Channeling Andrew Jackson who once owned the property where I grew up- - - - -"Mr. Marshall has made his decision- - - - -now let him enforce it!" POTUS isn't the only one who can ignore a SCOTUS decision, or an executive order.
Jackson never said “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!”.
Andrew Jackson never said this, and was first mis-quoted in Horace Greeley’s The American Conflict in 1864.
What Jackson actually said was:
“…the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”
The United States had been an operating, independent government for less tan 50 years by the time Jackson took the reins as president. Concepts such as “state’s rights” and “separation of powers” were still in their infancy. The federal government in Washington was balancing on the edge of a knife between large Indian tribes who were begging the government to intercede on their behalf and uphold their separate, sovereign status, and powerful state governments that desired to bulldoze over the Tribes’ land rights, even if it meant seceding from the Union to do so. When Jackson commented on the Marshall Decision he was expressing the reality that the Judicial Branch had no soldiers to enforce Marshall’s enlightened ruling, and that a Congress controlled by southern politicians would never allow federal troops to enforce such a decision. Jackson realized that if he used his position as President to order troops to protect Indian lands that the southern states would rebel against an “overreaching federal power”, secede from the Union, and form their own government (something they did anyway 30 less than 30 years later anyway).
