Thomas Jefferson Quotes
The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruption's of time and party, its members would become despots.
Jefferson, Thomas. "Letter to William Charles Jarvis, 28 September 1820." The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Paul Leicester Ford, vol. 10, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1899, p. 160.
The highest court in New York.
Some of the Founding Fathers did not conceive of the kind of judiciary where Federal courts could nullify an act of the Congress by declaring a law unconstitutional. Morris was one. Others did. The Constitution is not very explicit on this point, but the nation has settled with a process that would have surprised Morris and a few others.
The Senate was investigating a scandal where the George W. Bush White House had induced the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, to fire 8 of their own political U. S. Attorney appointments because they had or were investigating/prosecuting Republican politicians for corruption or not prosecuting Democrats vigorously enough. Gonzalez took the responsibility for the firings but did “not remember” why each had been fired nor was there any record in the Justice Department indicating any shortcoming with their jobs. The White House political operatives refused to testify under oath citing “Executive Privilege.”
The drafters of the Constitution were well aware of this view of Montesquieu’s which was one of the main bases of separation of powers and checks and balances in America.
In 2002 the corrupt Indonesian Courts ruled that a very solvent Canadian company Manulife was bankrupt so that others could get control. The international financial and political community wanted the Indonesian government to intervene and reverse the rulings, but historically the courts had no independence and had been tools of the government.
The reference was to the Presidential power to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will serve beyond his term.
This constitution was written 7 years before the national constitutional convention. It shows that there was concern about the separation of powers in United States even before the Constitution was drafted. See {616750} for an even clearer statement of the separation of powers principle.
At that point in American History there were some who thought that the Congress was aggregating too much power. At the beginning of the 21st century we bemoaned a weak Congress and worried about an imperial and too powerful an executive while a few thought that the Judicial branch had become too powerful in “legislating from the bench.”
Hatch was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He had previously served as the second vice president of the United States under John Adams between 1797 and 1801. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation; he produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national levels.
