... The glory and ornament of our system which distinguishes
it from every other government on the face of the earth is
that there is a great and mighty power hovering over the
Constitution of the land to which has been delegated the awful
responsibility of restraining all the coordinate departments
of government within the walls of the governmental fabric
which our fathers built for our protection and immunity.[1]

At other times the subject has been dealt with less enthusiastically,
even skeptically.

One obstacle that the theory encountered very early was the refusal of
certain Presidents to regard the Constitution as primarily a source of
rules for judicial decision. It was rather, they urged, a broadly
discretionary mandate to themselves and to Congress. And pursuing the
logic of this position, they contended that while the Court was
undoubtedly entitled to read the Constitution independently for the
purpose of deciding cases, this very purpose automatically limited the
authoritativeness of its readings; and that within their respective
jurisdictions President and Congress enjoyed the same correlative
independence as the Court did within its jurisdiction. This was, in
effect, the position earlier of Jefferson and Jackson, later of Lincoln,
and in recent times that of the two Roosevelts.

Another obstacle has been of the Court's own making. Whether because of
the difficulty of amending the Constitution or for cautionary reasons,
the Court took the position, as early as 1851, that it would reverse
previous decisions on constitutional issues when convinced they were
erroneous.[2] An outstanding instance of this nature was the decision in