Constitutional Law Quotes
In 1832 the Supreme Court held that the state of Georgia could not remove Creek and Cherokee Indians from lands that had been guaranteed to them by a federal treaty. The president disagreed with the court, then headed by John Marshall:. Marshall could not do so without the executive. The Indians were illegally removed to Western lands.
In a 1949 dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago Jackson claimed the majority view would “convert the Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
See Daniel Webster and John Marshall for earlier expressions of this famous quotation: {37299} and {320000}. Also, Maurice L. Duplessis {600341} for a contrary view.
Vallandigham was urging Union soldiers to refuse to fight and serve. Lincoln had to approve all the death sentences of deserters from the army and there were few duties that troubled him more … so much so that he even violated the 1st Amendment responsiblities he had sworn to uphold. Based in this precedent and others, President Woodrow Wilson jailed critics of the First World War including the labor leader Eugene Debs.
Dodd observed that FDR expanded the power of the Presidency to deal with the emergency of the Great Depression, and like most Americans hoped that these measures would succeed. The Supreme Court limited some of the power expansion to the Executive Branch, but was the start of the huge Presidential power expansion that would continue through the Cold War and the War on Terror by Presidents of both parties.
Many politicians were arguing that giving the intelligence agencies more power to wiretap, bug and hack into personal communications despite the 4th Amendment’s strictures argued that the public was in rational fear of terror attacks and had a right to be protected.
