How was it, meantime, with the judiciary itself? Unfortunately, the Supreme Court had already been drawn into the quarrel. For, at the single December term, in 1801, held under the statute of that year, an application had been made to the court by four persons in the District of Columbia for a rule upon James Madison, Secretary of State, to show cause why a writ of mandamus should not issue requiring him to issue to these persons certain commissions as justice of the peace, which had been left in Marshall’s office undelivered at the time when he ceased to add to his present functions those of Secretary of State. They had been made out, sealed, and signed, and were supposed to have been found by Madison when he came into office, and to be now withheld by him. This motion was pending when the court adjourned, in December, 1801. Of course, a motion for a mandamus to the head of the cabinet, upon a matter of burning interest, must have attracted no little attention on the part of the new administration. Abolishing the August term served to postpone any opportunity for early action by the court, and to remind the judiciary of the limits of its power. At last the court came together, in February, 1803, and found the mandamus case awaiting its action. It is the first one reported at that term. Since Marshall had taken his seat, there had as yet been only five reported cases. All the opinions had been given by him, unless a few lines “by the court” may be an exception; and according to the new usage by which the Chief Justice became, wherever it was possible, the sole organ of the court, Marshall now gave the opinion in Marbury _v._ Madison. It may reasonably be wondered that the Chief Justice should have been willing to give the opinion in such a case, and especially that he should have handled the case as he did. But he was sometimes curiously regardless of conventions. If it be asked what was decided in Marbury _v._ Madison, the answer is that this, and only this, was decided, namely, that the court had no jurisdiction to do what they were asked to do in that case (_i. e._ to grant a writ of mandamus, in the exercise of their original jurisdiction), because the Constitution allowed to the court no such power; and, although an act of Congress had undertaken to confer this jurisdiction on them, Congress had no power to do it, and therefore the act was void, and must be disregarded by the court.[32] It is the decision upon this point that makes the case famous; and undoubtedly it was reached in the legitimate exercise of the court’s power. To this important part of the case attention will be called in the next chapter.