting Federalists into lifetime appointments. The battle was set before Jefferson took office. And his stance on judicial review was also set. “[W]ho was to say when the Constitution had been violated and that the laws so passed were null and void? The states themselves, replied Jefferson, acting through their legislatures.” Marshall was horrified in turn; having a law be legal in one state and not another would destroy the federal system. No big deal, said Jefferson, states were a limited federation in any case.
Jefferson tossed out Adams’ reorganization of the courts, as a first step toward eliminating all traces of Federalist power. Yet they were deeply worried that the Federalist Marshall Court would stymie them. So they expounded a doctrine that would undercut the court, announced by John Breckenridge of Kentucky in Congress. Each branch was sole interpreter of laws that affected it. [Echoes of this jaw-dropping assertion can be found in today’s political disputes, though Hendrick couldn’t know that.]
Enter dramatic irony. Justices of the Peace in Washington D.C. had not only to be appointed but their commissions delivered to the President. Fifteen of 19 got delivered. The Secretary of State in that last day rush left the other four on his desk. The name of the Secretary of State? John Marshall.
Poor William Marbury was one of the overlooked four. He went to the Court and asked for a write of mandamus ordering the current Secretary of State (James Madison) to deliver the commission and give him the job. (Which he didn’t much want since this was two years later. He’s a pawn.) Jefferson in effect said “hooray,” let Marshall rule that way. He would simply ignore it and put Marshall in his place, asking a generation before Andrew Jackson how the powerless Court could enforce the decision.
Marshall finessed the dilemma brilliantly, as I keep saying. By finding a technical loophole - that the Judiciary Act of 1789 had unconstitutionally extended the Court’s power of original jurisdiction - he ruled against both sides, cutting the legs out from under Jefferson.
Hendrick writes, “Thus the judiciary for the first time, after fourteen years of national existence, declared the right to set aside laws of Congress that violated the Constitution.” That’s the same narrow statement I’ve been making, but of course we could both be equally wrong. Just because I’ve been taught that by years of writing like Hendrick’s doesn’t make it automatically right. Nevertheless, I still assert after reading the objections that the case should be made that it is.
All the other things I actually wrote - that the case roiled the country, that it brought the Court into a co-equal status for the first time, that the decision was foundational in deciding what our form of government would be - also stand. Those are political statements rather than legal ones; they are sound history as well.