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The Grand Convention - The Supreme Law of the Land · American Political History

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season 16 of American Political History, The Grand Convention, the Supreme Law of the Land.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: On June 4th, 1787, in the middle of the fight over the Executive Veto, Elbridge Jerry mentioned something in passing, a plain fact from a working world of American law, offered as if everyone knew it.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: In some states the judges had actually set aside laws as being against the Constitution.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: This was done too with general approbation judges striking down laws and the public approving.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody rose to dispute this.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody called it a usurpation.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: It went into the record as a description of how things already worked, and the convention moved on to other business.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning, june fifth, the Convention reached the ninth of the Virginia resolutions, and the judiciary was born in a single line, that a national judiciary be established to consist of one supreme tribunal agreed to without a dissenting state.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature took six weeks of bitter debates before its houses stood.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: The executive took a considerable pause and a summer of balance.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The judiciary was passed nemcom, nobody speaking against it, in a morning without a speech.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then within the hour, the room found the two questions inside the easy answer and fought over both for the rest of the summer.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Who appoints judges and how far down does the national court system go?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: The appointment fight opened at once.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: The resolution said the judges would be chosen by the national legislature, and James Wilson attacked it with an argument he had used against every numerous body all spring.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Experience showed the impropriety of such appointments by numerous bodies.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Intrigue, partiality, and concealment were the necessary consequences.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Let the executive appoint a single responsible person with one name attached to every choice.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: John Rutledge answered for the other fear.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was by no means disposed to grant such a great power to a single person, the people will think we are leaning too much towards monarchy.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And doctor Franklin, finding the room stuck between two bad answers, asked whether other modes might be suggested, and then supplied one.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: He then, in a brief and entertaining manner, related a Scotch mode in which the nomination proceeded from the lawyers, who always selected the ablest of the profession in order to get rid of him and share his practice amongst themselves.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: In Scotland, he understood the lawyers chose the judges, and being lawyers they always chose the very best man at the bar because elevating him to the bench divided his clients among themselves.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Franklin landed the design principle underneath the joke.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was there, he said, the interest of the electors to make the best choice, which should always be made the case if possible.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody adopted the Scottish model.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: The question was put off and it stayed unsettled longer than almost anything in the Constitution.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature, then the Senate alone, then Nathaniel Gorham's model, the executive appointing, with the advice and consent of the Senate.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Proposed in July, tied, rejected, and finally adopted out of the same September committee that built the Electoral College.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: The President nominates, the Senate consents.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: The second question cut deeper.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: One supreme tribunal, but beneath it what?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Virginia Plan provided inferior national courts spread through the states.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Rutledge moved to strike them out entirely.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: The state courts, he argued, should decide all cases in the first instance, with appeals to the Supreme National Bench.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: That secured national rights and uniformity of judgments.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman supported him, arguing that states were being asked to pay for a second, duplicative system of justice laid on top of one they already had.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Pierce Butler put the state's feelings at its rise.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: The people will not bear such innovations, and the states will revolt at such encroachments.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Rutledge's motion carried five states to four, two divided.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: The lower federal courts were struck out.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then Madison and Wilson, on a suggestion, John Dickerson had pressed, if there was to be a national legislature, there ought to be a national judiciary it could institute.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Do not write the lower courts into the Constitution, but do not forbid them.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Write instead that the national legislature shall be empowered to institute inferior tribunals.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: The court system that nobody could agree to create were converted into courts a future Congress would have to create or not.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Every man could vote for the clause while believing his side would win the later fight.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: It passed.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: The argument over the shape of the American justice system was folded up and mailed to future people, where it stayed.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: But the fight came back anyways, in July and produced a sharp exchange.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Butler again could not see a necessity.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: The state tribunals might just do the business.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin concurred national courts could create jealousies and oppositions in the state tribunals whose jurisdictions they interfered with.
• 6:08
  unknown: Mr.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Gorham pointed out that federal courts already quietly existed, admiralty courts for the piracies at sea, sitting in the states for years and no complaints were made.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Governor Randolph said the thing underneath the whole question.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: The courts of the states cannot be trusted with the administration of the national laws.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: The objects of jurisdiction are such as will often place the general and local policy at variance.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Cannot be trusted.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: A Rhode Island judge paid by Rhode Islanders, elected by Rhode Island's Assembly, asked to rule against Rhode Island for the nation's sake, the empowering clause held by vote.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: What the convention did settle early and never unsettled were the two locks on the judges themselves.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: They would hold their offices during good behavior, no term, no election, removable only by impeachment, and they would receive for their services a compensation which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot fire the judge, you cannot starve him financially.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature that hated his rulings could reach neither to his seat or his salary.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Independence, built out of tenure and money.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Madison had wanted the wall higher still, salaries that could be neither diminished nor increased, so that no Congress could bribe the bench with raises.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Morris talked him out of the second half with the merchant's objections.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: The value of money changes, and a fixed salary in a moving world becomes a shrinking one.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: The tenure wall was stormed once near the end.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: On August 27th, John Dickinson moved to add after the words good behavior, provided that they may be removed by the executive on the application of the Senate and House of Representatives.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: The English rule.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Morris called it a contradiction in terms to say that judges should hold their offices during good behavior and yet be removable without a trial, and fundamentally wrong, besides, to subject judges to so arbitrary an authority.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Sherman defended it from the British statutes, and Rutledge ended it with the American difference in one sentence.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: If the Supreme Court is to judge the United States and particular states, this alone is an inseparable objection to the motion.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: A court that referees the Union cannot serve at the pleasure of one side's politicians.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: John Dickinson's motion lost with only a single state in favor of it.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then came July 17th.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Madison's provision was on the floor, the national legislature's veto on state laws.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: The veto over the states, the power he had carried to Philadelphia in his trunk and defended all summer as the one instrument that could stop injustices of the states at their source.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: He defended it that day with the boldest analogy he had.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing could maintain the harmony and subordination of the various parts of the empire, but the prerogative by which the crown stifles in the birth every act of every part tending to discord and encroachment.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: The crown's own veto over colonial laws, the prerogative Americans had listed among their grievances in 1776, offered by James Madison as the model of how a union polices its parts.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman answered that the power was unnecessary because the thing it aimed at would happen anyway, in the courtrooms.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: The courts of the states, he said, would not consider as valid any law contriving the authority of the Union.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Governor Morris, who had voted with Madison all summer, abandoned him with the same prediction.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: The proposal of it would disgust all the states.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: A law that ought to be negated will be set aside in the Judiciary Department.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Do not make Congress the censor of the thirteen legislatures.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Reviewing every fence law and probate act in America.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let the laws that cross the Union die in court, case by case when they surface.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: The question was put, and Madison's veto, the keystone of his whole design, was voted down three states to seven.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: He never got it back.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: He tried once more in August and lost again.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then, in the same hour, Luther Martin of Maryland rose, the state's sovereignty man of June nineteenth, the delegate who would never confederate on unjust principles, the man William Pierce's private sketchbook described as possessing a good deal of information, but with a very bad delivery and so extremely vobose that he never speaks without tiring the patience of all who hear him.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: This time he needed one motion.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: That the legislative acts of the United States, made by virtue and in pursuance of the Articles of Union, and all treaties made and ratified under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the respective states, and that the judiciaries of the several states shall be bound thereby in their decisions, anything in the respective laws of the individual states to the contrary notwithstanding.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: The Supreme Law.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was the New Jersey plan's sixth resolution back from the dead.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: The clause the small states had drafted in June offered now as a gentler substitute for the veto just killed.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it was agreed now nom con, not one state opposed.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: The sentence entered the plan in the afternoon, without debate, on the motion of the convention's loudest states' rights man.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Martin's clause bound the state judges, but it left the judges in the state courthouses before local judges under local eyes, with no congressional censor and, if he could help it, no swarm of national courts.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Federal law would be supreme, and the state's own branches would be the ones administering the supremacy.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: That was the shield as Martin had built it.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention kept the sentence and rebuilt the shield into a sword.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: In August, the clause was amended, not just the legislative acts of the Union, but this constitution itself would be supreme law, and the state judges would be bound by it anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: The states' constitutions themselves, subordinated by name.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Council of Revision made its last stand on July 21st.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Wilson moved once more to join the judges with the executive in revising laws, and the debate it provoked said out loud what the whole structure assumed.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason, supporting the council, described what the judges could already do without it.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: They could declare an unconstitutional law void, but with regard to every law however unjust, oppressive or pernicious, which does not come plainly under the description, they would be under the necessity as judges to give it a free course.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Declare an unconstitutional law void, stated as the existing baseline, the thing the judges could do anyways, and that baseline was exactly why Mason wanted the council.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: The judge's ordinary power reached only so far.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Wilson moved the council, he made the same point from the same premise.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Laws may be unjust, may be unwise, may be dangerous, may be destructive, and yet not be so unconstitutional as to justify the judges in refusing to give them effect.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: The courts could stop an unconstitutional law, a merely terrible one would sail past them, which was the whole argument for adding the judges to the veto, and the whole argument against it, and the floor divided on it in every direction at once.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Madison seconded the motion and argued it as architecture.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: It would be useful to have the judiciary by giving it an additional opportunity of defending itself against legislative encroachments, useful to the executive by inspiring additional confidence and firmness in exerting the revisionary power.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And useful to the legislature itself by preserving a consistency, conciseness, and technical propriety in the laws, qualities he said, particularly necessary and yet shamefully wanting in our Republican codes.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Nathaniel Gorham did not see the advantages of employing the judges this way.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: As judges, they were not to be presumed to possess any particular knowledge of the mere policy of public measures.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth, the committee man, rarely on Wilson's side of anything, approved heartily of the motion.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: The aid of the judges would give more wisdom and firmness to the executive.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: They would possess a systematic and accurate knowledge of the laws, which the executive could not be expected always to possess, and of the laws of nations, of which the judges alone would have competent information.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And John Rutledge ended the argument with the sentence the American Judiciary was built on instead.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: The judges ought never to give their opinion on a law till it comes before them.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: The judges of all men, Rutledge said, were the most unfit to be concerned in a revisionary council.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: They would speak when a case reached them, in their proper character and not before.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin, opposing the council, relied on the same assumption.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: As to the constitutionality of laws, that point would come before the judges in their proper official character, and in that character they held a negative on the laws already.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Caleb Strong of Massachusetts stated the separation as a maxim.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: The power of making the law ought to be kept distinct from that of expounding them.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Elbridge Jarrett would rather give the executive an absolute veto than blend the judges into lawmaking.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Judges who helped write the laws could not afterwards judge them cleanly.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: The rule was close and scattered.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia for the council, four states against.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Pennsylvania and Georgia split down the middle of their own delegations.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: A vote three to four with two split, and the council died for the last time.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: The qualified veto, the president's alone, was then agreed to without a dissenting state.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: In the whole summer, exactly one delegate stood up against the premise itself.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: John Francis Mercer of Maryland in August.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: I disapprove of the doctrine that the judges, as expositors of the Constitution, should have authority to declare a law void.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think laws ought to be well and cautiously made and then to be uncontrollable.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: One voice, seconded weekly by John Dickinson, against Jerry, King, Wilson, Martin, Mason, Morris, Madison, Rutledge, Williamson, Sherman, all of whom had spoken for the courts, refusing unconstitutional laws as a fact of the coming system.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: The last piece was laid on August 27th, quietly.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Johnson of Connecticut moved that the judicial power extend not only to cases under the laws of the United States, but to all cases arising under this constitution.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: The doctrine itself made a source of lawsuits.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was agreed to without opposition, Madison noting for himself that the jurisdiction was understood to be limited to cases of a judiciary nature.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: The courts would not roam, the cases would come to them.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: The rest of the jurisdiction was a menu, and every item on it named a particular wound.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Cases affecting ambassadors and councils because a state court insulting a foreign minister had nearly caused a war under the Confederation.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Admiralty and Maritime Cases, the sea law, uniform or worthless.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Controversies between two or more states, the boundary and land wars the old Congress had refereed with a clumsy arbitration machinery used exactly once.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And controversies between citizens of different states.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because a Massachusetts creditor in a Rhode Island courtroom was suing his judges' neighbors under his judge's legislative laws.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Supreme Court would take the ambassadors and the state party cases originally.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everything else would reach it on appeal.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Justice for outsiders moved out of the hometown courthouses.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention wrote one more thing into Article III and wrote it as a wall, treason.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: In England, treason had been an elastic crime for four centuries.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Merely imagining the king's death, constructive treason stretched by judges and parliaments to cover words, associations, imagined intentions, and its punishment reached past the traitor into his children, through attainer and the corruption of blood stripping a family's inheritance forever.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Every man in the room had been a traitor under that law eleven years earlier.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: They wrote the definition into the Constitution itself, where no legislature could stretch it.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Only the narrowest word in the document.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Madison thought the definition too narrow.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: A government, he worried, ought to be able to reach crimes against it that this wording would miss.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention kept it narrow anyways, two witnesses to the same overt act.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: No conviction built from a phrase here or a dinner there.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Article III promised one more thing, the trial of all crimes except impeachment, shall be by jury, and held in the state where the crime was committed.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Of juries in civil cases, the suits over debts and contracts and properties that filled the actual dockets of America, the article said nothing at all.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Article six carried one more sentence behind the Supremacy Clause, and it was addressed to every man in America holding a piece of government paper.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: All debts contracted and engagements entered into before the adoption of this Constitution shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution as under the Confederation.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: The whole mountain of old debt, the loan office certificates, the soldiers' final settlement IOUs, the French and Dutch loans.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Carried across into the new government, declared as valid as it had been before.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: They would fight over what valid would mean.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Pierce Butler did not want the Constitution to compel payment, as he put it, as well as the bloodsuckers who had speculated on the distresses of others as to those who had fought and bled for their country.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: The soldiers had sold their nearly worthless IOUs to speculators for a fraction of their value, and full payment now would pay the speculators, not the soldiers.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason objected that the word shall fulfill was too strong, it might be impossible to comply with.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: The clause was settled as a declaration, not a schedule.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: The debts are valid, what the new Congress would actually pay and to whom the Constitution left that fight for the government it was creating.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Committee of Details draft gave the new Congress the old Congress's power to borrow money and omit bills on the credit of the United States, and on August sixteenth, Governor Morris moved to strike the omitting half out.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: If the United States had credit, he argued, such bills would be unnecessary.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Madison tried the middle position.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Would it not be sufficient to prohibit making them a legal tender?
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: That would remove the temptation to omit them with unjust views and promissory notes in some emergencies may be best.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason and Governor Randolph were adverse to tying the legislature's hands altogether.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: The late war, they believed, could not have been carried on had such a prohibition existed.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: John Mercer declared himself a friend to paper money and opposed to any prohibition of it.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: It would be a stamp of suspicion on the government to deny it a discretion on this point.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Oliver Ellsworth answered for the decade the room had just lived through.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think this a favorable moment to shut and bar the door against paper money.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: The mischiefs of the various experiments which have been made were now fresh in the public mind and had excited the disgust of all the respectable parts of America.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Paper money can in no case be necessary.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: The power may do harm, never good.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: George Reed of Delaware said that the words, if not struck out, would be as alarming as the mark of the beast in Revelations.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: The words were struck nine states to two.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: The new government would coin money and borrow money, and the power to print it was cut out of the draft by name.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the states were bound in one more way, in the tenth section of Article I, a list of things no state may ever do, and it read like a bill of indictments against the previous decade.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: No state shall coin money.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: No state shall omit bills of credit.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: No state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts, and that clause came into the draft in August on Rufus King's motion, lifted nearly whole from the Northwest ordinance the old Congress had passed in July.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: No state shall pass any bill of attainder or ex post facto law, no naming a man guilty by statute, and no punishing an act that was lawful when it was done.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: No state shall enter into any treaty or alliance, lay imposts without the consent of Congress, or keep troops or ships of war in peace.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman, of all the men in the room, the most tender towards the states wanted the money clauses absolute and said why.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is a favorable crisis for crushing paper money.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: If the consent of the legislature could authorize emissions of it, the friends of paper money would make every exertion to get it into the legislature in order to license it.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Crush it now.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well the memory was fresh, and leave no door for its friends to lobby open.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Every man listening knew which state the section described, the state that had made paper money legal tender and persecuted a butcher for refusing it.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: The state the newspapers called Rogue Island was the one state not in the room to object.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: The finished document gathered Luther Martin's July sentence enlarged into Article VI.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share this show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.