“You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”

There was a time in my life when most people didn't have to worry about this corruption but that time is long over.

the co-equal part by way of "advise and consent" is broken.

could elect an undignified, dishonorable of this caliber. Some of them feared the power of the misinformed, but counted on the integrity of following the rule of law.

When a group in power flaunts their rejection of our guiding principles without sanctions, the glue that binded us, failed.

It holds still, but it is stretched thin.

Andrew Jackson, a semi-literate war hero instituted the genocidal Trail of Tears.

Andrew Johnson. Again semi-literate, ended Reconstruction, snuffed out the hopes of black Americans, and ignored the 13th and 14th amendments.

Seems like they had immunity, or was it just a little bit of white privilege?

accepted leaving office under the terms of the Constitution. The SC today is hearing and deciding, and apparently leaning toward, the idea that a sitting President can decide to remain permanently and take whatever steps to not accept the peaceful transfer of power. Indeed they, by heading toward carte blanche for all acts, are bringing us the scenario in which the sitting President could simply say "there will no longer be elections." An illegal act? Certainly to most minds but not under the universal "immunity" the SC is cozy with today.

So no elections are declared and any move by the people or courts could be met with targeted assassinations by the President because under the SC argument today he would be immune to prosecution for those killings. So who is left to stab at Caesar?

humanity, but he was a frontier jurist and a product of the west at the time before statehood. There are a number of President's who owned slaves.
Johnson was never elected President.
Pretty compromised and brought more shame to a country shamed by much of its past.
My remarks were about the discussions by the founders who relied upon the gentlemanliness of noblesse oblige as the goal of the nation. They were certainly aware of scoundrels, but thought there would be a ruling faction at the beginning.
The average Joe didn't vote in an extremely man's world.

He did some pretty unethical things, too.

That didn't happen until 1876. What he did was obstruct carrying it out as much as possible, particularly by letting the process become hopelessly corrupt. Grant tried to reverse much of that, but the damage had been done.

By that I mean, no one would really have ever thought to prosecute them for anything. Sure, they had detractors (Johnson especially was not very popular outside of Tennessee), but Jackson was a titanic figure, thought of as a second Washington at the time, and did what most American citizens wanted him to do.

the wealthy and certainly did not believe that all citizens had a right to vote.

The more you understand our history the less ‘what the holy framers intended’ is relevant or a standard we should admire and adhere to.

And weren’t much different from the British they hated.

in selectivity but at it's core the notion was how not to have a king. That is at risk as we speak. The foundation of my OP was that the structure/mechanism they created that they thought would prevent such a thing is in the process of failure.

It wasn’t clear at all until Marbury v. Madison in 1803 that the court had the authority to strike down a federal law for being unconstitutional. And that authority was basically invented by Chief Justice John Marshal as it just wasn’t explicit in the constitution.

but my OP is about the notion that the structure of things and the people involved would perform when necessary to prevent a king. There was argument all along that it would not. When I say the framers did this or that I'm not trying to imply unanimity in their views or arguments and it really was just "acceptance" in the end.

But the intent was to have a system to check against having a king at the end of the day. The evolution of the SC by way of Marbury gave us a feeling of increased security relative to that. Especially given the root conflict posed by the conduct of Marbury and Adams. Ordering a government official to commit an act also implies the inverse which is to prohibit and act. Marshall's decision was close enough in proximity to the ratification of the Constitution, 14+ years, that there was not a long trail of cases to cite as stare decisis and combined with the obvious peeing matches that were occurring it was not a leap for Marshall as much as an "affirmation" of the role of the SC.

Of course there were those from the beginning who felt the SC did not have this authority and indeed you can find much of that today in the GQP/MAGA doctrine and their adherents. So back to the court of today it is appropriate to bring up Marbury and I thank you for that because it shows the duplicity of how the gang of 6 function. They basically are throwing Marbury to the trash heap with regard to review of acts in office by a President by seeming to accept the argument that any conduct at all is exempt from judicial review. Of course they will trot out their authority "under Marbury" when it suits them for some other President as we have seen the last 4 years. That is my biggest criticism of the 6 is that duplicitous conduct, argument, reasoning and decisions turns the SC into a circus where argument is used and accepted in a case to reach a particular part of the basis for decision and then in that same case the whole argument is rejected when taking that just achieved basis to a next step. You cannot whipsaw your argument like that in legal cases. In other words, for example, you cannot say "y" is a fundamental right and being so means "x" and then in the next step in the argument/ruling say that therefore it is imperative that we do "c" because "y" is not a fundamental right. But they do this over and over. The case most vexing me right now for example is about unanimity of a verdict or decision. Reading the text of the Ramos decision from 2020 made my jaw drop that such BS was pedaled as a logically stated ruling. I'm still so pissed I can't bring the energy to write my promised article about it.

I don't know when that started, but they want to be very narrow.
Alito, especially, wants to attend to something that hasn't happened,
to escape commitment.
They did this with Colorado. They refused to discuss the matter at hand.
Marbury was an intellectual exercise to cover all bases.
Now, it seems, the complexities of ensuring the majority vision of world view must be stamped issue by issue.
They want the exception to be the rule.

is a huge part of what is so awful about these 6. The weaseling and talking out of both sides of their mouth during their reasoning in their decisions.

Alito. Alito is actually more aligned with whom Machiavelli studied, but I think Alito is expanding Scalia's depraved opinions because he has trump madness to contemplate.
We need real time decisions based on what is, not on what might be.
When might be shows, we can modify. That is science, not religion.

get there "might be" out there when it suits them and can't find it for other times. Alito always struck me like someone who stepped right out of "The Scarlet Letter".

understanding.
This point in our history is so crucial.
When the founders contemplated the long term success of their guide to a non-kingdom, they were in a frontier where 4 million people lived excited to be free of convention.
We need jurists to recognize today requires solid hooks for us to hang our hats.
The rule of law compelled Socrates to accept the consequences and stay put in his cell.
We allow weasels to rip our flesh hoping they will recognize the harm. The are weasels and cannot stop weaseling.
I worry too many of us are blind to the weasels.

I appreciate your references to history. I think part of what we are experiencing is generational to a degree. The founders were possessed of first hand experience of the tyranny of a king and I think that, despite acknowledging the concern of the potential in mankind for corruption, they felt that the experience of tyranny would ring so clear down through the ages that a "co-equal" branches structure would always be able to "pull us back" from allowing tyranny to grab hold. But now we are so far removed from that personal experience that we see some "average" people embracing the idea. So long as it's their king.

In some ways it is a generational differential in personal experience and understanding that we also see between those of us who lived and endured the fights in the '50's-'70's and our children and grandchildren today. As their rights we fought so hard to gain are now taken away they now see a bit of what we experienced. But when we tried to make it so clear in 2016 what was at risk they had no experience because it was our battle from another time. So now we fight again. For rights. For peace. For our country. Hopefully not having to fight a king.