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Chapter 1: What events led to the founding of the Supreme Court?
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This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. Each Tuesday, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America that began 250 years ago this year. So today we're going back to the moment when the American Revolution ends and the revolutionaries become statesmen and build a brand new government.
So I just want to take a second and sit with the magnitude of that task. Imagine having to build a brand new nation, a democratic government and all its infrastructure from scratch. It was a Herculean task. And like most things that entail a lot of people getting on the same page, it was full of fights and different visions for what the U.S. government would be like.
And while a lot of what the framers came up with back in 1787 when they drafted the Constitution has stayed the same, like the concept of checks and balances between the different branches of the government, Some of it looks vastly different. Take the judicial branch and the Supreme Court. Today, the Supreme Court has a lot of power dictating the laws of the land.
But back at the turn of the 19th century, not so much. This is how Alexander Hamilton put it at the time.
The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse, no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever.
In other words, without the sword or purse, the Supreme Court didn't have much power to enforce its decisions, making it the least dangerous and least powerful branch.
There was just no notion that it would be powerful. It wasn't yet in really anybody's imagination that they had to worry about.
That's Larry Kramer, author of The People Themselves, Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review.
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Chapter 2: How did the Supreme Court start as the weakest branch of government?
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We start our story with a contested presidential election, the election of 1800, one of the most partisan showdowns in our country's history.
It's the most divisive period in American history, except for the Civil War and possibly today.
The country was still pretty new, and everybody was trying to figure out how this democracy thing was going to work. Things like trade, taxation, foreign relations, state versus federal power.
It's a period of a lot of turmoil. And there's essentially one huge division, you know, around which the political parties form.
The United States didn't start out with any political parties, no teams. But competing visions of government were pulling people apart, which led to the creation of these two parties.
The Federalists, the party of incumbent President John Adams, and the Democratic Republicans.
Always confusing because it has both Democrat and Republican in it.
The party of candidate Thomas Jefferson.
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