The Supreme Court Extends Its Reach

In 1801, just before the Federalist-dominated Congress turned over power to the Democratic-Republicans, it passed a new Judiciary Act. The act created six additional circuit courts and sixteen new judgeships, which President Adams filled with Federalist “midnight appointments” before he left office. Jefferson accused the Federalists of having “retired into the judiciary” and worried that “from that battery all the works of Republicanism are to be beaten down and destroyed.” Meanwhile John Marshall, chief justice of the United States (1801–1835), insisted that the powers of the Supreme Court must be equal to and balance those of the executive and legislative branches.

One of the first cases to test the Court’s authority involved a dispute over President Adams’s midnight appointments. Jefferson’s secretary of state, James Madison, refused to deliver the appointment papers to several of the appointees, including William Marbury. Marbury and three others sued Madison to receive their commissions. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Supreme Court ruled that it was not empowered to force the executive branch to give Marbury his commission. But in his decision, Chief Justice Marshall declared that the Supreme Court did have the duty “to say what the law is.” He thus asserted a fundamental constitutional power: that the Supreme Court had the authority to decide which federal laws were constitutional. The following year, the Court also claimed the right to rule on the constitutionality of state laws. In doing so, the Court rejected Democratic-Republicans’ claim that state legislatures had the power to repudiate federal law.

Over the next dozen years, the Supreme Court continued to assert Federalist principles. In 1810 it insisted that it was the proper and sole arena for determining matters of constitutional interpretation. Then in 1819, the highest court reinforced its loose interpretation of the Constitution’s implied powers clause in McCulloch v. Maryland. This clause gave the federal government the right to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” for carrying out the explicit powers granted to it by the Constitution. Despite Democratic-Republicans’ earlier opposition to a national bank, Congress chartered the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, and its branch banks issued notes that circulated widely in local communities. Legislators in Maryland, believing that branch banks had gained excessive power, approved a tax on their operations. Marshall’s Court ruled that the establishment of the bank was “necessary and proper” for the functioning of the national government and rejected Maryland’s right to tax the branch bank, claiming that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.”

By 1820 the Supreme Court, under the forceful direction of John Marshall, had established the power of judicial review—the authority of the nation’s highest court to rule on cases involving states as well as the nation. From the Court’s perspective, the judiciary was as important an institution in framing and preserving a national agenda as Congress or the president.