



According to Native American scholar Frank Pommersheim:



"While others consider the statement apocryphal, there is no doubt that President Jackson supported Georgia's claimed sovereignty over Cherokee land. The constitutional imbroglio was only averted when the impending nullification crisis convinced President Jackson that such a constitutional crisis was not in the national interest."



An earlier and plainer example also involved Marshall -- and a Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson. Jeffrey Rosen wrote for PBS that a showdown between the two pitted Jefferson's federalist views against Marshall's view that the Supreme Court had authority over all U.S. laws:



"The culmination of Marshall's national vision came in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), in which he wrote an opinion for a unanimous Court upholding Congress' power to charter the Bank of the United States. Marshall resurrected the same arguments that Alexander Hamilton had used to persuade George Washington to charter the bank over Jefferson's objections: namely, that the Constitution gives Congress the authority to pass all laws 'necessary and proper' for executing its constitutional powers, and that those words should be construed broadly, in a practical spirit. … Although the decision was popular in the middle and Northern states, it precipitated a backlash against the Court in the Southern and Western states.



"Jefferson's reaction to McCulloch was especially peevish and extreme. He endorsed attacks on the decision published by the radical states' rights partisans Spencer Roane and John Taylor, agreeing that the Supreme Court had no power to review the constitutionality of state laws or to second-guess the decisions of state courts. Later, he seemed to deny entirely the Supreme Court's power to hand down binding interpretations of the Constitution. This proved too radical for Jefferson's protege, James Madison, who wrote to his patron that he had no doubt that the framers of the Constitution intended the federal courts to be a final arbiter of conflicts between federal and state law. On his deathbed, just before he expired on July 4, 1826, Jefferson criticized Madison for being too accommodating."