a right to withhold the commission at his pleasure; and it would be strange, indeed, if it was not intended to give him the power also to arrest its being put on record and delivered after he had signed it, if he saw good cause to do so. But it is not now important to weigh accurately the reasoning of the Chief Justice, which certainly partakes largely of the art and precision of special pleading; as the case was abandoned then, and no similar case has arisen for more than half a century. That the claim of Mr. Marbury and his associates, with ample facilities for its prosecution in the inferior tribunals within their reach, (Judge Cranch, the reporter of the case of Marbury _v._ Madison, a full believer in the judicial as well as the political infallibility of the Chief Justice, being the Federal judge in the District) should have been given up, after the determination with which it had been asserted, and the care and favor with which it had been considered and elaborated by the Chief Justice, would at the first blush seem not a little unaccountable. The fact of abandonment, in the absence of other explanation, would justify the inference that it was the result of a subsequent conviction that the proceedings were erroneous. But changes of opinion or disposition under such circumstances seldom arise, and the solution of their subsequent course is, I think, to be found in other considerations. The course pursued by the President afforded unmistakable evidence of his determination to resist at the threshold, and to the bitter end, the supervisory power of the judiciary over the other great departments of the Government, which was then for the first time sought to be introduced through the _ex parte_ proceedings in the case of Marbury _v._ Madison. With such a demonstration before them it became the Supreme Court and its supporters, before it committed itself more deeply in the attempt it had entered upon to control the action of the aroused democracy of the country represented in the executive and legislative departments of the Federal Government, to survey, with more care than had perhaps been hitherto used, the means of offense and defense with which the Constitution had invested each.