Lincoln on Judicial Supremacy
First Inaugural Address
Washington, DC, March 4, 1861

In his first inaugural address, President Lincoln warned that blind faith in the authority of the eminent Supreme Court bore a very high price for American self-governance.

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding … And while it is obviously possible that such decisions may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be over-ruled, and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time a candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made … the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Mario M. Cuomo, Why Lincoln Matters Today More than Ever 148-149 (2004), citing Fragment on government, ca. July 1854, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), 4:268