When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the 1832 case Worcester v. Georgia, so the story goes, President Andrew Jackson responded by declaring that "[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
That's probably not a direct quote—it didn't appear until more than 20 years after Jackson supposedly spoke it—but the sentiment it captures is fairly accurate. Jackson plainly did not agree with the court's ruling in that case, which dealt with how states could legally interact with Native American tribes, but the matter was resolved when the state of Georgia repealed the law that triggered the legal battle in the first place.
Jackson's quote, apocryphal as it may be, retains a place in American presidential history not because of the specifics of that case—but because of the vibes it projects. It exposes an unsettling conundrum at the center of the American experiment in self-government: Can the courts serve their constitutional role as a check on executive power if the president simply says "no"?
