McCulloch v Maryland

6 Key excerpts on "McCulloch v Maryland"

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  Supreme Court Decisions

  Scenarios, Simulations, and Activities for Understanding and Evaluating 14 Landmark Court Cases (Grades 7-12)

  • Jeffrey D. Stocks(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ASE 1:

  THE POWER TO DESTROY

  MC CULLOCH V . MARYLAND (1819)

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003238379-1

  FOR THE TEACHER

  Quick Reference

  The Issue: Maryland state officials, unhappy with the existence of the U.S. bank, a competitor to their own chartered banks, levied a state tax against the federal bank. The bank’s cashier refused to pay the tax and was subsequently fined by the state of Maryland.

  The Players:

  James McCulloch—cashier of the Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States. Daniel Webster—McCulloch’s attorney. John Marshall—Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

  The Ruling: The court ruled in favor of McCulloch, with Marshall arguing that if a state is allowed to tax the federal government, then it is supreme over the federal government. Thus, it must not be allowed to do so. Or, as he wrote, “… the power to tax involves the power to destroy.”

  Significance: This case firmly established the supremacy of the national government over the states.

  Background

  The early landmark cases of the Supreme Court were sweeping in nature and laid the foundation for the practical concept of the application of the U.S. Constitution. Marbury v. Madison (1803), for example, solidified the court’s role in determining the constitutionality of law. That precedent having been set, the Supreme Court settled one constitutional dispute after another. McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) is important for several reasons. On its face, it established the dominance of the national government in the federalist system. In the court’s ruling, Chief Justice John Marshall noted that a state could not tax a national entity because “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.”

  On another level, however, this case showcased the power wielded by the president through lifetime appointments to the federal bench. The Federalist Party idea of a strong national government found life not through the democratic process, but through judicial fiat (creating law instead of interpreting it). The Federalist Party was all but dead by 1819, but its ideas of a strong judiciary, powerful central government, and flexible constitution lived on through Supreme Court Justices like John Marshall. The court asserted its own power (not listed in the Constitution) to interpret the Constitution in Marbury v. Madison (1803). It solidified the supremacy of the national government over state governments in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). Finally, in Gibbons v. Ogden

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  The American Supreme Court, Sixth Edition

  • Robert G. McCloskey, Sanford Levinson(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Story’s argument in the Martin case that national powers should be liberally construed enabled him to contend that Congress had a right to pass Section 25 and thus to make the Court the dominant tribunal of the nation. But his interest and Marshall’s in the doctrine of liberal construction went far beyond its use to bolster judicial status. They wanted to enhance national power in all respects, partly because this would simultaneously restrict the power of the states, but partly too because they anticipated awesome tasks for the nation and wanted to insure that it was constitutionally equipped to deal with them. And the Court’s success in accomplishing this aim must be attributed in no small degree to self-contradiction among the forces that opposed it. McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 is by almost any reckoning the greatest decision John Marshall ever handed down—the one most important to the future of America, most influential in the Court’s own doctrinal history, and most revealing of Marshall’s unique talent for stately argument. It involved a state tax on note issues of the Bank of the United States, which had been incorporated by act of Congress in 1816. The government argued that such a tax on a federal instrumentality was invalid and need not be paid. The state replied that the incorporation of the Bank exceeded Congress’s constitutional powers and that in any event the states could tax as they willed within their own borders. These contentions raised vast and difficult questions both for the present and the future. The Bank was viewed with special loathing by the states’ rights advocates; any decision upholding its claim to exist and denying the state’s claim to tax could be counted on to infuriate them. And not the least of their heated objections would be the familiar one that the Court had no power in spite of Section 25 to entertain the cause

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  The Constitution of the United States

  A Primer for the People

  • David P. Currie(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  McCulloch v. Maryland established a second implicit limitation on state authority: the states had no power to tax the Bank of the United States.

  The Court made little effort to show where this limitation was found in the Constitution. Chief Justice Marshall did mention the Supremacy Clause of article VI, which makes federal law supreme in case of conflict; but he identified no provision of federal law with which the state tax conflicted.

  Marshall made quite clear the practical ground for his conclusion: “The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” If the states could tax the National Bank, they could destroy it; and the framers never intended the federal government to be at the mercy of the states. The same reasoning later led the Court to hold the states without power to regulate the federal government.27

  Marshall was not deterred from his conclusion by the fact that the Bank of the United States was a largely private institution; it sufficed that the bank served to carry out functions of the central government. Nor did he rely on the fact that the tax in question placed the bank at a disadvantage by exempting its local competitors, arguing instead that any inquiry into the nature of the particular exaction was “unfit for the judicial department.” Justice Holmes’s riposte in arguing against an extension of the immunity recognized in McCulloch was telling: “The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits.”28

  There is a more fundamental argument, however, against the entire principle of federal immunity from state laws. Marshall was right that the framers could hardly have meant to allow the states to destroy the federal government, but no constitutional immunity was necessary to prevent that from happening. Even if the Constitution itself provided no immunity, Congress could protect the bank from destructive state taxation by legislation under the Necessary and Proper Clause.29

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  Judicial Review and Judicial Power in the Supreme Court

  The Supreme Court in American Society

  • Kermit L. Hall, Kermit L. Hall(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  45 Marshall upheld a federal statute and observed: “The power now contested was exercised by the first Congress elected under the present constitution… It would require no ordinary share of intrepidity to assert that a measure adopted under these circumstances was a bold and plain usurpation, to which the constitution gave no countenance.”

  In other respects, affirmative words have not been taken as negativing other objects than those affirmed, although they more generally have been so treated. For instance, Article I, section 8, clause 6 authorizes Congress “to provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States,” but this has not been construed as impliedly forbidding Congress to impose penalties for other reasons.46

  But more practically, Marshall’s construction of Article III does much more to weaken the Court’s power, including even its power of constitutional review, than would have resulted from another construction perfectly available to him. It is ironic that this would have occurred in the very case celebrated because of its alleged aggrandizement of judicial power. Under Marshall’s construction, Congress may not add to the Court’s original jurisdiction but it may, by simple act, subtract from the Court’s appellate jurisdiction, such jurisdiction being subject to “such Exceptions… as the Congress shall make.” It is really cases within its appellate jurisdiction, however, where nearly all of the Court’s significant work is done. Thus Marshall’s opinion implies that Congress may readily undercut the whole power of constitutional review simply by cutting back on the Court’s appellate jurisdiction in such a fashion that it never gets a case in which to exercise its power of that review.47 Similarly, Congress could avoid constitutional review of its acts in the inferior courts by eliminating such courts—something clearly within its constitutional authority.48

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  Judges on Judging

  Views from the Bench

  • David M. O′Brien(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  24

  Not for 54 years after Marbury did the court hold another Act of Congress unconstitutional.25 In another irony of history, the court decided in 1857 that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the Louisiana Territory under an 1820 Act known as the Missouri Compromise. This case was the infamous Dred Scott decision26 that added fuel to the fires leading to our Civil War.

  Another interesting footnote to Mr. Marbury’s case is that after 10,000 words, more or less, Marshall held that the court had no jurisdiction on the case since the statute purporting to create jurisdiction was void. So we have, perhaps, the most important single opinion of the court in nearly 200 years pronounced in the context of a holding that the court had no jurisdiction at all! From this, of course, we authoritatively conclude that the court always has jurisdiction to decide its own jurisdiction!

  As with so many great conceptions, the idea of judicial review of legislation now seems simple and inevitable in the perspective of history. People, not governments, delegated certain powers to the national government and placed limits on those powers by specific and general reservations. The people having flatly stated certain guarantees relating to religious freedom, to speech, to searches, seizures, and arrests, would it be reasonable to think that legislative action could alter those rights? The very explicit procedures for constitutional amendments, standing alone, negate the idea that a written constitution could be altered by legislative or executive action.

  The language of Article III vesting judicial power “in one Supreme Court” for “all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties . . .” would be sterile indeed if the Supreme Court would not exercise that judicial power by deciding conflicts between the Constitution, federal laws and treaties on the one hand, and Acts of Congress, the Executive or States on the other.

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  The US Supreme Court and the Centralization of Federal Authority

  • Michael A. Dichio(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  3 (and juxtaposed to this state); it is part and parcel of the central state. This understanding of state development shifts attention away from European-style welfare-state conceptions and toward a broader definition of development. Empirical analysis of a sample of 214 decisions during this period reveals that the Supreme Court as an institution had a complex relationship with federal authority, building it in the individual rights realm while neither greatly expanding nor constricting it within economic activity issues.

  The founders cemented lexicon divisions between federal and state sovereignty and between narrow and broad constitutional interpretation within the constitutional lexicon, thus ensuring a persistent conflict between national and state power. While this conflict persists to the present day, its apotheosis was the Civil War. That war and the Reconstruction Amendments mark the most important constitutional change since the founding, and accordingly, the effects wrought by these changes warrant closer investigation. Significant legal changes along constitutional issue areas began at the end of the Civil War and the start of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase’s tenure. In this era, legal doctrine—porous and ever-changing—possessed more continuity across chief justice tenures more frequently than in the past.

  Two examples exemplify the Court’s role in economic activity cases during this period. In 1902, at the urging of dairy farmers, Congress passed an act imposing a tax of ten cents per pound on oleomargarine that was artificially colored yellow. Noncolored margarine was taxed only one-quarter of a cent per pound. McCray, a licensed dealer, did not pay the higher tax despite selling the yellow-colored form of margarine. After losing his case in lower courts, McCray appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the federal act exceeded Congress’s taxing authority. In McCray v. United States (1904), the Court held in a six-to-three decision that “The right of Congress to tax within its delegated power being unrestrained,” the federal statute was constitutional.4 Thus, McCray

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