page_1050 < previous page page_1050 next page > Page 1050 California and Florida. The Sunbelt economy is driven by high-technology chemical, electronics, and aerospace industries and bolstered by vast natural energy resources and highly productive agriculture. See also Internal Migration. Supreme Court Although the Supreme Court is the most important judicial body in the world in terms of the role it plays within the political order, no one could have predicted this at the time the Constitution was written in 1787. The first chief justice, John Jay, resigned in 1795 to run for governor of New York. Nominated as his successor by President George Washington was John Rutledge, who had been named to the initial Court in 1789, but resigned in 1791, without ever sitting, to go to what was considered the more prestigious South Carolina Supreme Court. Because Rutledge failed to receive Senate confirmation, Oliver Ellsworth was nominated and confirmed in 1796 as chief justice, but he too resigned to accept a diplomatic post in France in 1800. Few decisions of this period were of great significance. The most important, a 1793 decision upholding federal jurisdiction in a suit brought by South Carolina land speculators against the state of Georgia, was met by a storm of protest that resulted in the quick proposal and ratification of the Eleventh Amendment effectively overruling the decision. The rise in importance of the Supreme Court began with the appointment by President John Adams in 1801 of John Marshall, his secretary of state, to succeed Ellsworth. This appointment was widely interpreted as the symbol of the desire of the Federalists who had lost the recent election to retain control of the judicial branch after Thomas Jefferson and his supporters took over the presidency and Congress. This illustrates the extent to which the institutional mechanisms of checks and balances can help a repudiated political party. Given the lifetime tenure of justices, the Supreme Court is almost by definition a "conservative" force, even if what is being "conserved" is the liberal vision of an earlier party. Not the least important of Marshall's contributions to the power of the Supreme Court was his establishment of the notion of a single "opinion of the Court" and his efforts, usually successful, to discourage the expression of any dissent from this opinion. Previously, the justices, like members of English courts, delivered separate opinions, with none being designated as the view of the institutional Court. Marshall's opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803) is famous for exemplifying the Court's power to invalidate even a congressional statute thought to violate the Constitution. Far more important, however, were a number of decisions upholding congressional power or limiting state power. Most important was McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), which upheld the power of Congress to charter the (Second) Bank of the United States even though the Constitution contains no language specifically authorizing such an act. (This lack of authorization had led Representative James Madison, when the First Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791, to oppose the act as unconstitutional.) Moreover, the Court invalidated an attempt by Maryland to tax the Bank, viewing such a tax as an impermissible attack on the powers of the national government. What McCulloch illustrates is the crucial ability of the Supreme Court to legitimize the decisions made by other branches of government by reassuring the public that they are, indeed, "constitutional." Although "judicial review" is analyzed most often in terms of the ability of the Court to invalidate unconstitutional legislation, in fact the Court rarely finds legislation unconstitutional. Most often challenges, especially to federal legislation, fail, and the disputed legislation gains legitimacy from having survived judicial scrutiny. Also more important than Marbury, practically speaking, was the 1810 decision in Fletcher v. Peck, in which for the first time the Court struck down state legislation as constitutionally invalid. Over the half century following Marbury, the combination of the Court's upholding federal legislation and invalidating state legisla- Â < previous page page_1050 next page >