"with having transgressed the bounds of judicial duty
and become the apostles of a political sect, traveling
about the country for little other purpose than to preach
the Federal doctrines to the people", nevertheless, all
that they had done was to unfold and explain the principles of the Constitution, to explain the laws, "and
when some of the laws have been denounced by the
enemies of the Administration as unconstitutional the
Judges have felt themselves called upon to express their
judgments upon that point and the reasons of their
opinion." In retort to this defense, it was very properly
said that it was not the business of the Judges to be
concerned with the views, either of "friends" or of "enemies of the Administration."
The appointments by Presidents Washington and Adams of Jay and Ellsworth as Ambassadors had further served to convince the Anti-Federalists that the Judicial Bench was being made simply an annex to the Federalist party. "It (the Executive) has been able to draw into this vortex the Judiciary branch of the Government, and by their expectancy of sharing the other offices in the Executive gift to make them auxiliary to the Executive in all its views, instead of forming a balance between that and the Legislature, as it was originally intended," wrote Jefferson.[1] Madison vigorously opposed the practice. "It is an unwise and degrading situation for a National Judiciary," said Charles Pinckney in the Senate, in 1800; and to establish the independence of the Judges and free them from the control or interference of the Executive, he proposed
- ↑ Jefferson, VIII, 205, notes on Prof. Ebeling's letter of July 30, 1795. Writing to Madison, Dec. 28, 1794, ibid., 156, Jefferson had said, relative to the new "infernal" excise law: "We shall see what the Court lawyers and Courtly Judges and would-be Ambassadors will make out of it." The notorious James T. Callender in The Prospect Before Us (1800), 83, wrote: "Think of the gross and audacious prostitution of the federal bench by the successive selection of foreign ambassadors from that body." Madison, VI, letter to Jefferson, March 15, 1800.
