February 24 · This Day in America
For the first time, the House of Representatives votes to impeach a President of the United States. The vote is 126 to 47, and the president is Andrew Johnson — Lincoln's successor, locked in a furious struggle with Congress over who would shape Reconstruction and what freedom would actually mean for four million newly emancipated Americans. The trigger is narrow, a fight over firing his war secretary in defiance of a new law. The stakes are vast: whether the country would protect the people it had just freed. Johnson would survive his Senate trial by a single vote, and Reconstruction's promise would be betrayed for nearly a century before it was renewed. But the precedent stood, and it still does — that no one in America, not even the president, is above the law's reach. The republic had just used a tool the Founders left it, and lived.
Source: history.house.gov
Also on this day · 1803
In a case about an undelivered job commission, Chief Justice John Marshall does something quietly enormous: he declares that the Supreme Court can strike down an act of Congress that violates the Constitution. "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." With that sentence the third branch of American government found its true power.
Source: www.archives.gov
“It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803