Such are the lawyer's facts of the case; it is the historian's facts about it which are today the interesting and instructive ones. Marshall, reversing the usual order of procedure, left the question of jurisdiction till the very last, and so created for himself an opportunity to lecture the President on his duty to obey the law and to deliver the commission. Marshall based his homily on the questionable assumption that the President had not the power to remove Marbury from office, for if he had this power the nondelivery of the document was of course immaterial. Marshall's position was equally questionable when he contended that the thirteenth section violated that clause of Article III of the Constitution which gives the Supreme Court original jurisdiction "in all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, and consuls, and those in which a State shall be party." These words, urged the Chief Justice, must be given an exclusive sense "or they have no operation at all." This position is quite untenable, for even when given only their affirmative value these words still place the cases enumerated beyond the reach of Congress, and this may have been their only purpose. However, granting the Chief Justice his view of Article III, still we are not forced to challenge the validity of what Congress had done. For the view taken a little later by the Court was that it was not the intention of Congress by this language to confer any jurisdiction at all, but only to give the right to issue the writ where the jurisdiction already existed. What the Court should have done, allowing its view of Article III to have been correct, was to dismiss the case as not falling within the contemplation of section thirteen, and not on the ground of the unconstitutionality of that section. Marshall's opinion in Marbury vs. Madison was a political coup of the first magnitude, and by it he achieved half a dozen objects, some of the greatest importance. In the first place, while avoiding a direct collision with the executive power, he stigmatized his enemy Jefferson as a violator of the laws which as President he was sworn to support. Again, he evaded the perilous responsibility of passing upon the validity of the recent Repeal Act in quo warranto proceedings, such as were then being broached. ¹ For if the Supreme Court could not issue the writ of mandamus in suits begun in it by individuals, neither could it issue the writ of quo warranto in such suits. Yet again Marshall scored in exhibiting the Court in the edifying and reassuring light of declining, even from the hands of Congress, jurisdiction to which it was not entitled by the Constitution, an attitude of self-restraint which emphasized tremendously the Court's claim to the function of judicial review, now first definitely registered in deliberate judicial decision.